Page "Dot-com bubble" Paragraph 10

According to dot-com theory, an Internet company's survival depended on expanding its customer base as rapidly as possible, even if it produced large annual losses.

For instance, Google and Amazon did not see any profit in their first years.

Amazon was spending on expanding customer base and alerting people to its existence and Google was busy spending on creating more powerful machine capacity to serve its expanding search engine.

The phrase " Get large or get lost " was the wisdom of the day.

At the height of the boom, it was possible for a promising dot-com to make an initial public offering ( IPO ) of its stock and raise a substantial amount of money even though it had never made a profit — or, in some cases, earned any revenue whatsoever.

In such a situation, a company's lifespan was measured by its burn rate: that is, the rate at which a non-profitable company lacking a viable business model ran through its capital served as the metric.