Dot Com To Dot Bomb

We listened to a lecture on the dot com to dot bomb era in tech companies. From the early nineties to the late nineties there was an explosion in the tech industry, as the internet came into being. Basically, there was such a rapid expansion of the internet and computing technologies that people didn’t know how to assign value to the services that were being made available. Putting a dot com after your company name was essentially a money printing machine. There were no rules or regulations regarding the computing industry as nothing of its kind had ever been seen before. Small startup companies became massive near overnight, and huge established companies got bigger. Everyone was riding the bubble and no one saw an end to it. Alas, an end did come, as in early two thousand, the bubble burst, leading to a huge depression in the market. There were some survivors, but many many companies lost their proverbial shorts. The survivors did something that the other companies couldn’t do, adapt, and adapt quickly. Andrew used the analog of dinosaurs to describe the companies that met their end in the market when the crash happened. They were gigantic beasts, dominating the entire tech landscape. They owned the entire market, but since they were so big, they were also slow, and unable to adapt to change quickly enough. Because they were set in their ways and unable to adapt to the new, harsh landscape in which they suddenly found themselves, they all died out.

Guest Speaker: John Dimmer

We had the pleasure of having John Dimmer come speak to the class. John is an entrepreneur who knows quite a bit about finance. He currently runs the investment firm Firs Management, which invests in startup companies, as well as being an owner of a Honda dealership as well as several Airstream trailer dealerships all around the Northwest region. John Dimmer started out by getting a B.S. in finance from the Oregon State University, after which he moved into a job at Puget Sound Bank. After His job at Puget Sound Bank, he moved to a job working at Alliance Surety Bonds, where he learned a lot about accounting and learned skills which would become helpful with his businesses later on. He got his start in business with Andrew Fry and Free Range Media, which was sold in late 1999, before the dot com bust in early 2000. After that, he opened a Honda dealership in Oregon, then after that, he started branching out into other franchises. He opened his first Airstream trailer franchise in the Portland area in 2010, and that did so well that he opened another in Covington in 2011, and another in Boise in 2012. All this to say that John Dimmer has some serious experience operating companies. He talked to us about the different levels of funding, as well as the different types of funding. All in all it was a very helpful conversation to have and it cleared up a lot of points about funding of a startup company that we would not think about right out of the gate.

Guest Speaker: Amy Sallin

We had the pleasure of hearing from Amy Sallin. Amy works in the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, where she manages Business plan competitions.  She came to talk to the class about the 2016 UW Business Plan Competition. The competition is a tournament style competition where groups put together a business plan and try to secure funding for their idea. There are $70,000 worth of prizes awarded to the top teams in the competition. The competition is set up to help students of the university create a business plan for the intent of starting their business. The competition is basically three tiered. First, the teams send in executive summaries, where they are screened for eligibility into the contest. Then, the teams that pass the screening round go to the investment round. In the investment round, the teams set up booths akin to how a trade show is set up, then the judges walk around the booths and have an allotted amount of virtual money to invest in the teams. Of the 36 teams that make it to the investment round, the top 16 move on to the sweet 16 and final round of the competition. The final 16 then present to a new set of judges, and the top four teams are selected. The final four then present to a new set of judges and the other teams, and then the awards are given out to the top teams. The whole focus of the competition is to get people excited about their business ideas and expose them to the people that could help them actually launch their business ideas.