Dotcom

Dot-com entrepreneurs have a decade of exposure to all things Internet, web and technology, which makes them smarter and more-informed Internet business minds.

He attributes the downfall of many early companies to a combination of two things--a lack of understanding of how different the insurance market is from other financial services, and the Internet hype and dot-com boom that led people to spend too much money on the wrong things.

Before the dot-com era, venture capitalists would take a technology risk, but never a market risk.

Invented by a former dot-com engineer, players of Burn Rate struggle to keep a dot-com start-up afloat as bad business pours in and the money runs out.

"Dot-com entrepreneurs today should go back to basics," Romeo said.

"I had thousands of emails from dot-com employees informing me of the goings on in their companies," writes Kaplan.

"I do think that Capacitor appeals to the Web-savvy, dot-com, Burning Man audience member.

ABOUT TWO YEARS AGO, A journalist I know interviewed the five founders of a new dot-com for an article in a prominent business magazine.

VCs never expect profits immediately from their dot-com investments.

When I had previously covered Sundance, during the dot-com boom of early 2000, it looked as if the future of film was off-screen and on-line.

"Our institutions of higher education are the ultimate long-term investment," Insana advised, "but that doesn't mean that a college or university should put itself in an inferior position by being too conservative, and hanging onto the minority of lower-return investments." On the other hand, said the analyst, "you don't want to swing for the fences." He cautioned that schools must drop the 20-percent-rate-of-return mindset that was prevalent during the dot-com boom: "That just isn't a normal rate of return." Endowment managers, he said, must now accept that when it comes to the market, "the abnormal has become normal.