I worked in Austin, Tx in late 1999 right across from the Dr. Koop building. Even at the time it was amazing how much money they were spending/had spent on thi

I worked in Austin, Tx in late 1999 right across from the Dr. Koop building. Even at the time it was amazing how much money they were spending/had spent on things like that. I'm not sure they even fully moved in after it was built, or if it imploded first. Funny thing, I worked at a company that served the likes of ING and some other broker-dealers at the time, and was about break-even on that business. However, the lure of all the easy internet money was a siren's call, luring the founder to try and grow into a 'portal' to attract eyeballs. That didn't work out so well, however we were using Linux, Apache, Perl and only some pdf processing software required MSFT at the time, and a free copy of Sybase (no, I don't know why that was our db of choice, and it crashed as it was the 'free' version, not fun being the new guy/last man standing trying to recover the db on live servers). Even at the time, it was hard to figure out how Dr. Koop, Pets.com, Vignette etc. were ever going to make the money their IPO's drew. At the time, Amazon was also a questionable affair, but they managed to make it, so it's not all hopeless. Some of the companies will make it, but so far my ability to pick the winners is pretty slim.