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The question Finn asked—“Why did people believe in what they believed in?”—becomes even more germane after the crash because the culture of risk that was so prevalent during the dot-com boom survived the dot-com crash. In this comment, he recognizes that something had become calcified, “worshipped”…

For Alan, there was certainly an upside for the company in terms of issuing stock options to employees. When asked if equity holding made a difference in his attitude and loyalty to the company, he replied:

Yeah, absolutely. Even looking at the start-up, not everyone was a shareholder. And esp…

Many of these experiments emerged from early creative endeavors but were often later linked to financial business models whether through advertising, sponsorship, or other such means. Silicon Alley’s early period of experimentation—and the early days of the Internet industry—brought information to …

Another cultural shift was an emerging rhetoric around financial markets. What people say about markets, to some extent, makes markets.43 Nigel Thrift has called the new economy a “rhetorical fabrication,”44 and others have argued that to dismiss the rhetorical flourishes of the new economy is to m…

The political rhetoric of both Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Bill Clinton a decade later set a cultural stage for the rise of venture labor. With manufacturing in decline, competing political proposals emerged for how to fix the problems of the economy. For political conservatives, the answer invo…