Stories from the dot-com era

Some compare the high prices of today’s tech giants to the pricing in the stock market back then.

- Matthew Matthee

I was in Cape Town again recently. I took the scenic route back to Knysna after spending time with an old university friend in Paarl. Instead of the usual N2 drive, I went via the N1 through the Huguenot Tunnel, crossed the R60 through Robertson, and eventually rejoined the N2 near Swellendam.

I listened to a great podcast called How I Built This with Guy Raz, who was interviewing Jeff Lawson, the founder of Twilio, a cloud communications company.

Today, Twilio is a $9 billion (about R157 billion) business, but what caught my attention wasn't how Twilio was built - it was Lawson's story about his first venture during the dot-com bubble of the late '90s.

The late '90s were wild. The internet was this brand-new thing that everyone thought was going to change the world- and it has, of course-just not in the way people thought it would.