Maybe The Dot Com Bubble Wasn't Such A Bubble After All

We've definitely seen quite a few cases of dot com bubble-era startups coming back to life a decade later -- but a new study is suggesting that for all the talk about the dot com bubble and the resulting burst, there may not really have been a bubble at all. Instead, what the researchers found was that, in a random sample, nearly half of companies that received venture funding in 1999 are still in business today. To them, that suggests that there should have been even more companies funded during the dot com era, because not nearly enough have failed. Of course, you can raise all sorts of questions about this -- including questioning the methodology of the study, and whether or not "number of companies" is truly the important number to be focusing on. You can also question what the "appropriate" percentage should be for failed companies. However, when you hear stories about dot com stars getting more funding years after you figured they were long gone, it certainly suggests that the bursting of the bubble wasn't quite as dramatic as some would have you believe. Of course, if that's the case, it might make you wonder whether the good that comes out of bubbles is really as strong this time around as well.