Thanks for your take and sharing your perspective
@Andreas Ramos! I was a 96 undergrad at Harvard and grew up in the SF Peninsula. I remember the exact moment of downloading the first image on Netscape in '94/'95. It was a game changer for me and all of my roommates and CS buddies. There was palpable excitement.
And then I co-founded a chat co-browsing company 1998 in the bay area that lasted until 2004 so I also had a front seat on all of this.
IMHO there was definitely fraud (Worldcom, etc.) but the dotcom crashed as everyone was going after "eyeballs" instead of real revenue and few consumers were willing to spend money on the web as there was too much fear of inputting in your CC. At some point investors realized there was no profitable model and the market crashed. Fraud also contributed but I didn't remember Fraud crushing
pets.com, Webvan or most of the big names during that era. I felt was more imho that they ignored profitability as a metric and that the infrastructure/userbase was not there to make the market and cost structure match their aspirations. I could be mis-remembering though.