“This feels like 1999 again.” No, it doesn’t. And I was there (here). I joined Cisco in January 2000 as a co-op, then full-time in May 2001. At the time, Cisco was the hottest infra company on the planet, riding the wave of the dot-com boom. But by the time I started full-time, the crash had already begun. A month in, my manager was laid off. The party was over. Entire industries vanished. Here’s what actually happened: 1. The users weren’t ready. Most people were on dial-up. Mobile didn’t exist. E-commerce logistics were immature or non-existent. Everyone had ideas, but the end user wasn’t there. 2. Capital vanished. The IPO window shut. Venture funding dried up. Startups that depended on future growth couldn’t raise and died fast. 3. Metrics were fake. Companies like Kozmo, Webvan, Pets.com burned cash chasing usage that never converted. Things like CAC/LTV wasn't common enough vernacular. 4. Infra got overbuilt. Telcos like Global Crossing and WorldCom spent billions on fiber and data centers. The demand never showed up. Cisco’s customers disappeared, not because they lost but because their customers died. 5. Business models were broken. Most dot-coms were never real businesses. They scaled early and hoped revenue would catch up. It didn’t. Now look at today. OpenAI, Meta, Google, xAI, Microsoft are all scrambling to keep up. Jensen put it plainly (h/t @BG2Pod) “Every hyperscaler has realized they dramatically underbuilt.” “Every forecast we’ve seen has been too low.” “We’re not building for speculation. We’re building for active workloads.” So no. This isn’t 1999. This isn’t Pets.com IPOing on vibes. We are not in a hype cycle. We are in a compute bottleneck.