Welcome to the era of blocks and mortar: Learning from the past

cointelegraph.com:

The idea of history repeating itself is commonplace. Nevertheless, it’s intriguing to watch it unfold when it happens, as I believe we’re seeing now with Web3 echoing the dot-com era. 

If you weren’t there at the time, the phrase “the dot-com bubble” makes it sound like everyone was getting tipsy on their over-consumption of the newly-discovered internet. If you were there, you’ll remember it as a more adversarial period. 

It felt like David versus Goliath: the underdog dot-com challengers ready to disrupt the status quo and establish new ways of doing everything we had always done, but online. Hopes, dreams, and funding were poured into many a brand-new website. Swathes of talent fled traditional businesses to build the next unicorn.

And the big corporations were seriously spooked. Believe it or not, the dot-com revolution caused executives to make all kinds of strange, self-defeating decisions in an attempt to keep up with what was happening. 

For instance, under threat from Amazon’s online bookstore, U.S. book retailer Barnes & Noble set up an entirely separate entity devoted to digital expansion — effectively, an online competitor to its own struggling core business. 

I was fortunate enough to observe those turbulent times firsthand, having joined at a startup in 1999 as employee #2. Within ten months, I went from having one colleague to having 450 colleagues. 

Then one day: boom. And bust. 

We had to fire 250 people in 24 hours. At the same time as hundreds of other firms like ours were doing the same thing. It was a tumultuous period, with a lot of sunk costs, finger-pointing and blame-casting. 

In the fallout from the crash, here are a few things I noticed happening. 

The companies that had been less than prudent, those