I found an interesting tweet from journalist Simon Crisp yesterday reminding me that it is 10 years ago, more or less, that the dotcom world collapsed.

The Wired magazine link to what happened to some of the movers and shakers of the dotcom boom and bust makes interesting reading.

I remember it well.  The craziness of unproven brands that burnt piles of cash such as Boo.com raking in plaudits and investment – A new paradigm no less.

Boo.com was run by two Swedish entrepreneurs – one a model with little business experience, but somehow they were whizz kids, without question.  There were some questions when it went belly-up.

Anyway, I was working for a sales and marketing agency called Congress.  My account was web tracking software called Visual Insights.

It was exciting times.  We had a £800,000 budget to market a real technology of substance – not a dotcom – in Europe for a Chicago based company.

I got to travel over there, I saw Congress add a new member of staff every week or so – and the future looked rosy although I cannot really stand Surrey.

I also remember that our business model, as good as it was, could not survive a tech stock market crash, investors pulling out 2nd and 3rd round funding from customers and a raft of US clients no longer worried about creating revenue streams in Europe; they were more worried about surviving.

I was made redundant with most of the marketing department.  Congress barely lasted six more months after that.

Yet, we were dealing with real, not scatter brain, concepts and technology – the whole hill of cards came tumbling down all the same for all of us.

It is partly, maybe nearly wholly, why I was never convinced about a new paradigm about housing.  We shall find out shortly.

I guess I can say I was part of history albeit not a major war or historical landmark, but history is made up of more than just battles.

I did learn a lot and it was from that point on that I decided to specialise in PR and not be a general marcoms professional – at least I think – besides having some interesting experiences and some good people to work with – I came out of it with something good.

Postscript

Did I ever tell you about clubbing in Basingstoke with Congress marketing mates?  I am glad I didn’t and its not own my Facebook page either.

Tags: dotcom bust, dotcom crash

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Digital media, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.