“The Bear” on Business

Think back to the year 2000. Were you in the middle of the big Internet and Telecom Boom? The pace was frenzied. The money being raised was staggering. Start-ups with barely defined business plans had little trouble getting funding. Companies went public while losing large sums of money and their strock prices rose in step functions. Brings back the lyrics of an old song “Those were the days my friend. I thought they’d never end.”

How young were you? How experienced were you relative to the job you had? What about your boss? Your boss’ boss? Your CEO? How many people were really qualified for the job they had?

And the investors: what did they know? They were raising money without bounds. The quicker they put it to work, the more they could raise. Just like management, the ones who knew the Internet were not all that experienced in investing.

Fast forward two years. It’s now 2002. Enron. Worldcom Global Crossing. Pets.com. The medival ages lasted for 1,000 years. The aftermath of the tech meltdown seemed to last even longer. But as bleak as the sector looked in early 2005, the renaissance was right around the corner.

Now it is almost 2008. Even the meltdown seems like a distant memory. Internet stocks are booming again. Infrastructure–fiber, wireless, content distribution networks–is in incredible demand. If you are in telecom or Internet, the future looks just fine and dandy.

Perhaps never before in American business has a large group of very young entreprenuers, management and investors experienced a dramatic boom, an equally dramatic bust, and a very strong resurgence in the span of less than 10 years. This group of professionals will be entering the prime of their careers with all the experience of this complete cycle. Wow, and the strong resurrgence is probably only in its infancy.

The question is: “What have we learned?” Certainly we have had the benefit of a lot of mistakes. Are we taking full advantage of this benefit? Or, now that we have the opportunity, will we repeat the same mistakes of the late 1990’s.

I continue to be amazed at how many in our industry blame everyone but themselves for what happened during the boom. It was Bernie Ebbers fault. Jeff Skilling poisened the industry. Joe Nacchio was a crook. Blame the bankers: Jack Grubman, Frank Quattrone, Mary Meeker and Henry Blodget.

Certainly all these folks shoulder a huge burden. But for every one of them, there are thousands of the rest of us. And most of us would do well to reflect on our own actions and behavior. This blog will be about applying better fundamental business practices to the tech industry.