Google started out when the dot-com boom was happening. It grew under the radar of big companies that were competing in but basically ignoring search. Then they were able to really invest during the bust for a long time.
The day I graduated, I skipped the ceremony to go straight to California for the dot-com boom.
Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.
Technology investment drove growth in the 1990s, both directly and by fueling a rising stock market that led to increased consumer spending.
Mindtree began as an internet systems integrator when the dot-com boom was going on.
The nineties, ecstatic decade!
At the height of the first great dot-com boom, Craig Kanarick, then in his early 30s, was running Razorfish, a Web design firm he'd co-founded with an old friend, which at its peak had 2,300 employees in nine countries.
Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.