Definitely not a bubble. Trust me
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
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You forgot to say "bro", bro! You're obviously a fraud!
Makes me wonder whether people saw the dot com bubble the same way in the late 90s, with investors smelling their own farts and everyone else on the sidelines screaming about how stupid this is.
Yes. I was there and that was it exactly. Companies would slap a .com at the end of their name and bam their stock would go crazy.
...and start rebranding with 2-colour logos, whilst missing vowel out of their names.
Not quite the same, but remember when everyone had a bare -r at the end of their name, flickr, tumblr, etc. What was up with that?
The only difference then was that they would all IPO. The current bubble is consolidated to a few large companies and a lot of venture-backed bottom feeders. Other than that, yeah, just obvious insanity.
They tightened up the rules on IPOs after so many companies with no futures basically pumped and dumped their stock on the public. Now the way to dump on public bagholders is through SPAC mergers.
I was technically around as well, but I was in high school and was busy worrying about my own problems. Adults were doing adult things and making adult mistakes and bearing adult consequences. Even back then I knew adulthood was going to suck.
Yes. There were plenty of people saying "but this business doesn't have a path to making more money than it spends." There was, at the time, serious doubt about internet advertising as a viable business.
And the companies building out the telecommunications infrastructure. Between the 1996 reforms creating a lot of redundant competition for competing telecommunications networks, mania about the information superhighway, there was basically never going to be a way for these companies that spent billions deploying real resources in creating telecommunications lines to make enough money to even make their interest payments. So they mostly went bankrupt and their assets got sold to others at a fraction that it cost to build them.
Warren Buffett sat the whole thing out and his portfolio significantly underperformed the market as a whole. His philosophy of only wanting to invest in companies that he saw as undervalued, with a low price for their earnings or dividends or general enterprise value, didn't work really well for the prevailing investor sentiment at the time.
Allbirds? Damn I like their shoes.
Guess I'll look for another brand for the summer.
Not that this makes the story any more sensical, but they sold the allbirds branding and shoe business to private equity in the last month or so for $39m, so allbirds the shoes will still be around (although I’m sure become shitty) and the allbirds company doesn’t seem to have a business model at all right now.
Pivots to rent extraction.