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During the dot-com days, one could take just about any company public and reap fortunes. All you had to do was to make sky-high projections for growth, say you were in the Internet space, and go along with unscrupulous investment bankers and their analysts.

I think the dot-com boom and bust represented the end of the beginning. The industry is more mature today.

I worked at ABCNews.com at a time when nobody knew what 'dot com' was.

AIR was born from thinking about how rich Internet applications would play out over time and what new pieces of technology would be in demand for these to go to their next generation.

An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in. Microsoft started with programming tools, but came out with an operating system. Oracle started doing contracts for the CIA. AOL started out as an online video gaming network.

An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.

Remember, 2000 was the year of the dot-com bust. The telecom industry lost about $2 trillion in market capital at that time.

It was 1999, and we were building a way for college kids to create online profiles for the purpose of sharing... with employers. Oops. I vividly remember the moment I realized my company was going to fail. My co-founder and I were at our wits' end. By 2001, the dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money.

Many dotcoms recruited people from existing companies who were quite experienced in finance, marketing, distribution and other disciplines but not necessarily experienced in the Web culture.

But if you look at WorldCom, which is the biggest failure to date, they grew dramatically, they were buying companies that were bigger than they were and they were doing it off inflated stock.