Working In The Dot Com Bubble ft. Matt Rosoff
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 687 Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
To kick off this week’s Better Offline Dot Com Special, Ed Zitron is joined by The Register’s Matt Rosoff to talk about what it was like to be in the tech industry during the last time the markets got drunk on a major digital hype cycle.
Matt Rosoff: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Matt-Rosoff/
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:agrmux4phzmfvgyblvhxrbnh
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:06.7 | Hello and welcome to Better Offline. |
| 0:10.7 | I'm of course your host, Ed Zittron. |
| 0:30.3 | And today I am joined for a dot-com special by Matt Rosoff, the editor-in-chief of the Register, |
| 0:34.3 | who has been in Silicon Valley, I believe, 300 years you said? |
| 0:35.5 | It was... 325, yeah, so I'm actually a vampire that's nice oh what like |
| 0:39.9 | kevin o'leary in a marty supreme sorry martin supreme that's a thing he says in it have you heard about |
| 0:45.3 | that no i don't know but i haven't seen that yet a ping pong doesn't really do it for me i didn't really |
| 0:50.6 | like it but there is a bit in it where kevin o'leary goes I'm a fucking vampire. I've lived for this many years. And I read about this. I did not like the movie, but I read about it. I was like, oh, I would actually love it if this was true. And apparently they did film it with fangs. And they should have done that. They should have just had him be a vampire at the end. However, he's regularly in the sun, so I'm not sure how they would have done that. They should have just had him be a vampire at the end. |
| 1:11.9 | However, he's regularly in the sun, so I'm not sure how they would have squared that circle. |
| 1:16.2 | Anywho. |
| 1:16.8 | Nighttime only. |
| 1:18.0 | Computers. |
| 1:19.0 | So, Matt, you were, what were you, we're just going to go straight into it. |
| 1:23.1 | What were you doing in the dot-com bubble era? |
| 1:26.2 | Like, where did you begin and where did you find yourself |
| 1:28.7 | as it progressed? Yeah, it's an interesting blast from my very distant past, but I moved to |
| 1:35.3 | San Francisco in 1992, sort of the tail end of the Gulf War recession. So there wasn't much |
| 1:42.9 | going on then. I was interning, doing different kinds of jobs, copy editing, doing some of those Gulf War recession. So there wasn't much going on then. I was interning, doing |
| 1:45.0 | different kinds of jobs, copy editing, doing some of those kinds of things. And then in 1995, |
| 1:51.4 | I joined a little startup that was going to publish content on the worldwide web. They didn't |
... |
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