Sharon was acqui-hired after Lamini failed to find product market fit, and she had to fire her co-founder Greg. Greg went to Tensorwave (another AMD play) and eventually quit there as well.
The way I look at it, AMD and others dumped $25m into a very early AI play that never was going to be successful. I don't fault them for trying.
There was no way she could even come close to successor of Lisa though. The grooming thing was a media play at best. Dr. Fei-Fei Li would be a heck of a lot more appropriate than Sharon.
Anush is excellent and turned around the software story. If he goes, the party is over.
The fact that Sharon was mentioned as a possible successor to Su made me LOL. OP totally clueless. She should never have been given a VP AI Engineering title given how little she's done in her career which says more about how ignorant / desperate AMD was at the time. They've made big strides since then. I'm not expecting her to make it 2 years in Anthropic either.
Sure, dot-com valuations were high in 2000... but smart people were getting concerned about dot-com valuations as far back as the mid-1990's. Alan Greenspan, head of the Fed, was publicly raising concerns about "irrational exuberance" in 1996. And yet, valuations kept getting sillier for another half a decade. Why did the bubble end in 2000? Why not earlier, or later? Why was it a crash, instead of a slow decline? Why did everything suddenly change, seemingly all at once? There's no consensus on the causes of those sudden market movements.
Otherwise, I agree there quite a few parallels with the present.
The reason is detailed in the article. Fed increased rates in a very short amount of time and people fled the stock market for the safer interest rates...
"At the same time, a decline in interest rates increased the availability of capital.[20] The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which lowered the top marginal capital gains tax in the United States, also made people more willing to make more speculative investments."
...
"Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan, then Chair of the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates several times; these actions were believed by many[weasel words] to have caused the bursting of the dot-com bubble."
The precipitating cause wasn't valuation or rates. It was a seemingly sudden change in the mindset, motivations, fears, finances, decisions, and behavior of stock buyers and sellers.
Do more research. I'm just pointing to one source for brevity of discussion, there are others.
The problem was how quickly rates went up (not necessarily how much they went up). It was like 5-6 times in 6 months, which spooked everyone. It peaked in 2000, then the unprofitable companies ran out of money when investors pulled out of the stock market, then rates went back down.
I lived through it. It was like day/night in SF. One day it was glorious and the next day it wasn't. It was classic SF group think, and everyone in the bay area was ignoring the "irrational exuberance". Money was flowing, people woke up, then it stopped.
I suspect we will see this again with AI at some point. I've been building my own business around this whole concept of financial failure, not taking on massive debt like everyone else is and running super lean and profitably. It is hurting me in the short term to not have access to capital, but I think it'll all turn around at some point when people wake up, again.
There are entire categories of scams that exist only thanks to cryptocurrencies. Do you think random people in Western countries would wire money to human traffickers running pig butchering farms in Cambodia without stablecoins? Or to ransomware gangs in Russia without Bitcoin?
Not only they aren't remotely comparable, but there's obviously a huge difference when fraud goes through accounts linked to real identities, since banks and payments systems are legally mandated to deal with KYC and AML regulations.
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