In 2000 the bubble burst while I stood inside the city we had just built for it.
The Nasdaq peaked in March 2000 and then collapsed, erasing trillions in dot-com value. That same October, Dubai Internet City opened its doors. In November, the first resident crew boarded the International Space Station, beginning humanity's continuous presence in orbit.
In 2000 the internet economy fell off a cliff. The Nasdaq peaked in March and then unwound, and companies that had been worth billions on a slide deck were worth nothing by winter.
In the middle of that, in October, Dubai Internet City opened its doors with two hundred companies inside. I remember the strangeness of it: the world declaring the internet dead exactly as we cut the ribbon on a city built for it.
Crashes do not kill real things. They clear out the tourists. Everything I have built since, I built assuming the noise would eventually leave and the work would remain.