Tag Archives: Antone Johnson

Silicon Valley After the Dot-Com Crash of 2001

Silicon Valley After the Dot-Com Crash of 2001

Occasionally a question comes along on Quora that resonates with me on a personal level, calling for a more in-depth answer that draws on my own experiences as a Silicon Valley native and tech industry lawyer. One such question, “What was it like in Silicon Valley after the bubble burst in the early 2000s?” led me to write one of those answers. I was humbled to see Robin Wauters repost an excerpt in TechCrunch (complete with my ugly mug) and link to my Quora answer on the subject of the great dot-com crash of 2001-02. I’ve reposted the piece in its entirety here for those who don’t care to go down the Quora rabbit hole.


What was it like in Silicon Valley after the bubble burst in the early 2000s?

The collapse was sudden, shocking, and depressing. Dot-com crash of 2001 - screen shot of Antone Johnson’s answer I think most of us saw it coming, but the speed and severity of the crash came as a hell of a shock. Settle down, youngsters, for a long answer from a Valley native who labored in the trenches at two firms at the heart of the boom-and-bust cycle (parental discretion advised).

By 2000, it seemed like everyone I knew in their 20s and 30s was working for a new Internet company. (That should have been a warning sign right there.) Not just Bay Area locals; new college grads and experienced business, finance and technology professionals were migrating here from all over the country in the years leading up to the dot-com crash. Commentators famously compared it to Florence during the Renaissance. The housing market was beyond ridiculous at the peak. I mean worse than the usual “Bay Area ridiculous” that’s been the status quo since the 1980s. (People were resorting to paying six months or a year’s rent in cash in advance in order to get a decent apartment in SF.) Excite at Home Logo Having moved back to Palo Alto in 1998, I barely recognized my home town; every billboard up and down Highway 101 advertised some kind of Internet business with a silly name ending in “.com”. I worked for a high-profile Internet company (Excite@Home) whose gleaming new headquarters served as a billboard of sorts, right up against 101 in Redwood City, with our logo visible to thousands of cars whizzing by — or rather inching by; traffic during that period was as bad in the Bay Area as it was in LA, with even 280 turning into a pretty bad traffic jam most mornings as people commuted south from the City to thousands of newly created jobs at newly created companies up and down the peninsula.

A seat at the deal table

Leading up to the dot-com crash, I worked in a job that was tightly tied to the state of the “dot-conomy.” WSGR logoAs a lawyer in one of the corporate groups at Wilson Sonsini (WSGR) in Palo Alto, the Valley’s largest law firm, from 1998-2000, I contributed in my own little way (there were hundreds of us) to the IPO, M&A and VC factory that was WSGR at that time. It was the best career decision I ever made because of the doors it opened, but it also became sheer misery by late 1999 when everybody and their dog was trying to go public at once. When I left to go in-house to Excite@Home (April 2000, coincidentally the date of the first big Nasdaq “correction”), my subgroup alone within Mario Rosati’s wing of the corporate practice (two partners, several associates and paralegals) was working on nine IPOs simultaneously, on top of all the usual venture financings, M&A and general corporate work.

Nasdaq chart of dot-com boom and bust Continue Reading

Legal Guidelines for Small Businesses Using Social Media

Legal Guidelines for Small Businesses Using Social Media

Social media is real-time, spontaneous and casual, making it easy for people to think that “anything goes” online, says Antone Johnson, founding principal of Bottom Line Law Group, a San Francisco-based firm. Johnson has worked as an attorney at MySpace and eHarmony. He says many laws that apply to businesses offline also apply online. Continue Reading

Martindale-Hubbell Connects Lawyers, and… More Lawyers

Martindale-Hubbell is a legendary name in legal circles, synonymous with legal directories dating back more than 140 years.  Long before the Internet existed, a ritual among junior associates at law firms was to pull the weighty leatherbound tome off the shelf, find opposing counsel’s M-H profile and hand out copies to everyone on the deal… Continue Reading

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