Anthony Scilipoti

So they would raise money from equity holders and eventually get some debt.

But the powers that be at Lucent and Nortel would also offer them.

So they would say, buy this $10 million worth of product.

And why don't you pay me over some extended period of time?

Oh, and by the way, we'll give you a line of credit so that you need $10 million from us of cable, but you need to buy some routers from Cisco.

You know what?

We'll give you some line of credit so you could do that because Nortel could borrow money, could have a great balance sheet, could raise money, whatever.

And so that's what was happening.

Well, ultimately, when the equity market started to wobble and there was no one left to continue to make sales to, right?

Well, then now all of a sudden, Nortel didn't get paid on its debts and the wheels came off.

And then the 360 Networks and JDS Uniphase and et cetera, that were the customers of the big three that I just mentioned, they went by the wayside.

And so what ended up sort of now let's take that and think about what's happening today.

So you have the likes of the NVIDIAs of the world and let's say Microsoft and you have open AI and such.

And NVIDIA is investing in OpenAI.

And Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.

Microsoft offers cloud services to OpenAI.

So it's a customer.

So OpenAI becomes a customer of Microsoft.

But Microsoft gave it the money so that it could actually pay it back.

NVIDIA invests in OpenAI and NVIDIA is a supplier of chips to OpenAI.