I actually remember where I was the day the dot-com bubble burst. It was March 2000 and I was sitting in a newly-opened branch of Starbucks near my home in London, reading a copy of the Financial Times. I was on gardening leave at the time, serving notice between jobs. Five years earlier, straight out of university, I had become a stock analyst and now the market for stock analysts was hot. There was a sense of euphoria in the air that we were at the dawn of a new economic age, funded by continually rising stock markets and a population that wanted to participate. Stock analysts sat at the centre of it all – the VCs of their day. We advised people what shares to buy and what to sell, and were rewarded handsomely for it. 

I bit into my blueberry muffin and read the headline: “The NASDAQ composite index suffered its biggest loss in more than three weeks yesterday after a Japanese stock rout caused selling”. I skipped to the next story and wiped away some crumbs. No bell rang, but that wa…