Cade Metz

He acknowledged that a lot of this spending

was at least in some ways irrational.

And he said that there would be losers in this scenario.

After this dinner, which made headlines across the country and across the world, a lot of people started using the word bubble.

And when I talk to people here in Silicon Valley and financial analysts and tech historians about this moment we're living through, what they often point back to is the dot-com bubble of the late 90s and 2000s, when early internet technologies showed enormous promise and the Valley started to invest enormous amounts of money in it.

Well, for people who live through the bubble, what they often think of is an enormous number of startups that were created and that went public and had huge valuations, even though they had little or no business model, certainly no revenues.

And then when the market crashed, when people decided that the spending was getting ahead of what was possible, a lot of those companies went out of business.

Companies like Cosmo that delivered goods straight to your door.

Pets.com, which sent you pet food.

There are famous examples of this, and that's often what people think of.

But underneath that,

And this is where the analogy really holds up to today.

As those startups were being built, there were other companies that were building the infrastructure needed to drive the internet, that were spending enormous amounts of money to lay the fiber optic cable that would carry all that information across the internet to our machines.

When the bubble burst, a lot of those companies went bankrupt.

And that's often what people are thinking about as they look back at the dot-com bubble.

Just like then, you have companies spending enormous amounts of money on the infrastructure needed to drive on this.

The difference is they are spending a lot more today than they did 25 years ago.

This is a great point.

So many of the applications that were promised by all those startups that went out of business are part of our daily lives today.

Amazon delivers our pet food.