Good product ideas are important, but product market fit is even more important. In essence, it is difficult to judge whether an idea is a good idea alone, but whether it is the right time. Bubbles aren't just about madness, either. Among the endless "applications" developed on the older generation of infrastructure, those that can survive the bubble also guide the development direction of the next stage of infrastructure. Creativity is very important, staying alive is even more important, but the most important thing is to be able to adjust the skills at the execution level as things develop, and realize the dream of the year at the right time.
—— Mable Jiang, Executive Director of Multicoin Capital
I like the Golden Gate Bridge very much. It is majestic and magnificent, spanning between mountains and seas. I was studying in San Francisco more than ten years ago. When I was renting a house, I deliberately chose a house that claimed to have a Golden Gate Bridge View. However, when I looked from the living room to the Golden Gate Bridge, I could only see a little red bridge tower. In my upstairs unit lived an old American couple, who occasionally met in the corridor and smiled politely at each other. I often think that they should appreciate this beautiful bridge every day upstairs.
Once I chatted with the landlord and learned that the old couple had been renting his house for many years and lived in poverty. He sympathized with the old couple and never raised the rent in these years. Despite their poverty, the old couple maintained their decency. I often see them driving an old Toyota to go shopping for groceries. The car is too old to tell the year, but it is clean from the inside to the outside. Once I bought a bunch of quick-frozen dumplings in a Chinese supermarket, and I couldn’t finish cooking too much. I suddenly thought of them, packed a big plate and took it upstairs. "This is home-made dumplings, let's have a taste", the old couple were very happy to eat. There is a saying that one family in the world is brothers everywhere, so I am not lying.
After getting acquainted, the old man came to me once and said that he couldn't access the Internet, so he asked me to take a look. It was a very old computer with a win95 system installed, and it was actually a 33.6K phone modem. It was the first time I saw it. The old man said that he bought this computer back then to use E*Trade to buy and sell stocks. I bought a lot of technology stocks during the Internet bubble, and most of my life savings and almost all 401K pensions disappeared with the Internet bubble. I can only live on the meager monthly social security payments. Probably because I have already accepted the reality, the old man said this without a trace of turmoil, but I was a little shocked. It was not long after the bubble burst, and jokes about the big bubble were still being heard a lot. But jokes are jokes after all, and I don’t feel it when I listen to them, until one day I suddenly find out that the people in the jokes are living by my side. Just like the saying that I often see recently, a speck of dust from the times, falling on a person's head, is like a mountain.
After it was repaired, I said the cat was a bit slow. The old man said it was enough, so I dialed the number and connected to craigslist with an average speed of less than 4K to buy second-hand goods (the US version of 58.com). At that time, broadband had long been popular, and the only websites that could be used normally at dial-up speed were probably only such websites that were almost all text. To this day, visiting Craigslist still makes you feel that you have traveled back to 20 years ago, which is really a model of not forgetting the original intention.
Back to March 1999. Priceline, an online airline ticket seller, went public at $19, rising to $88 on its first day of IPO. At this time, it was only 11 months before the Priceline website was launched, but in this short period of 11 months, he burned 150 million US dollars. Even so, Priceline could only sell a few hundred tickets a day at the time, and paid $30 for each one sold. Losing money was the hallmark of a successful .com company in 1999, and everyone was losing money, but few were as creative as Priceline.
Even fiercer than Priceline is a company called Webvan. As early as 20 years ago, Webvan wanted to sell fresh food online and wanted to deliver it within a half-hour window selected by customers. In order to achieve this goal, Webvan designed an extremely advanced automated storage center. The cost of building such a storage center is 40 million US dollars, and each storage center can only cover 60 square kilometers. They also purchased a large number of trucks equipped with GPS, which were extremely rare at the time, and designed a system that could automatically plan the optimal route.
In June 1999, Webvan went online. Due to the convenient service and people's curiosity about the Internet economy, it became an instant hit, and as many as 6.5% of San Francisco households became its users. Only five months later, Webvan went public, with a market capitalization of US$8 billion at its highest, which is the sum of the three major fresh food retailers in the United States. But the good times came and went faster. Two years later, on July 9, Webvan suddenly announced the suspension of operations, and the life of the originator of fresh food e-commerce came to an abrupt end. In its short life, it burned through $1.2 billion, its stock price fell from $35 to 6 cents, and it lost an average of $130 on every sale.
There were many, many companies like this back then, and they all had the same characteristics, they all wanted to “change the world,” they had crazy high valuations, and they didn’t make any money. Most of them disappeared quickly. It's not just application companies that have disappeared, infrastructure operators have also closed down, including the famous WorldCom and Global Crossing.
However, the Internet bubble left a rich legacy to the world. Until now, the optical fiber built during the bubble still accounts for more than 70% of the total optical fiber mileage in the United States. Even the dotcoms that have long been wiped out are not left with nothing. A few years ago, Amazon acquired a robotics company called Kiva. Now the black-tech warehouse robots designed by Kiva operate Amazon's warehouses all over the world, processing more than 10 million orders every day. And this system is optimized based on Webvan's system at that time. But compared to these visible and tangible legacy, what is more important is that the Internet bubble brought the world to understand online life.
Many people once believed that Internet applications had no future at all, because there were too many organizations pouring in and too few real users. Twenty years have passed, and Priceline, which has survived, has a valuation of 100 billion U.S. dollars, 10 times higher than the most frenetic period in 1999. And the more famous Amazon, even though it has not yet realized its dream of selling all the books in the world, its stock price still rose to $2,400, which is 400 times the stock price after the bubble burst. And Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber and many more companies emerged and rose from the ashes of the pioneers.
Foam"Foam"It is naturally the safest and most appropriate to describe it in one word. However, the Internet itself contains endless connotations, which far exceed our current wildest estimates and predictions. "
Twenty years later, no one is talking about the bubble anymore. Internet technology has already changed the world, and there is no sign of it ending. And another new journey has begun. This time the protagonist is younger, with a wilder background and more doubts. This journey is destined to be even crazier.
I have long since lost contact with the old couple. They are all in good health, and it is certainly not a problem if they have been around for more than ten years, but that old Toyota is estimated to be more than 30 years old, and it probably cannot be driven no matter how well maintained it is. I hope that the stocks he bought back then included Priceline or Amazon. Maybe the old man has never sold them. Now he can cash out some and exchange for a car. Maybe he can buy a house and enjoy the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge in his own home.
Bless them, and bless all friends who persist in the future.
