Azeem Azhar

I say it has to have two components.

Number one, there needs to be a significant market correction.

It needs to be beyond the 20% bear market.

It has to be 40%, 50%.

And one that sustains for a long time, the dot-com bubble market correction sustained for 15 years, the housing bubble for seven or eight years.

But the second thing to distinguish this from just speculators getting too excited is

is that the productive capital investment that drove the bubble in the first place also has to decline significantly.

And what we've seen in previous bubbles is it really needs to be 50% or more.

So I'm looking for two tests, a decline in market valuations by at least 50% for a few years, and productive capital for this technology dropping by about 50% again for a few years.

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.