Of course, not all internet companies from that time went bust. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. October 22, October 21, October 20, October 15, October 1, November 9, November 3, October 14, October 12, October 11, November 8, October 5, September 23, September 16, September 13, September 3, September 2, September 1, November 10, October 28, October 26, October 7, October 4, September 24, September 20, July 1, December 17, October 9, September 30, June 24, March 4, August 30, If you were looking for a single company that exemplified the dot-com era, you could choose Priceline.
It was founded by Jay Walker, an entrepreneur with a clever solution to a real problem: every day, , airline seats were going unsold. Priceline offered these seats to online customers who could name the price they were willing to pay. Consumers got cheaper flights; airlines sold excess inventory; inefficiencies were ironed out of the market; and Priceline took a cut for facilitating the process: your garden-variety win-win-win-win that only the internet could make happen.
By the end of , it was selling more than 1, tickets a day. Walker intended to get to ubiquity the way Yahoo had done: by building a brand through relentless marketing. All of this succeeded in placing Priceline fifth in internet brand awareness by the end of , behind only AOL, Yahoo, Netscape and Amazon.
Or that Priceline customers often ended up paying more at auction than they could have paid through a traditional travel agent. Investors were more interested in grabbing a piece of a company that was going to change the future of business. The venture capitalists who backed companies like Priceline, eToys, and Kozmo. By , losing money was the mark of a successful dot-com. And few could lose money as prolifically or creatively as Priceline. It hurts our valuation.
So many of the companies that would embody what we think of when we remember the dot-com bubble — Pets. It became a joke that the dot-coms that started out promising a grand vision of a more efficient way of doing business were — almost to a company — unprofitable.
But that was not the name of the game in the late nineties. Any IPO meant an exit for venture investors. That was the early money cashing out, selling their shares to the investing public. It became imperative to keep the pipeline of new companies — and new IPOs — coming. By the spring , one in twelve Americans surveyed said that they were in some stage of founding a business. And their annual profits? What profits? Most people knew it was unsustainable, but no one wanted to admit it.
If you could squeeze your IPO out before the window closed, then you could pick your moment to cash out, hopefully before everyone else got the same idea. One by one, the weakest of the dot-coms began to underperform. Dot-coms ceased being sure stock market winners — in a trickle, and then all at once. Falling stock prices turned into stock market delistings and then became actual bankruptcies.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq peaked on March 10, , at 5, From that March peak, all the way down to the trough it reached on October 9, the bear market bottom would be 1, Was there any one thing that pricked the bubble? No, there were a myriad of factors. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. Nov 13, , pm EST. Nov 13, , am EST. Nov 12, , pm EST. Nov 12, , am EST. Edit Story. Feb 11, , pm EST. Janet Brown Contributor.
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