Between 1998 and 2000 many venture capital firms squandered thousands of millions of dollars on still-born dot-com “e-commerce” ventures. Most of these were poorly thought out and doomed to failure before the start-ups even began trading.
Normally cautious investors pumped money into companies with no revenue model. When asked where the money was going to come from, smug directors would answer “We don’t know yet… but we will think of something.”.
I made quite a good living out of writing business proposals for start-up companies. I would often be asked to “put as many buzzwords in as possible”… uh, okay it’s an Infotainment vertical client server infoportal… will that do? People were paying money for this gibberish… and they couldn’t get enough of it.
It’s hardly surprising that most dot-coms are bankrupt or struggling. These badly run companies just didn’t work. By 2001, most of the venture capitol funds had been withdrawn. The buzzwords that once propelled finance companies into near orgasmic spurts of spending now cause them to remember their shameful foolishness. The years of dot-com madness have been replaced with dot-com denial.