This does seem like a 1990s story.

I'm just barely young enough to have missed it. Friends who quit school early were in on it.

I don't know if this was the case at Fast but in a lot of cases back in the 1990s a lot of the engineers knew everything was screwed up.. and they just didn't care, the money was good while it lasted.

The experience almost always helped people get ahead, no one ever gets punished for doing good work at a company that fails due to bad management and investor decisions.

I disagree that it looked like pets.com.

One key difference is pets.com is public and got money from common people.

Fast got money from highly sophisticated VCs. They all made calculated bet.

No VCs would tell you their deals have 100% success.

Employees that join are highly educated. They also know that it is a startup with high failure chance. Much higher than FAANG. Every educated person knows this.

And it is normal to be disappointed when a bet doesn't work out.

$100M is a lot less money today than it was in 2000 after factoring in inflation and low rates.

But the revenue is also inflated, so it all works out in the wash.

So Pets.com actually drove more revenue than Fast?! Oh my god.

Also, most people in the US had heard of Pets.com while it still existed.

Yes, but also no.

Per the CPI, for every $1 in 2000, you need $1.68 today. 1.68^1/22 - 1 is about 2.39%/year inflation.

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=200001...

For the purposes of engineering salaries, CPI is not an accurate representation of the change in what $100M can buy.

For the purposes of corporate exits too, or for the purposes of real estate.

I can't imagine PPI is too far removed.

So is 600k

I wonder just how much difference it makes that all this wacky startup action is private equity (writ large) rather than the public markets. Seems like... maybe a lot?