This could be a book but I'll do the tldr for this thread. We were a small scrappy startup with our own video compression and streaming tech. We had just gone p

This could be a book but I'll do the tldr for this thread. We were a small scrappy startup with our own video compression and streaming tech. We had just gone public and raised 15 million dollars, and were pivoting to being a content company (because tech sucks and content is king if you are in the year 1999). Our lead investor was great. He told me again and again that we were in a bubble, and to focus on the core technology as a backstop in case the bubble burst. After the crash, our $40 stock went down to $0.06. I went from being a multi-millionaire on paper to being broke-ass for real. The CEO and I had to fire 110 people, cutting the staff down to about 25. We jettisoned the content portal and refocused on the core IP. In the end amazingly, the company survived and was eventually acquired by Google. It was tough letting people go but the alternative was for the company to go bankrupt and everybody to lose everything.