During the bubble 'mindshare' was considered the most valuable thing you could get, more than money. Hence, superbowl commercials for Dotcom startups. Scaling

During the bubble 'mindshare' was considered the most valuable thing you could get, more than money. Hence, superbowl commercials for Dotcom startups. Scaling has gotten far, far, far cheaper in terms of hardware, software and staff. This opens up a new class of possible businesses and returns. Remember that Google didn't even exist during the first part of the boom; monetizing with advertising was difficult... Everything cost tens of thousands of dollars back then, phone systems, servers, development environment licenses, ... Anyway, memory lane. Now you can git push to heroku and launch a web app. That's definitely valuable. Heroku probably would have been worth well over $1bn during the boom, though. At the time, you could legitimately spend a year building out a web application.