> Back during the dot com days, everyone from the secretaries to the chefs to the founders were getting rich
As someone who is old enough to have been working in tech since the 1990s... not really. I mean, it happened on occasion but it wasn't actually a common occurrence even during the heyday of large dot com exits.
The idea of this was massively propped up by overhyping the vanishingly few cases in which it did happen.
I'm not at all refuting your basic point that the "we're all getting lambos" fiction got increasingly disconnected from reality over time, but it was always more apocryphal than real.
I also worked during the dotcom days and worked for a recently ipo'ed startup. Everyone made money from it, so this is from experience. One of the assistants made enough money to buy a vineyard and this was from a company that IPO'ed for less than $1 billion.
As someone who is old enough to have been working in tech since the 1990s... not really. I mean, it happened on occasion but it wasn't actually a common occurrence even during the heyday of large dot com exits.
The idea of this was massively propped up by overhyping the vanishingly few cases in which it did happen.
I'm not at all refuting your basic point that the "we're all getting lambos" fiction got increasingly disconnected from reality over time, but it was always more apocryphal than real.