What Tech Bubbles Leave Behind

Tech bubbles come in two varieties: The ones that leave something behind, and the ones that leave nothing behind. Sometimes, it can be hard to guess what kind of bubble you’re living through until it pops and you find out the hard way.

When the dotcom bubble burst, it left a lot behind. Walking through San Francisco’s Mission District one day in 2001, I happened upon a startup founder who was standing on the sidewalk, selling off a fleet of factory-wrapped Steelcase Leap chairs ($50 each!) and a dozen racks of servers with as much of his customers’ data as I wanted ($250 per server or $1000 for a rack). Companies that were locked into sky-high commercial leases scram­bled to sublet their spaces at bargain-basement prices. Craigslist was glutted with foosball tables and Razor scooters, and failed dotcom T-shirts were up for the taking, by the crateful.

But the most important residue after the bubble popped was the mil­lions of young people who’d been lured into dropping out of university in order to take dotcom jobs where they got all-expenses paid crash courses in HTML, Perl, and Python. This army of technologists was unique in that they were drawn from all sorts of backgrounds – art-school dropouts, hu­manities dropouts, dropouts from earth science and bioscience programs and other disciplines that had historically been consumers of technology, not producers of it.