The dot-com bubble burst in 2000 when the Nasdaq dropped more than 76% in roughly 2 years

Between 1995 and 2000, the Nasdaq Composite index jumped from roughly 1,000 to 5,000 amid excitement over new internet companies. As venture capitalists dumped money into startups, those same companies struggled to turn a profit, leading to a bubble. The Nasdaq wouldn't reach its former high until 2015.

The dot-com boom sent tech stocks soaring before a historic collapse

A look at the dot-com bubble, when investors poured money into unproven internet startups, driving the Nasdaq to dizzying heights before it crashed by more than 80% after 2000, showing how new technologies can detach markets from reality.

More than 650 companies went public in the US in 1996

As the dot-com bubble reached its peak, most dot-com companies went public with little proof of being profitable and were often overvalued. In 1999, the Nasdaq's price-to-earnings ratio (a tool used to determine a stock's value that divides its price by earnings) hit 90.2, signaling that many companies were operating at a net loss. Startups promised investors that more time and money would help scale their businesses and become profitable.

See which companies folded and which survived the dot-com crash

Companies that primarily used the web as a platform for doing business were more vulnerable than companies that created technology. While hardware and software companies managed to make it to the other side, most e-commerce companies took a brutal beating and share prices plummeted.

The 'big bang' of the dot-com era: Netscape's stock price doubled on the day of its initial public offering

The company behind the browser that revolutionized search went public on August 9, 1995. Just before the IPO, the company increased its initial opening price from $14 to $28. On the day the company went public, shares traded as high as $71 before closing at $58.25. The company's market capitalization exceeded $2B. The eye-popping IPO is largely considered the beginning of the dot-com bubble.

Many original dot-com company founders were bought out early on

The people who bought the original domains for dot-com companies and had the ideas to start businesses were often bought out by investors before becoming well-known companies. Both Pets.com and Broadcast.com were acquired early on.

Many dot-com companies spent some investor money on expensive parties

Parties hosted by dot-com companies were known to be extravagant and expensive. Technology companies in the Bay Area hosted between 15 and 20 parties a week on average, which cost between $30K and $50K on average.

Dot-com companies paid $44M for Super Bowl ads in 2000

During the 2000 Super Bowl game, 17 dot-com companies paid $44M total for ads. Just the next year, only three dot-com companies ran ads in the game. The significant drop reflects just how hard the crash hit dot-com companies and how unsustainable the businesses were.

The dot-com boom made Mark Cuban a billionaire

Cuban co-founded AudioNet with Todd Wagner in 1995 before it became Broadcast.com—a web app that allowed people to listen to sports commentary on their computers if they couldn't watch a game. In 1999, Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.7B. By the time the market crashed, Cuban had already sold most of his stock in the company and had become a billionaire.

Pets.com is one of the most emblematic dot-com companies

Pets.com—an e-commerce pet store webpage—is a prime example of dot-com companies burning through investments. Despite being a popular and well-known brand, the company struggled to generate enough revenue to become profitable. After raising approximately $82.5M in its February 2000 initial public offering, Pets.com filed for bankruptcy in November of that same year.

The 1929 stock market crash is a defining example of a financial bubble burst

Fueled by margin speculation and intense optimism, stock prices soared to unsustainable levels before collapsing in late October—erasing billions in market value within days.

The term 'startup'—which is typically used to describe private companies in their early stages of operation that focus on innovating new products or services to meet a market gap—can be traced back to a 1976 Forbes article.

The original 'four horsemen' of tech were Intel, Dell, Microsoft, and Cisco

These companies became known as the "four horsemen of tech" for the influence the companies had both on other businesses and investors in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The expansion of internet infrastructure throughout the 1990s and the dot-com bubble lifted these companies to incredible heights.

Indicators of economic bubbles include euphoric narratives and extreme valuations.

Domains were like real estate in the dot-com era

In the early days of the World Wide Web, users needed to type URLs directly in the search bar to navigate to webpages (as opposed to the more general keyword search that browsers use now). This made simple, short, and intuitive domain names a hot commodity. So having a domain name, like Pets.com or Rent.com, that was easy to find and understand was like owning prime real estate on the WWW. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Warren Buffett has been criticized for avoiding investing in tech stocks during the 1990s dot-com boom, as he wasn't confident in the future growth of the tech industry.

The dot-com stock bubble taught Howard Marks about markets

Annual investment letters from Howard Marks, the billionaire cofounder of top distressed debt shop Oaktree Capital Management, are required reading on Wall Street. The prolific writer and investor explains the distinction between the folly of trying to time the market and the necessity of paying attention to market cycles. The difference makes all the difference in returns.

'Tulip mania,' the 1630s Dutch craze where rare bulbs were briefly traded like luxury assets, may have been the first financial bubble—and it still shapes markets today.

Google's early focus on simplicity and user experience drove its future successes

Google Search revolutionized information retrieval in 1998, but additional web-based products, including Gmail, Maps, Docs, and YouTube reinforced the company's core ad business while allowing it to aggregate the world's information. Forming Alphabet protected this business from riskier moonshot projects.

Yahoo acquired Paul Graham's former startup Viaweb in 1998

Viaweb was the web app tech startup that Paul Graham, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell cofounded before they started Y Combinator. The company sold for $49M and Viaweb was rebranded as the Yahoo Store.

The lifecycle of a financial bubble often follows a predictable pattern

Economist Hyman Minsky originated what became a five-stage model of an economic bubble: a new “displacement,” a rapid boom, euphoric speculation, early profit-taking by insiders, and finally panic selling. From Japan’s 1980s real-estate surge to the 2008 crash, the pattern repeats across eras and assets.

See the original websites for companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple

Explore archived images of homepages on websites dating all the way back to 1991.

See a ranking of the most popular websites on the World Wide Web from 1995 to 2023

America Online's homepage was the most popular website through mid-2021, when the Yahoo homepage took over and, shortly afterward, became the first website to reach 1 billion monthly visits. It would not be dethroned until early 2006 by Google, a major player in the search engine market.

Y Combinator, the startup accelerator, gets its name from the 'Y combinator' computer science concept.

Warren Buffett has said not investing in Google or Amazon early enough was a mistake on his part

After avoiding investing in tech stocks during the dot-com boom, Buffett's stance on investing in tech was widely criticized. Buffett later shared his thoughts on why he regrets not investing early enough.

The top 100 companies in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has pumped out some of the biggest companies in the world, including Apple, Meta, and Google. Thousands of companies operate in the area, ranging from valuations in the trillions to startups only worth thousands.

A timeline of Google's growth

As of 2025, Google will approach its third decade of existence. A period that's seen the company go from dominating the search market to the launch of one billion-user product after another, from Gmail to YouTube. This detailed timeline lays out what happened when, laying out Google's history in detail. It marks key milestones, like the introduction of Google Maps, and what year they happened.

YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65B in stock during its second year

In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65B, only two years after its launch. Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley's best-known venture firms, was an early investor in the streaming video platform, seeing it as the next step in the evolution of user-generated content that flourished online during the mid-2000s.

The main bank serving Silicon Valley startups and venture capitalists collapsed in 2023

Silicon Valley Bank—the 16th largest bank in the US—served many tech startups in the area as well as many venture capitalists. The bank collapsed in 2023—in a single day, bankers took out $42B.

How venture capital firms came to be

The venture capital firm that kickstarted an industry.

The Beanie Baby craze is known as one of the wildest collectible bubbles in history

The Beanie Baby boom saw collectors drive prices for stuffed animals into the hundreds or thousands of dollars, fueled by hype surrounding scarcity and online bidding wars. When demand collapsed in the early 2000s, the market crashed—leaving steep losses for many speculators.

Google had a quirky, auction-based IPO.

In its sixth year, Google's shareholders reached a size where regulators would require the company to publicly report its financials. This prompted the company to go public through an unconventional style: the Dutch auction. The company auctioned its shares starting from a high price and dropping to a lower level.

Many of the 2010s girlboss-era founders experienced a public fall from grace in 2020

In the 2010s, dozens of female founders were celebrated on the covers of business magazines like Inc. for their recent startup success, from Emily Weiss’s Glossier makeup brand to Steph Korey’s Away luggage company. But many of these companies were also the subject of large takedown articles around the year 2020.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk formed PayPal after merging two dot-com companies

Elon Musk cofounded "X.com," an online banking service, in 1999 with the idea that the web would become a financial repository as internet access expanded and became ingrained in daily life. Peter Thiel cofounded "Confinity" as a digital security service that morphed into a payments system. In 2000, the two merged to form PayPal, and in 2002, they sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5B.

'The Million Dollar Homepage' is a snapshot of a dead internet

In 2005, 21-year-old Alex Tew set out to make $1M by selling $1 pixels on his website, effectively creating a standalone internet billboard. The gambit worked, and because the advertisements were one-time payments, the site looks the same as it did in 2005, despite many of the advertised sites going defunct since.

Sears once tried to become a tech company

In 1984, Sears arguably created one of the first online retail services, called “Prodigy,” in 1984 alongside IBM and CBS. But it was more of a WeChat than an Amazon, offering a variety of other services to users a few years before the dot com era.

How the internet became the World Wide Web: a visualization

The internet was officially born in 1983 and had more than 150 million global users by 1997, creating an international web of seemingly separate networks. This data visualization shows the growth of the internet from 1997 to 2021. Data in this...

Web3 is the successor to our current version of the Internet

Web1 (existing roughly from 1990 to 2005) was about decentralized and community-governed open protocols. Most of the value accrued to the edges of the network: users and builders. Web2 (roughly 2005 through 2020) was about siloed, centralized services run by corporations.