I was in my late-20s when the bubble burst. There was a palpable sense of "the sky is falling". A lot of not-so-technical people quit (or were let go from) tech jobs to become real estate agents.
One person that really helped me through all the doom-and-gloom was Phillip Kaplan, a.k.a. Pud. Seriously. He ran a site called "Fucked Company", which poked fun at the stupidity of big dotcom companies with questionable business models. The site was funny and all, but what really helped me was how Pud ran a successful web site that made money, by himself, with no Super Bowl ads or anything else. It reinforced to me that a successful business could be run on the web/internet, despite what all the doom-and-gloomers were saying. I knew the web wasn't dead thanks, in part, to Pud and "Fucked Company".
Pud's book, "F'd Companies: spectacular dot-com flameouts", was a good laugh. It's just a simplistic piss-take, but even all these years later, it shows up the sheer ridiculousness of what those dotcoms were trying to do and were able to (apparently easily) get millions of dollars of funding for.
One person that really helped me through all the doom-and-gloom was Phillip Kaplan, a.k.a. Pud. Seriously. He ran a site called "Fucked Company", which poked fun at the stupidity of big dotcom companies with questionable business models. The site was funny and all, but what really helped me was how Pud ran a successful web site that made money, by himself, with no Super Bowl ads or anything else. It reinforced to me that a successful business could be run on the web/internet, despite what all the doom-and-gloomers were saying. I knew the web wasn't dead thanks, in part, to Pud and "Fucked Company".