Comment by bobxmax 14 hours ago
The dot com boom involved silly things like Pets.com IPOing pre-revenue. Claude code hit $500m in ARR in 3 months.
The fact people don't see the difference between the two is unreal. Hacker news has gone full r* around this topic, you find better nuance even on Reddit than here.
You'd think after all this time nerds would stop obsessing about profit. Profit doesn't matter. It hasn't mattered for a long time because tech companies have such fat margins they can go profitable in months if they wanted to.
Yes, $5m in sales. That's effectively pre-revenue for a tech company.
What you're missing is how that value comes about. People seem to think it's an infinite fountain but it's more like strip mining the commons.
We also know that AI hype is holding up most of the stock market this point, including the ticker symbols which you don't think of as being for "AI companies". Market optimism at large is coming from the idea that companies won't need employees soon, or that they can keep using AI to de-leverage and de-skill their workforce
They're not claiming that it's like the dot com boom because no one is actually making money. They're claiming that this is more like the dot com boom than the housing bubble, which I think is true. The dot com crash didn't cause Jane-on-the-street to lose her house while she worked a factory job, though the housing crisis did have those kinds of consumer-affecting outcomes.
Do you mean pre-profit/without ever making a profit? I found an article about their IPO:
> Pets.com lost $42.4 million during the fourth quarter last year on $5.2 million in sales. Since the company's inception in February of last year, it has lost $61.8 million on $5.8 million in sales.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/pets-com-raises-82-5...
They had sales, they were just making a massive loss. Isn’t that pretty similar to AI companies, just on a way smaller scale?
We haven’t seen AI IPOs yet, but it’s not hard to imagine one of them going public before making profit IMO.