Technology

Anyone remember the dotcom boom (and bust)? The AI hype bubble reminds me a lot of that. It ticks all the same boxes: wild new tech showing up all the time, stratospheric hype, corporate FOMO, a money spigot that seems to be spraying investments at any company with AI in the name, business plans that lose money per unit sold but plan to “make it up at scale.” And unlike the last 16 years this is all happening when interest rates are non-zero so money actually costs something.

When I think about the dotcom boom and bust I tend to group the companies into 3 or so broad categories:

• Companies that were doing the right thing at the right time. These are the companies that weren’t necessarily pushing the envelope from a technology perspective; they were building a business model on where the technology was at the time but that could improve as the technology did. In the dotcom days the business model that most exemplifies that was e-commerce. Amazon and eBay grew up in the dotcom era and survived the bust no problem because they were already profitable by the time the investment money stopped flowing.
• Companies that were way too early. These are the ones that had a great vision but that were too far ahead of the technology curve. Did you know we had online grocery delivery in 1999? Webvan tried to move fast and corner the market but due to mismanagement and the tech and market not being ready they crashed hard in 2001. Grocery delivery is of course totally commonplace today, but even if Webvan wasn’t mismanaged I find it highly unlikely that they could have succeeded when less than half the country even had dialup and the common wisdom of the day was to not type your credit card number online.
• And last but not least, you’ve got the startups that never really had a business plan and the existing companies just jumping on the hype train because of FOMO. Startups were getting investment dollars just to … build a website. Big companies were putting up totally contentless “web experiences.” Suddenly every breakfast cereal had a website. Did it have nutrition information? No. Online ordering? No. Mostly it was just marketing drivel and maybe a recipe for snack mix if you’re lucky. These are the ones I think of when I hear that Taco Bell is going “AI-First.”

Anyways, there’s more I could say about why I think this will play out faster than crypto did but this is already a wall of text. For all the people who missed the dotcom boom: Enjoy the hype cycle. It’ll be a smoking crater before you know it. :)