Podbit · The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Nortel carried 75% of North America's internet traffic and was valued at $230 billion at its peak. Then the dominoes hit infrastructure. Within a year, 90% of its value was gone. Along with Global Crossing and Lucent, Nortel had lent money to the same dot-coms now going bankrupt — and none of the three survived.
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At 7:44 · chapter starts 6:00
The B2C collapse didn't stay contained. Sun Microsystems, whose tagline was 'We're the dot in dot-com,' had built its business on powering the internet companies now going bankrupt. At its 2000 peak, Sun was valued at $205 billion — nearly as much as General Electric. Then its clients vanished. Net income of $1.8 billion in 2000 turned into a $2.4 billion loss by 2003, and the company shed 96% of its market cap before Oracle acquired what remained for $7.4 billion in 2009. DoubleClick, the era's dominant ad tech company, fell from a $12 billion valuation to $800 million before being taken private, only to be acquired by Google in 2007 for $3 billion — a reminder that not all dot-com technology was worthless, just the business models built on top of it.
Sun Microsystems, valued at $205 billion at its 2000 peak, shed 96% of its market cap as its internet clients went bankrupt.
Perfecting a product for months guarantees nothing. The Starter Story founder pressed publish on his meticulously crafted site and watched zero users arrive — the brutal lesson every founder needs to hear.
The world's best companies didn't buy their first customers — they went to where those customers already were and created content for them. Free channels like Reddit aren't a hack; they're the actual strategy.
A single link post on Reddit drove 100 visitors to Starter Story in minutes. Then the moderators deleted it. That deletion became the catalyst for a far smarter strategy.
Redditors hate spam — so stop looking like spam. By putting all his content directly into a self-post and adding only a tiny footer link, the Starter Story founder made his marketing invisible to moderators and irresistible to readers.
Going from zero engagement to hundreds of upvotes overnight isn't luck — it's product-market fit. When your content makes strangers ask for more, you've found something real.
Reddit traffic is borrowed. An email list is owned. The Starter Story founder built tens of thousands of subscribers before Reddit banned him — meaning the platform's death sentence didn't matter.
After interviewing thousands of successful founders, one pattern repeats: they all built something, got ignored, and then figured out distribution. Building was never the hard part — getting in front of customers was.
Spend 80% of your landing page design time above the fold. The hero section is the only thing most visitors will ever truly read, so it needs to deliver your full message instantly.
Avnish grew his solo business to $25,000 per month in just 15 months without spending a dollar on ads. His entire growth engine was built on community posts in Reddit and Facebook groups.
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