Dot Com Boom and Bust - What were you doing?

My first job out of university was with a graphics hardware start-up in Bristol in late 1998. I lasted there for about six months, but it didn't work out largely because they tried to hire someone junior to do a senior guy's job.

So in a sense I started my working life as a beneficiary of the Dot.com bubble...

I then went to work for a graphics application company just outside of London. There wasn't much opportunity for progression there, I wasn't earning enough to buy into the local property market, and I was having real difficulties with a housemate.

I should point out that the company owned a couple of local houses that it rented to its staff. Being in Hertfordshire, they were based in prime commuter territory, and the sort of junior staff they recruited couldn't easily afford rents. I was in one of these properties, and so couldn't afford to move out.

So I decided to hand in my notice, and move to a more lucrative contract role. I was asked to stay on for a few weeks to finish off the project, this was in August / September 2000, but I ended up being there until Christmas. In that time the jobs market went from buoyant to dead as the Dot.com bubble blew out.

For the next two or three years there simply wasn't a demand for IT staff. I spent most of that period working as a games tested for a company in Brighton (trust me, it's not as much fun as it sounds), before trying to start something up on my own. The latter went horribly wrong in the spend a good part of a year working for nothing, only for the client to get all the benefit sort of a way...

In 2004, after several years living well below the poverty line, I landed a contract development role. I think that a lot of IT professionals who got caught between jobs had a similar experience, as it was a sector specific recession, at least in the UK.

The thing is that the bubble never seemed to go away as far as Silicon Valley thinks. Look at the valuations that Google or Facebook have assigned to their acquisitions. Are companies like Instagram, Nest, Deep Mind, Snapchat, Uber and so forth really worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars?
 
I was still on the Pokemon band wagon in my former years of high school and navigating my way through puberty.

Concurrently my uncles mates floated their IT company. It went from 40c to $6 per share. They became instant multi multi millionaires. Uncle kept hesitating until he bought in when it was at $4. When the bubble burst it crashed, I've recently heard it is sitting at about 4 or 5c per share. His mates still live quite lavishly, uncle on the other hand is a little burnt. Just a little. Fortunately he had some 'luck' with property and is about even now (in that he has a great house and a few IP's).

I recall everyone being very excited about life around then. Dad was never an investor and just worked hard through this time. He was in IT and he made good coin, paying off the house around this time and wondering what to do with his growing cash next (he decided to move into a bigger PPOR), no IP's). Talking about it is still my uncles sore spot. Heard a lot of their IT mates lost everything when they put their house/s up as collateral, some are mentally not quite right after that experience.
 
Lord Shanghai, I live in Shanghai half the year.

I was just finishing high school and business at Tafe. I remember this and just a little from the late 80's. Then September 11 2001. At the same time I was reading money books talking about the markets going up steadily over medium to long term. So the Dot Com Bust, I saw as an opportunity.
My heart goes out to those that lost jobs, or almost lost their homes. What a valuable learning experience that would have been.
 
Yes, got caught out again. Lost job along with everyone else in my industry: Asia dependent at that stage. But I knew it wasn't anything like the early 90's and things were very different for me by this time.
Just took another teaspoon of cement, got another job (played dumb) and stuck it out for 7 months then went back into my own industry again as the worst was over by then.
 
It takes courage to be a contrarian. Those who were brave/nuts enough to get in early probably did very well. 23 year old Steve Outtrim from Sausage Software comes to mind. Evan Thornley was another. I am sure there are also many canny bit players who also did OK.

The period 1997 - 2001 were interesting times. In 2000 I had a friend who was earning $300 an hour in IT, and he complained incessantly that others were earning more. These days, he earns a fraction of that and is grateful to be in work.
 
I was working in Sydney and then London for a software house, which sounds both more glamorous and risky than it was. It was very specialised software and a privately owned company so was largely unaffected.
 
In late '99 I was an unemployed copywriter looking to make my big break in advertising. Around the turn of the millennium, I was drawn into the tech boom by my father who was a serial stock punter. He had set up an online trading account to monitor his portfolio and needed help operating it as he didn't use computers. Didn't take me long to figure out the modus operandi at the time which was to buy up listed shells in the hope that they would announce they were "seeking opportunities in the technology sector" The trick was to figure out which stock was going to announce it next though by the end of the boom, most of them had jumped on the bandwagon and made the switch.

Went from unemployed 21 year old with net worth of zero to near millionaire in the space of a few weeks. Was one of the most exciting, thrilling and exhausting times of my life though it made me a little agorophobic as I was spending so much time online in chat rooms and forums learning as much as I could about trading as it was a very steep learning curve.

Then lost almost all of it over the next year. Had enough, went travelling. learnt alot.
 
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Who remembers that young kid in the USA who speculated on dot com stocks and became a millionaire? I recall the SEC put an end to his shennigans. They took around a quarter of his winnings, but he kept the rest. I wonder what he is doing now. Back then he was 15, these days he would be around 30.
 
Then lost almost all of it over the next year. Had enough, went travelling. learnt alot.

I just stuck to property, the slow and steady approach with no headaches and lost nothing, only gains. ;)

Wonder what the next "boom/bust" will be ? And Im not talking the usual commodities v property cycles.

Whats the next "BIG" thing?
 
I was building computers for people while at high school. Made a few hundred bucks out of it. That's my only first hand experience of the dot com boom.
I probably could have made some decent money, as I was one of reasonably few people back then that could use computers well.
 
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