> But he utterly failed. Maybe. If so, we're talking about a single investor out of at least hundreds that have similar, if not so insane, models. They work

> But he utterly failed. Maybe. If so, we're talking about a single investor out of at least hundreds that have similar, if not so insane, models. They work out fine, many of those posting here work for a company funded by such back in those days. In the late 90's/early 00's it was interesting to see which sites took off and which did not. I owned a hosting company and was fairly active in the community. It was an open secret that the giant sites of today were simply losing money on a monthly basis due to infrastructure costs with rich investors picking up the tab. Other competing bootstrapped companies with regular Joe founders simply could not keep up when their competitors could simply burn $100k/mo in bandwidth and server bills while instead they needed to be responsible with sustainable growth. I had more than a handful of founders/company owners who had previously perfectly sustainable models built up over half a decade only to be crushed by loss-making VC money. I often wonder how much different the Internet would look like if a startup remained a startup, and not some high finance big business industry that took over the title.