Monday, 18 February 2013

Crazy Things in the Crazy Year


Silicon Valley life in the dot com bubble

Driving from San Francisco to San Jose takes 90mins, and that’s not during the rush hour!

No matter it is breakfast, lunch or supper, eating in the restaurant became a torment. It is common to wait for more than 45mins.

Finding a house here during the dot com bubble? That’s almost impossible. Even before 1997 when the bubble hasn’t totally formed yet, different kinds of people came to the Silicon Valley to rent house. At that time, you can ask them to do anything if you can provide them with a house.

Want to buy a car? You’d better go to Oregon. Car dealers in the Silicon Valley were having a very long waiting list.

Absurd Business Ideas

The business ideas of many online pet suppliers are to instigate the consumers to buy lots of dog food or cat litter online, and deliver them for free. The high freight as long as the large expense spent on advertising made some of them close done. Among them, Pets.com is the most famous one. It had its IPO in 1999 and closed done in 2000.

Another website, Kozmo.com. Firstly they promised to deliver the good in one hour in New York, for free. Deliverymen usually ride a bike to do this. That seems to be quite successful. But after they have expanded their market, they wanted to continue with the idea of delivery free in one hour in the whole country! That led to great transportation cost and the company closed done in 2001.

Tragedy of profligacy

During the peak of dot com bubble. A founder of a Com company who was very wealthy after the IPO of his company bought a lot of real estates. In the year when he was 39, he lost his life and the lives of his two other friends with his world class sports car. At that time, he was being accused of drug taking and raping.

An online video venture, spent $12M to celebrate its start business. In fact, the founder of company is an escaped criminal. He made lots of money during the dot com bubble. But after the burst of the bubble, his company went bankrupt. And he had to surrender himself to the law.
 

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