The Moment a Most Famous Dotcom Millionaire Knew the Party Was Over

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

So Tracy, I think you know, and I think listeners know, that at least for me, my interest in markets really came about during the.com bubble.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

Yes, you have brought this up a number of times. And I have to say, I love hearing the stories of you losing money during the bubble bursting.

Joe Weisenthal (0:32)

I made a little money. I made a little money too, but I also lost them. But for me, so many things or things that I've sort of like learned or like internalized about how that markets work, like still come from more or less that period.

And I think it's obvious that on some level, what we're seeing now in markets, what we've seen in crypto, what we've seen in tech has some pretty obvious parallels to that period.

Tracy Alloway (0:57)

I feel like the late 90s, early 2000s tech bubble would be a good grounding for the current market situation.

So I envy you that experience. But the thing that interests me a lot about 2000, when the bubble burst and all the tech stocks collapsed and all of that, is when did people actually declare like tech is over? The tech bubble has burst, this is it. Because this is a question that comes up a lot now, right?

Joe Weisenthal (1:24)

Right, so it's like, what is over and what is real? And what like, so obviously a year ago, there were a lot of people who on paper were worth a lot more money than they are right now. But presumably, you know, people are like, oh, what's the bottom? When does this bounce back? What sticks with us? Like these are all like really interesting questions.

And of course, no one knows the answer, but you know, all of these conversations happened after the 1990, the late 90s.com bubble. And you know, I think people forget like for years, no one talked about Amazon, like 2001 through say 2006 or seven, it was not a particularly prominent company that people talked about.

Tracy Alloway (2:04)

Right, so this is the other thing that interests me. It's what comes out of the wreckage of a bubble bursting, because everyone was very excited about the internet in the late 1990s. And so you saw a bunch of companies rise up to come up with some sort of internet-based business model.

And then it all kind of went away after the bubble burst, but some companies that did phenomenally well decades later actually emerged out of that rubble. And the question of course now is whether or not the same thing might happen.

Joe Weisenthal (2:32)

So the question is, how do you know it's over? What comes after that?

What is it like to lose on paper sort of like unbelievable gobs of money, which a lot of people are going through now? So obviously there were a lot of the.com IPOs. People remember pets.com was sort of infamous. There were like hundreds in the year, yeah, tons.

But I think the real first one, the one that really caught people's attention, and just like, wow, there's an unbelievable amount of wealth here. I don't know, do you remember the globe.com?

Tracy Alloway (3:06)

You know what, it rings a bell, but I'm not that familiar with it. I think it was famous for at the time being like the biggest one day pop in IPO history.

Joe Weisenthal (3:16)

Yeah, it was, I think at one time, and it was definitely like one of the first ones. It was like a little bit earlier than the rest. And so it sort of had this meteoric rise and then fall. Anyway, the co-founders of the company, they were like in the media and they're famous for like being really young and really rich and wearing plastic leather pants to parties as one does when you're young and really rich.

And then of course, the bubble collapse.

Tracy Alloway (3:45)

Is this what you were doing?

Joe Weisenthal (3:46)

No, but I was like, oh, this is like really cool. Anyway, so I'm very excited. I just want to jump right into it. This is like a personal thrill for me because of course this got me interested in markets.

We're going to be speaking with Stephan Paternot. He is currently the co-founder and executive chairman of Slated, which is an online film finance marketplace, but also he was the co-founder and co-CEO of the globe.com. So we're going to hear some stories about what those years were like and maybe some takeaways for people today. So Stephan, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.