Dot Com Again?

Remember the madness around the year 2000, when the dot com explosion was in high gear? I remember going on sales calls (at Network Appliance) with my team, when we showed up the CEO and a gang of VP's greeted us. They would then show us slides about how big their boutique firm was going to become over time. The catch was always something like "this is a great opportunity for you Mr. Vendor. If you donate storage to our firm, we will give you warrants that will be worth many times the value of paying you cash today for your storage." There were tons of companies that played the game back them, the vast majority of which are out of business and never to be heard of again.

There seems to be a new breed of these companies surfacing again. The new term for dot com is web 2.0. And, there are a lot of them out there. Recently I got a call from a recruiter about an unusual company. This one was in the advertising space for cell phones. Their first application is a program to locate public restrooms in major cities across the US. The "interview" consisted of telling a story about how big they are going to be, then asking the vp of sales candidates to put together a market plan on how they are going to attack the market and present to the executive team on a future call.

Does this sound familiar? Want to bet if these guys are in business in three years? My advice, stick to real companies that have top talent in their executive teams and at least have an idea of where they are going. Good selling!