What a rollercoaster ride! (Score 2, Informative)

I was involved in a dot-com startup (low-profile - nowhere near as famous as Sportal, Boo or ClickMango) at that time and I have to say that it was a really exciting time. I certainly have no regrets. Sure, with hindsight, I'd have done some things differently but not massively so. We adapted and learnt pretty quickly and with the knowledge and experience we had, I think that the decisions we made weren't bad. I certainly learnt a hell of a lot during that phase of my career. Not many people have taken a business plan and a lump of seed capital, built a business out of it and then had to wind it up again.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and as the business I helped start up didn't survive, the mudslingers can claim that we were a failure. However, our investors were happy that we had achieved what we had set out to do with the seed capital they had put up. I'll tell you this much - there were an awful lot of investors who were a lot less happy than ours.

It was kinda like a gold rush - some people sold out for a fortune or survived the crash and are still going; others went bust or decided to cut their losses before they went bust. Sure, there was hubris and some amazingly incompetent people were given stupid amounts of money to essentially burn but there were also a lot of guys who had good ideas who saw an opportunity to make them happen and, like all entrepreneurs, some were successful and others weren't.

Five years after the event, there's a lot of self-proclaimed experts who'll spout on about irrational exuberance and all the rest but very, very few of them were actually there at the time and even fewer actually took the plunge and got stuck in. Some might say that reflects well upon their judgement but like I said, I have no regrets and the holier-than-thou spouting of someone who's never walked the walk is only so much line noise.

Jack