Financial wounds do heal after a while and it’s been almost a couple of decades since the.com boom ripped through the financial markets and ushered in a mini recession in North America. So I feel that it is okay now to mention a few of the companies that glorified that era with massive IPOs and venture capitalists scratching to get on board some of these companies that failed miserably.
Now keep in mind that during the.com boom many of these companies actually hired and retained skilled people in particular in the upper levels, enticing them into their arms with stock options. A lot of these people had dreams of getting in like they would have with Microsoft in the early days and retiring after 5 or 10 years or so where they could live off these massive stock options they got for basically nothing. Keep in mind stock options are not the same as options trading strategies. These are real assets as in sheets of paper given to employees as an incentive to make the company work and more valuable in the long run.
Some of those companies that you may or may not have heard of are Webvan.com, Pets.com, eToys.com, flooz.com, MVP.com, and don’t forget some search engine such as AltaVista and Lycos who before Google came on board were actually the search engines of choice.
Now some of these ideals such as MVP.com, pets.com and eToys.com were actually good ideas, but maybe ahead of their time. Consumers weren’t actually ready to be buying over the Internet in huge volume. Internet pioneers did see this as a way to the future and not part was correct, just not the explosive growth everyone thought it was going to be. Things are much different today, and in addition we as a society have a much more in-depth understanding of what the Internet is, how people use it, and how it’s changing our lives.
It’s not lost on me that while reminiscing about some of these ideas, I am actually working on the internet doing my regular job and also doing some option trading on the side from my home office. Pretty good doing this internet.