Not the OP, but the big one for me was everybody's rush to IPO. You weren't a real tech company if you weren't publicly traded and offering your employees stock

Not the OP, but the big one for me was everybody's rush to IPO. You weren't a real tech company if you weren't publicly traded and offering your employees stock options. In 2000, I was working for a twenty year old, privately owned, profitable software company at the top of a growing vertical that decided they needed to rebrand as a dot-com, buy their next biggest competitor, and IPO. They got as far as the first two before the bubble burst completely. Seeing infrastructure brands like Cisco, Java, and RedHat all over the mainstream financial press made me worry the tech would suffer for the sake of marketing. Indeed, I saw companies investing in tech from those brands before their use cases justified it, because they could show investors their name brand hardware in the data center and cash in on that brand recognition. But the cost doesn't matter because you'll get rich when you IPO next year, right?