For only 18 months, from September 1998 to March 2000, was the dot-com euphoria insane. It was a Silicon Valley gold rush, there was money everywhere, and there was no shortage of enthusiastic people. Every week, dozens of new startups compete to throw the grandest launch party. But (Landing parties were very rare. Paper millionaires would rack up thousands of dollars of dinner bills and try to pay with shares of their startups; sometimes it even worked. Getting involved in startups. One student I knew was running six different companies in 1999. (It's generally considered crazy to start half a dozen companies at once after a 40-year-old graduate.) goes. But in the late '90s, people could have believed this was a winning venture. Everyone should have known the boom was unsustainable; the most "successful" companies seemed to embrace a kind of anti-business model. Where they lost money. Just as it seems irrational to blame people for dancing when the music plays, it seems irrational that adding ".com" to your name can double your value overnight.

Paypal Boom-

 When I was running PayPal in 1999, I was scared of my actions—not because I didn't believe in my company, but because it seemed like everyone here was willing to believe everyone else. Everywhere I looked, people were starting companies and closing companies. An acquaintance told me how he planned his IPO from his bedroom before starting his company. He didn't find it strange at all. In such an environment, it seemed cynical to act principled.

 At least PayPal had a suitably big mission. We wanted to create a new internet currency to replace the US dollar. Our first product was to let people send money from one PalmPDA to another. chose the idea as one of the 10 Worst Business Ideas of 1999. However, no one had any use for that product except journalists. PalmPDAs were still unpopular, and email was more popular than ever, so we decided to come up with a way to send and receive money via email.

 "By the end of 1999 our email payment product started working well. Anyone could log into our website and transfer money easily. But we didn't have enough customers, growth was slow, and costs went up. For PayPal to work, we needed to attract a volume of at least one million users. Advertising cost more than it earned. Ties with big banks weren't taking effect, so we decided to offer people something to pay for signing up.We gave new customers $10 to join, and every time they signed up a friend, we gave them another $10 as a referral. This brought us hundreds of thousands of new customers whose growth rate was exponential. Of course, this type of customer acquisition strategy was in itself expensive and unsafe. When you pay people to be your customers, you increase your infrastructure cost as well as multiply. This unusual cost was normal at the time. But we thought our huge costs were low. After a huge customer base, PayPal found an easy and smart way to profit by charging a small fee on customers' transactions.

 We knew we would need more funding to reach that goal. We also knew that the boom was coming to an end. Since we could not count on investor confidence in our mission to keep the business going through bad times to come, we were working fast to raise funds. On February 16, 2000, The Wall Street Journal ran a story praising our viral growth and suggesting to investors that PayPal was worth over $500 million. We raised $100 million dollars the next month. Our main investors officially accepted the Journal's valuation. (Other investors were in a hurry to invest. A South Korean firm wired me $5 million without first negotiating or signing any documents. When I tried to return the money, they didn't tell me that Where to send.) In March 2000, when we established ourselves in the market and started selling, PayPal started getting success in this. The boom bubble burst as soon as we started finalizing the deal.