Five years ago, the Nasdaq peaked at 5048. Today, it opened at 2065. Unreal... and it really didn't take 
long to come down either. By the close of 2000, its value had already been cut in half. I think at the time we all knew it was coming... eventually... but it was all a matter of when. Sure, during the runup, we talked "New Paradigm" and thought the growth would continue forever, but there was a point after which it just got ridiculously out of hand. I think the AOL - Time Warner, and the fact that a little punk startup that could was suddenly worth as much as this offline, established media giant threw a lot of cold water in people's faces. But, whatever it was, it all ended very quickly on this date five years ago.
Lessons learned? I hope so. Public investors seem to be pretty well sobered, but that tends to go in long cycles and I'm sure they'll be some other kind of bubble 10-15 years from now anyway. As for the private side and venture? I'm not so sure any lessons were learned, because there are still a lot of investors around with a lot of capital. However, like in any investment cycle, the quality investors will still succeed, and in bad times, while everyone suffers, its the wannabees that really get wiped out, and that will always happen.
Anyway, to commemorate this event, I put up, on my CafePress site, a Special Unlimited Edition (meaning I'm happy to sell as many as I can sell) mug... well, actually, two mugs and a mousepad, with the following logo:
And here are the items themselves (large and small mug):
In addition, I've put up some funky blogger related t-shirts as well.
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