Azeem Azhar

Well, I lived through both of those.

And I remember during the dot-com bubble, somebody broke into my office by climbing up the fire escape to pitch us their business to look for investment.

I mean, so that is a moment that I hope will not be repeated.

During the

housing crisis, I had to get to know the face of Angelo Mazzillo, who was the CEO of Countrywide Financial and a subprime lender with a great tan.

And for some reason, he was on my TV screen every single day.

It was absolutely spectacular.

And unfortunately, the reverse was true of his mortgages.

You see these characters, you see these moments.

The similarities with the dot-com are that this is being driven by venture capital, by Silicon Valley, by the promise of a new technology that will reinvent the world.

We thought we might create a new nation in cyberspace back in 1999.

But what's really different is that back then,

nobody was really using these sites and these services outside of Yahoo and CNET and eBay.

these things were empty.

The line was from the Kevin Costner film, Field of Dreams, build it and they will come.

And people built it, built these things and nobody came.

I mean, pets.com spent $150 million to make $600,000 a month in sales.

I mean, it was really, really confused.

So I think that's where the similarity to some extent ends, which is that

what we are seeing with generative AI is that most of us are using chat GPT and many companies are, and there's billions of dollars being spent.