Paul Graham writes in an essay:
The fact is, despite all the nonsense we heard during the Bubble about the “new economy,” there was a core of truth. You need that to get a really big bubble: you need to have something solid at the center, so that even smart people are sucked in. (Isaac Newton and Jonathan Swift both lost money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720.)
Now the pendulum has swung the other way. Now anything that became fashionable during the Bubble is ipso facto unfashionable. But that’s a mistake– an even bigger mistake than believing what everyone was saying in 1999. Over the long term, what the Bubble got right will be more important than what it got wrong.
The hard part, if you want to win by making the best stuff, is the beginning. Eventually everyone will learn by word of mouth that you’re the best, but how do you survive to that point? And it is in this crucial stage that the Internet has the most effect. First, the Internet lets anyone find you at almost zero cost. Second, it dramatically speeds up the rate at which reputation spreads by word of mouth. Together these mean that in many fields the rule will be: Build it, and they will come. Make something great and put it online. That is a big change from the recipe for winning in the past century.
