Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Wisen and I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, it's great
Speaker 1: to have you back. Thank you, thank you. I've come
Speaker 1: back refreshed and reinvigorated for another year of Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 1: I am extremely excited about another year of doing the
Speaker 1: show with you. I was very sad to not have
Speaker 1: you for the last two episodes, So yeah, I'm very
Speaker 1: excited that we're back at it in the new year. No,
Speaker 1: thank you. You know. The flip side of not doing
Speaker 1: the Odd Lots Podcast with you is that I get
Speaker 1: to listen to them on my own time, which is
Speaker 1: something I don't do when I record them with you. Obviously,
Speaker 1: good point. So that'll be my excuse when I when
Speaker 1: I take off a few weeks. At some point, I'll
Speaker 1: just say, oh, it's because I really just wanted to
Speaker 1: give them a fresh listen and not hear them biased
Speaker 1: by my own partic the patient. I'm sure that will
Speaker 1: be the case, do you know. Obviously we talk a
Speaker 1: lot about bubbles on the show. Last year we had
Speaker 1: a whole series about various bubbles throughout history, and then
Speaker 1: we had a bunch of episodes I think about bubbles
Speaker 1: that weren't even part of the series. I'm sure we'll
Speaker 1: have many more. It's just one of our recurring themes
Speaker 1: for obvious reasons. Yeah, bubbles remain I think personally, probably
Speaker 1: the most interesting phenomenon that we observe in markets, because
Speaker 1: there's all this collective behavior and sort of psychology involved
Speaker 1: in every single one. Right. I think it's like when
Speaker 1: psychology takes hold to such a dominant degree and the
Speaker 1: underlying reality of what's going on seems to exert just
Speaker 1: such a minimal force in the underlying market. I think
Speaker 1: that's a good way of describing it. The other interesting
Speaker 1: thing about it is, of course, you never know when
Speaker 1: a bubble is going to pop, right, because a bubble
Speaker 1: that doesn't pop is also known is a really good
Speaker 1: bull market. Right. It's one of these things where we
Speaker 1: only can definitively say something it's a bubble in the aftermath. Yes,
Speaker 1: all bubbles are retrospective in nature. Well put, So, you know,
Speaker 1: the thing is, we talked a lot about these from
Speaker 1: a sort of like you know, market perspective, like what
Speaker 1: are the signs that something is in a bubble and
Speaker 1: what are price movements that suggest something is in a bubble,
Speaker 1: and you know, that is certainly one way to examine it.
Speaker 1: But what we haven't done is much is talk about,
Speaker 1: like what it's like to actually live your life through
Speaker 1: a bubble, the perspective of a person who is just
Speaker 1: sort of right in the middle of it, someone right
Speaker 1: on the inside, as opposed to a speculator. Right. I
Speaker 1: really like this idea because it gets again to that
Speaker 1: behavioral aspect of bubbles. How do people actually behave and
Speaker 1: live when they are going through this kind of episode.
Speaker 1: So today I'm very excited We're going to be uh
Speaker 1: talking with our colleague Dash Bennett. He works with us
Speaker 1: here in Bloomberg. He's an editor, he does social media
Speaker 1: for us, he does a bunch of other stuff. We
Speaker 1: both worked with him for many years. And what's interesting
Speaker 1: and why I'm excited about talking to Dash is that
Speaker 1: he lived through the dot com bubble. Like so all
Speaker 1: this stuff that we talked about people are trading it
Speaker 1: in the stocks. He was actually working for one of
Speaker 1: these companies whose stock went completely insane and then totally imploded. Right.
Speaker 1: And the way this podcast is coming about is we
Speaker 1: were having a sort of casual conversation on our internal
Speaker 1: messaging system, and Dash started saying some really interesting and
Speaker 1: slightly outrageous things about what his whole experience was like,
Speaker 1: and we thought, we need to dig into the details
Speaker 1: of this right exactly. So, without further ado, Dash Bennett,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for joining us. Thank you good
Speaker 1: to be here. So let's get started with your history.
Speaker 1: Tell us where you were in nine what so we
Speaker 1: we already set it up. You were working for one
Speaker 1: of the companies that were sort of most emblematic of
Speaker 1: the dot com era. What was the company, how did
Speaker 1: you join them, and what were you doing for them? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of a became a legendary story of the
Speaker 1: dot com bubble bursting. So at the end ofning of
Speaker 1: two thousand, I was actually living in New York and
Speaker 1: I had oppen out of college. Long I was like
Speaker 1: trying to become a writer and it wasn't going very well.
Speaker 1: And then a friend of mine from high school, who
Speaker 1: was he went to the same high schools, maybe he
Speaker 1: was a few years older, emailed me out of the
Speaker 1: blue and said, hey, we're looking for writers. I worked
Speaker 1: for this company excited Home, which I had never heard of.
Speaker 1: I sort of knew what Excite was because that was
Speaker 1: the big web portal, like a big rival to Yahoo.
Speaker 1: It was like a second tier Yahoo. Yeah. So about
Speaker 1: a year earlier, at the beginning of ninety nine, it
Speaker 1: merged with at Home, which was a broadband I s
Speaker 1: P basically and where they sold internet connections through cable companies,
Speaker 1: and they had separate deals with the cable companies. Now
Speaker 1: it's all run by the cable companies back and at
Speaker 1: Home was its own thing. So they merge and that
Speaker 1: was a huge thing at the beginning of ninety nine,
Speaker 1: and their stock went through the roof. So they had
Speaker 1: all this money, and so they started creating content teams
Speaker 1: to create web content for their portal that would be
Speaker 1: exclusive to at Home. And so my friend had been
Speaker 1: working there for a few months and he was like,
Speaker 1: I'm writing about sports. I know you know about sports.
Speaker 1: We need people, why don't you come out here. So
Speaker 1: since I was looking for work, so they flew me
Speaker 1: out there and put me up for two weeks as
Speaker 1: a test as like an interview, which was crazy. So
Speaker 1: that's already crazy, the fact that they two weeks for
Speaker 1: an Yeah, me, a person who had at that time
Speaker 1: had no Byelines. Had no experience as a paid professional writer,
Speaker 1: so that, yeah, they flew me out there. They gave
Speaker 1: me like a two week tryout, basically hired me as
Speaker 1: a contractor. It went really well, so then they hired
Speaker 1: me full time. So again this just give you more
Speaker 1: sense of like how much money is playing around. First
Speaker 1: of all, they were paying me a salary that I
Speaker 1: never thought I would make at that stage of my life.
Speaker 1: But then they flew me out to their office was
Speaker 1: in Redwood City, California, which is just south the Sound Cisco.
Speaker 1: They put me up for thirty days in a temporary housing.
Speaker 1: They got me a rental car for thirty days, They
Speaker 1: hired a broker to help me find an apartment. They
Speaker 1: paid for all of that. So that was just sort
Speaker 1: of the first sign that this company has a lot
Speaker 1: of money and they're spending it very quickly. And the
Speaker 1: team I was on was growing. They were adding people
Speaker 1: all the time. There was about at its peak was
Speaker 1: about thirty people of writers, web designers, artists, all working
Speaker 1: to just create this sort of like little mini newsroom
Speaker 1: inside this technology company. So two things on that when
Speaker 1: you heard about this company and you heard about the position,
Speaker 1: were you thinking at all that this was a sort
Speaker 1: of risky venture. And um, was there any sense that
Speaker 1: you were working for a technology or a dot com
Speaker 1: company or did you just think this is a sort
Speaker 1: of run of the mill content provider. No, it very
Speaker 1: much had the like all the stereotypical traits of like
Speaker 1: a dot com phenomenon thing where we had a slide
Speaker 1: in our office, one of those like that's it went
Speaker 1: from the second floor down to the first floor. You know,
Speaker 1: when I showed up at the office, it was very
Speaker 1: clear that it had It had all those like things
Speaker 1: you always hear about. There was foosball table and ping
Speaker 1: pong tables, and there was free food everywhere. When I
Speaker 1: first started, there was you know, they brought in lunch
Speaker 1: once a week every Wednesday, we got a free everyone
Speaker 1: our team got a free lunch. And there were vending
Speaker 1: machines all over the offices but they were all free.
Speaker 1: So all the sodas and snacks, and we had bagels
Speaker 1: every morning, and so it didn't feel like a real company,
Speaker 1: but it also didn't feel like this was the thing.
Speaker 1: We were just trying to get as much as we
Speaker 1: could before it all fell apart. At the time when
Speaker 1: I started. It was very much like this is the
Speaker 1: future of the Internet, This is the future of the world.
Speaker 1: That's my memory of it too. I mean I wasn't
Speaker 1: working for any dot com at the time. I wasn't
Speaker 1: I didn't even have a job, But I remember like
Speaker 1: at the time, it didn't feel like, oh, this is crazy,
Speaker 1: it's about to end. It felt more like this is
Speaker 1: the future. Like everyone believed like this is the new economy.
Speaker 1: We were in a new year of prosperity, businesses of
Speaker 1: the future or going to have this sort of freewheeling vibe.
Speaker 1: So in retrospect you look at the slide and you say, oh,
Speaker 1: well that was obvious excess. But in that moment, it's like, no,
Speaker 1: the office of the future will be this fun place
Speaker 1: to play around. Yeah it was. It was. There were
Speaker 1: no cubicles, it was very much open off and a
Speaker 1: lot of those things you still see today as like
Speaker 1: the hallmark of a young, exciting company. It's all the
Speaker 1: same things they were doing twenty years ago. We have
Speaker 1: an open office here Bloomberg, and we have a great
Speaker 1: snack bar. Sadly, we do not have a slide from
Speaker 1: the would be Laura, right, that's our one area of restraints.
Speaker 1: But this gets to one of the big lessons that
Speaker 1: we learned from our Bubble series, which is that every
Speaker 1: bubble comes with a convincing story that you have to
Speaker 1: believe in. So Dash, I know you mentioned it already,
Speaker 1: but could you maybe just expound a little bit on
Speaker 1: what the story was for excite, Like what exactly the
Speaker 1: promise was way back in early two thousand's. I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about a lot, knowing I was going to come
Speaker 1: on here, trying to remember back to the days of
Speaker 1: what was going on there. And what I keep coming
Speaker 1: back to is that so many of these companies and
Speaker 1: ours that especially, they were trying to create a model
Speaker 1: for like how you would provide internet to people, and
Speaker 1: that model still exists today and it's actually the dominant model,
Speaker 1: but they were I don't know if it was because
Speaker 1: they were too early, or you know, they couldn't expand
Speaker 1: too much, or you know, or people were expecting too
Speaker 1: much too soon because of all the hype. But basically
Speaker 1: at Home was a broadband provider. They hooked people. You know,
Speaker 1: you paid forty dollars a month, they gave you a modem,
Speaker 1: they hooked you up to the Internet and they decided
Speaker 1: that well, but like a O L where you were
Speaker 1: in this when you dialed up to a O L.
Speaker 1: You were in this like their environment and their browser
Speaker 1: and all that. They were trying to do the same thing.
Speaker 1: But for broadband, which was still broad and was still
Speaker 1: relatively knew that and not a lot of people had.
Speaker 1: Most people were still dial up cable Internet was very
Speaker 1: expensive and most places you simply couldn't get it. That
Speaker 1: is a good point. It's like, in a way, they
Speaker 1: were just way too early, because if you think about
Speaker 1: even the media, what we're seeing in media today, where
Speaker 1: of an entity like Comcast, this huge infrastructure provider, but
Speaker 1: also which makes incredible content investments at the same time,
Speaker 1: it does sound like the excited mom. That's what they were,
Speaker 1: That's what that was. The idea was they bought Excite,
Speaker 1: which was the port because at the time that's how
Speaker 1: people got an Internet was portals. It was a O L. Yahoo,
Speaker 1: Those were our big competitors. So they're like, we'll buy it,
Speaker 1: will buy our own portal, we'll stick them together. Now
Speaker 1: we have everyone in this contained universe. So they come
Speaker 1: to our site, they do all their shopping, they do
Speaker 1: all their web browsing, we can serve them ads, we
Speaker 1: can also sell them things, and then we're also on
Speaker 1: top of that, we're making a month that they paid.
Speaker 1: Again real quickly before I forget to ask what month
Speaker 1: did you start, because you know, thinking about the timeline
Speaker 1: of all this, we know the bubble peaked in March
Speaker 1: two thousand, but when did you started? Excited? That's I
Speaker 1: think I started in March two thousand. It was either
Speaker 1: February March of two thousand it was, and it was
Speaker 1: right after two tho. You started right now, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was like I right at the peak of the ball.
Speaker 1: But about a year earlier was when there happened. Stock
Speaker 1: was the stock was up somewhere around a hundred, and
Speaker 1: they're already starting to be problems under the surface, because
Speaker 1: when I started a year later, it was down to
Speaker 1: like thirty interesting thirty or forty. So you mentioned the
Speaker 1: merger just then. I think this was part of this
Speaker 1: thing that went wrong for the company, right. They just
Speaker 1: spent a ton of money on mergers, and there was
Speaker 1: this frenzy at the time everyone wanted to grab market share.
Speaker 1: Walk us through what that was like living it from
Speaker 1: a corporate perspective. Yeah, so the merger obviously brought in
Speaker 1: a ton of new cash to the company, is my
Speaker 1: understanding of it. And they kind of did go on
Speaker 1: a huge spending spree, not just hiring more employees of
Speaker 1: their own, but also sometime in ninety nine, shortly after
Speaker 1: the merger, it became a kind of legendary thing. They
Speaker 1: bought a company called Blue Mountain Arts. It was billion
Speaker 1: dollar greeting carcase there was online greeting card company to
Speaker 1: basically just email little animations to your friends of like
Speaker 1: happy birth. I want to say, my dad uses Blue
Speaker 1: Mountain Greeting Cards system to this day, and he uses
Speaker 1: it as a replacement for email, so all his email
Speaker 1: messages to me basically come in the form of electronic cards.
Speaker 1: I hate this company. Dash Yeah, they still exist, but
Speaker 1: excite paid. I looked it up. It was like eight
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty million dollar deal and like million dollars
Speaker 1: in cash. I have to say, like, I remember that deal,
Speaker 1: and I know we're like, oh, at the time, it
Speaker 1: all seemed normal, But I do remember distinctly thinking like
Speaker 1: even amidst all this euphoria, thinking that it's like this
Speaker 1: seems a little weird, Like that was kind that was
Speaker 1: like the first sort of red flag that even at
Speaker 1: the time people were like, really, you're going to pay
Speaker 1: that much money for a Greek like they're like corny,
Speaker 1: like animated. Oh yeah, yeah, they were the because you know, again,
Speaker 1: not a lot of people had broadband internet, so you
Speaker 1: couldn't send like huge gifts or videos through the email.
Speaker 1: So it was a very weird thing. And then they
Speaker 1: they set up there, they so they brought them in,
Speaker 1: they set them up on our offices, and then two
Speaker 1: years later, when when the company fell apart, they sold
Speaker 1: the whole thing for thirty five million dollars, which is
Speaker 1: like no, nothing, So you got there. It was right
Speaker 1: around the overall market peak. But but after they had peaked,
Speaker 1: so you must have been working with a lot of
Speaker 1: people who at one point, we're worth millions of dollars
Speaker 1: on paper, and day after day watching their paper wealth
Speaker 1: sort of literally vanished. So I'm curious, like, what's that Like.
Speaker 1: There were a couple of people there who were actually
Speaker 1: had been employees before the I p O. And they
Speaker 1: got stock options, which was against a standard thing even
Speaker 1: back then. So yeah, on paper they were millionaires, and
Speaker 1: they had sold some of their stock when the stock
Speaker 1: was sky high and made a lot of money. But
Speaker 1: we're still continuing to work there, and nobody, nobody at
Speaker 1: my level, like was able to, like cash out and retire,
Speaker 1: or they might have been able to if they had
Speaker 1: timed it perfectly, but they obviously no one did. And
Speaker 1: you could see the frustration for them, especially as all
Speaker 1: their wealth is tied up in this company. And again
Speaker 1: they were sold this idea that this is a company
Speaker 1: that's gonna last for a long time, this is the
Speaker 1: future Internet. And as the company started to slowly fall
Speaker 1: apart and people began to sense that this was not
Speaker 1: going well and it didn't look like it was going
Speaker 1: to get better, obviously, Yeah, they were very frustrated and
Speaker 1: it was hard to come to work every day knowing that,
Speaker 1: Like I said, I was one of the last ones
Speaker 1: in so I sort of knew all along that my
Speaker 1: stock options were not going to become anything or was
Speaker 1: it real long shot that my stock options for becomes
Speaker 1: a thing. But like you said, yeah, you're right, these people,
Speaker 1: on paper, their wealth was they had a lot of
Speaker 1: wealth into this company, and then the company was falling
Speaker 1: apart around them. So were there any warning signs at
Speaker 1: the time, because it's easy for us, of course, to
Speaker 1: look back on it seventeen years in the future and
Speaker 1: we can sit here and say, oh, well, obviously they
Speaker 1: paid way too much money for an electronic greeting card company,
Speaker 1: and obviously they were paying people too much, and there
Speaker 1: was all this success. But at the time, was there
Speaker 1: any indication that the whole thing was going to come collapsing.
Speaker 1: I hate to say that, like, there were signs that
Speaker 1: was like obvious, this is this is about to burst.
Speaker 1: But when it did start to fall apart, it was
Speaker 1: a very slow motion at first and then all at once,
Speaker 1: and there were little signs that things were not going well.
Speaker 1: And the thing for someone at my level, the most
Speaker 1: obvious one is those perks like I was talking about
Speaker 1: when I was first tired with all the bagels and
Speaker 1: the free soda and all that. So after a few months,
Speaker 1: suddenly they take away the lunches. There's no free lunches anymore.
Speaker 1: And then a couple more weeks go by and now
Speaker 1: there's no more bagel, the bagels are only on Friday
Speaker 1: instead of every day of the week, and then yeah,
Speaker 1: and then all the the But the big one for me,
Speaker 1: when I was like, Okay, something is definitely going on here.
Speaker 1: Is like shortly before the first round of layoffs, they
Speaker 1: started charging five cents for the sodas in the vending machines,
Speaker 1: which used to be free. It's like really literally, nicol, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the thing. Yeah, it was like you used
Speaker 1: to give us these for nothing, and now you want
Speaker 1: twenty five cents. The fact that was cents almost made
Speaker 1: it worse than if they just charged full price, because
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, this is all they're gonna get.
Speaker 1: This is the beginning of the end, and it's going
Speaker 1: to start to go down. And in terms of like morale,
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously I imagined the worst thing that happened
Speaker 1: is people losing their millions. But all these little things,
Speaker 1: what how does this sort of just general vibe of
Speaker 1: working it does it feel less fun every day? Like?
Speaker 1: So there were little things like that. And then after
Speaker 1: I've been there about a year, so somewhere around the
Speaker 1: beginning of two thousand one, there was our our first
Speaker 1: round of layoffs, which was not a huge number in retrospect,
Speaker 1: but it was It wasn't like a big wake up
Speaker 1: call to everyone in the company that like, things are
Speaker 1: not going well. Something is wrong and we're not sure
Speaker 1: if we're gonna be able to get out of this now.
Speaker 1: So they the content people, were the ones who were
Speaker 1: getting acts the most because in addition to the stock dropping,
Speaker 1: we began to see the online advertising market started a
Speaker 1: crater and that was a huge chunk of our revenue
Speaker 1: at that time. So as that got worse, and then
Speaker 1: they laid people off, and then the revenue got worse,
Speaker 1: and then they laid more people off. So that whole
Speaker 1: year of two thousand one was like a steady drip
Speaker 1: drip drip of There was this first round of layoffs
Speaker 1: and then like we all knew that there was going
Speaker 1: to be another round, we just didn't know when. We
Speaker 1: didn't know where it was going to be. And another
Speaker 1: thing around the same time, for most of two thousand
Speaker 1: they were building a new building for us as it
Speaker 1: can do, headquarters right on the one on one, and
Speaker 1: also one of those classic signs in the headquarter curse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like there's a whole name and and it was
Speaker 1: open maybe you know. So once that opened, it was
Speaker 1: this big, gleaming building. It was very nice. There was
Speaker 1: a cafeteria and so at that time we had we
Speaker 1: were taking up space in four buildings. It wasn't even
Speaker 1: still big enough to handle all the employees. But then
Speaker 1: suddenly two of the buildings were combined into one building,
Speaker 1: and then a few months later we're all combined, and
Speaker 1: the company just kept shrinking, both in size and you know, stature,
Speaker 1: and every little like I said, every little drip drip
Speaker 1: drip was not only signs that the things were going
Speaker 1: bad for the company, but it was just brutal to
Speaker 1: morale and people. You know, that whole year of two
Speaker 1: thousand one, the whole summer, everyone just could sort of
Speaker 1: see that, like, you know, we need some kind of
Speaker 1: rescue here because this is not going well. And am
Speaker 1: I going to be the next person to get laid off?
Speaker 1: What am I going to do if I get laid off?
Speaker 1: Because the same thing was happening at every other company
Speaker 1: in the Bay Area all the same time. So if
Speaker 1: you got laid off, there was nowhere else for you
Speaker 1: to go to find another job. Right, So I'm curious,
Speaker 1: this is sort of a weird question, but as the
Speaker 1: money dried up and morale took a hit, did you
Speaker 1: observe the people around you clinging more firmly to the
Speaker 1: idea of the company's mission, Like did people start saying, well, oh,
Speaker 1: it's not as fun as it used to be, but
Speaker 1: we're doing something really important here. We're creating the future
Speaker 1: of the Internet. And the reason I ask is because,
Speaker 1: of course, when we talk about bubbles nowadays, a lot
Speaker 1: of people start thinking about bitcoin, and with bitcoin, the
Speaker 1: story is so strong there and there's this whole sort
Speaker 1: of belief system built up around it that people start
Speaker 1: to seize upon whenever the ice goes down. There was
Speaker 1: probably some of that at the top of the executives
Speaker 1: who were really invested in making this company work, and
Speaker 1: you know, at my level, kind of the bottom wrong
Speaker 1: of the company, I think people were just trying to
Speaker 1: trying to stay above water and survive. And we talked
Speaker 1: about this also that part of the thing with bitcoin
Speaker 1: is that people can see a future even if the
Speaker 1: bubble collapses, in the price collapses, people can still see
Speaker 1: a future where bitcoin exists or some other cryptocurrency exists.
Speaker 1: And I think a big thing with these companies in
Speaker 1: the and that first dot com boom was the mission
Speaker 1: is going to go on even if the company doesn't.
Speaker 1: So it was more about like winners and losers is
Speaker 1: that somebody was going to do what we were doing.
Speaker 1: Somebody was going to take somebody. That turned out to
Speaker 1: be right, as you say, the model survived. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: wasn't that there was anything wrong with the idea of
Speaker 1: broadband internet or online content. It was just that this
Speaker 1: company was not making it work, and so if we failed,
Speaker 1: one of our competitors would pick up the slack and
Speaker 1: keep going. But as time went on, it was like
Speaker 1: it became clear that we were going to be the
Speaker 1: loser in this fight and somebody else was gonna win.
Speaker 1: That There was a lot of that going on. I
Speaker 1: think all over the that dot com boom that whatever
Speaker 1: whatever your niche was, whatever business you were in, you
Speaker 1: had five competitors and you couldn't all survive. Somebody was
Speaker 1: gonna win. But there was no scenario which everything would
Speaker 1: just fall apart and there would be no internet. But
Speaker 1: it was a question of who's going to be the
Speaker 1: winner and who is going to be the loser? On
Speaker 1: their grim note, how did it finally and were you
Speaker 1: laid off? Like what was the how did it finish
Speaker 1: for you? So there was my team which was about
Speaker 1: thirty people by the summer of two thousand one, it
Speaker 1: was down to three. And yeah, it was, so you
Speaker 1: were a survivor. I mean, it's already pretty impressive. We're
Speaker 1: talking to someone who was like in the top. That
Speaker 1: was so that I hung on for as long as Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was the opposite of the last and first out.
Speaker 1: I was the last one in, which also meant I
Speaker 1: was made the least amount of money. So that's why
Speaker 1: I was able to to keep hanging on. But so
Speaker 1: the last few months it was like really grim. People
Speaker 1: were just disappearing every day, either quitting or getting laid off,
Speaker 1: and you wouldn't even know. One day, I came in
Speaker 1: before I was laid off, and my computer had been
Speaker 1: stolen from my desk, and it turned out that the
Speaker 1: guy who sat across the aisle from me had been
Speaker 1: laid off, and when he got laid off, he just
Speaker 1: took my computer and walked out the front door and
Speaker 1: no one stopped him, and I called security and they
Speaker 1: did not care. So, um, yeah, it was so weird.
Speaker 1: Was getting slower and slower. We moved to the desk,
Speaker 1: and then actually September eleven, two thousand one, happened, and
Speaker 1: then two weeks later the company fell for bankruptcy, and
Speaker 1: that was when I was laid off and they gave
Speaker 1: me two weeks. They gave me the option of just leaving,
Speaker 1: walking out the door with my severance, or I could
Speaker 1: stay two weeks and get a little bit more sunset
Speaker 1: my product, I guess, which didn't even really serve a purpose.
Speaker 1: But a lot of people were offered a deal. I
Speaker 1: remember where initially when the bankruptcy was filed, it was
Speaker 1: pitched as well, this is the real, the classic we're
Speaker 1: gonna reorganize, We're gonna come out on the other side,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna have a stable company again, and we'll
Speaker 1: get some new funding from me. You know. A T
Speaker 1: and T was a big investor in US and were
Speaker 1: trying to negotiate something where they could save us. And
Speaker 1: so a lot of people were sold on the idea
Speaker 1: that like, you can walk out right now with like
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks severance package, or if you stay
Speaker 1: and we get through this, then you're gonna be rewarded
Speaker 1: on the other side. So a lot of people took
Speaker 1: that deal, and then a few months went by and
Speaker 1: then at the end of December that was it. They
Speaker 1: liquidated and it was like we're done as a company,
Speaker 1: and those people ended up with nothing and again, and
Speaker 1: I heard stories of the last days of when it
Speaker 1: was clear that like, not only are we not going
Speaker 1: to make it like it's shutting down, we're selling all
Speaker 1: our assets. That people were just taking server rax out
Speaker 1: of the and just like dumping them in their trunk
Speaker 1: and driving away. Yeah, it was just it was just
Speaker 1: picking the place apart, people taking furniture and computers again
Speaker 1: and everything, and and so you know, in September there
Speaker 1: was this pitch that like, oh, the company will survive
Speaker 1: and keep going, and then two months later it was
Speaker 1: just it was over. And then even though I was
Speaker 1: laid off, I still lived there for a couple more months.
Speaker 1: And the thing that struck me as this is over,
Speaker 1: is so when I first moved to the Bay Area,
Speaker 1: I lived in Redwood City, which is where the office
Speaker 1: for Excited Home was, And it's about five miles from
Speaker 1: San Francisco. It's not that far, but if you tried
Speaker 1: to drive there during rush hour in two thousand, it
Speaker 1: would take at least an hour, sometimes two or three
Speaker 1: hours with the traffic because they're just everywhere, just people everywhere,
Speaker 1: everything is bustling. And then by the time I ended
Speaker 1: up leaving California, it would take fifteen minutes because there
Speaker 1: was never anyone, Like, no matter what time of day,
Speaker 1: there was never anyone in the highway. And you would
Speaker 1: drive down the highway and you'd see all these buildings
Speaker 1: for all these dot com companies, and they were empty,
Speaker 1: and all the restaurants were empty because so many people
Speaker 1: who came there to make their fortune and then their
Speaker 1: company collaps and as soon as their company collapse, they
Speaker 1: didn't stay. They went back to wherever the king. That
Speaker 1: is a great, perfect anecdotal way to sum up the
Speaker 1: end of the bubble, Dash Bennett, that was fascinating conversation.
Speaker 1: I love this perspective on the bubble. Thank you very
Speaker 1: much for joining. Thank you, Tracy. I love that perspective
Speaker 1: on the And that's kind of I guess that's kind
Speaker 1: of obvious. I know from many conversations with you, Joe,
Speaker 1: that you love talking about the dot com bubble. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, like I didn't live it like Dash did
Speaker 1: to an extent, but I remember it pretty vividly, and
Speaker 1: you know we've talked about it before, but that whole angle,
Speaker 1: that detail about people at the end, essentially looting the office,
Speaker 1: stealing servers from the server room. I love that so much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the idea that maybe there were some warning signs
Speaker 1: when the free lunches ended. That's the sort of classic
Speaker 1: economics tenant, isn't it. No free lunches literally free, but no,
Speaker 1: it is easy and to you know, And I think
Speaker 1: the whole thing with the slides, It's like, it's easy
Speaker 1: to look at the excesses of the past and to
Speaker 1: assume that it must have been obvious at the time
Speaker 1: that everyone knew that they were ridiculous. But I think that,
Speaker 1: you know, And it goes to this theme that we
Speaker 1: keep hitting on the power of the story, right is
Speaker 1: in a bubble. It's so compelling that you're just not sure.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, maybe the slides are ridiculous, but maybe
Speaker 1: this is what the office of the future is going
Speaker 1: to be like. And it's really hard to know in
Speaker 1: that moment which way it's going to go. Right. And
Speaker 1: sometimes the story is actually correct because, as Dash pointed out,
Speaker 1: this business model did become the dominant model. It was
Speaker 1: just that this particular company, excited at home wasn't the
Speaker 1: one dominating it. Right. So this gets back to the
Speaker 1: idea that he was talking about the winners and losers
Speaker 1: during a bubble, like not everything is going to necessarily disappear,
Speaker 1: but a huge chunk of it might, even if the
Speaker 1: story turns out to be exactly right on. And of course,
Speaker 1: the excited home model not that different from the well
Speaker 1: time Warner model, which is not that different from the
Speaker 1: sort of Comcast model of today. So even if the
Speaker 1: founder's vision is sort of perfect, you know, and it's
Speaker 1: easy to forget Amazon in late two thousand, early two
Speaker 1: thousand one, I think they're a lot of people who
Speaker 1: wondered whether Amazon would hang on. So even if your
Speaker 1: your vision is perfect, it could still all go bust, right,
Speaker 1: So further proof, I think that bubbles and markets remain
Speaker 1: the most interesting phenomenon that we can observe in the space.
Speaker 1: Let's do more bubble episodes of this year, another bubble series,
Speaker 1: definitely alright, Alright on that note, this has been another
Speaker 1: episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wasn't and
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart,
Speaker 1: and you can follow Dash on Twitter at Dashbot and
Speaker 1: a shout out to our producer, to for Foreheads, and
Speaker 1: the head of podcast at Bloomberg, Francesca leaving thanks for listening.