At the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, Cisco briefly became the most valuable company in the world. It wasn’t a consumer darling like Amazon or a flashy startup like Pets.com. Cisco didn’t sell to ordinary people at all — it sold the invisible infrastructure the internet needed to function: routers, switches, networking gear, the plumbing of the online world.
To many investors in 1999, Cisco felt unstoppable.
To many skeptics in 2001, Cisco felt like a fraud.
Both groups were mistaken.
Cisco was neither a miracle nor a mirage.
It was simply a company perfectly positioned for a technology wave the world misunderstood.
And that makes Cisco the perfect analogy for today’s AI giants — especially NVIDIA.
Cisco didn’t chase consumer hype.
Cisco didn’t guess at business models.
Cisco didn’t try to reinvent the internet.
Cisco focused on one mission:
Build the hardware that connects the world.
And Cisco understood something crucial far earlier than most:
“The internet will grow faster than anyone expects.”
To capitalize on that insight, Cisco did four things exceptionally well:
Every website, every e-commerce store, every corporate network — nearly all ran on Cisco hardware.
Cisco bought dozens of companies in the 1990s, absorbing talent and tech before competitors could respond.
Cisco wasn’t a media darling.
But CIOs trusted it.
Enterprises standardized on it.
Distribution became Cisco’s superpower.
Every time the internet doubled in users, Cisco doubled its footprint.
Cisco didn’t grow because of hype.
Cisco grew because the internet grew.
The deeper pattern:
When a new technology becomes infrastructure, the companies that power it become dominant.
During the bubble, investors didn’t just believe in Cisco —
they believed in an infinite internet explosion.
Assumptions included:
These assumptions were unrealistic — not because Cisco was weak, but because expectations were too extreme.
When the bubble burst, narratives swung in the opposite direction.
But the truth?
Cisco didn’t fail.
Expectations failed.
Cisco survived, evolved, and remains one of the most important infrastructure companies in the world.
The lesson:
“A bubble does not mean the underlying technology is fake. It means people temporarily misprice the future.”
The Cisco analogy fits NVIDIA almost perfectly.
AI is built on compute.
NVIDIA owns that compute.
Just as the internet couldn’t scale without routers, AI cannot scale without massive compute.
As AI usage grows, NVIDIA’s total addressable market expands.
NVIDIA is not a bubble…
…but it lives inside a bubble environment.
This is the nuance most people miss.
The word “bubble” triggers fear, suspicion, and memories of 2000 or 2008.
But historically, bubbles are not scams —
they are infrastructure accelerators.
They overbuild the systems the world later depends on.
Examples:
Overbuilt track → powered manufacturing growth.
Overbuilt grids → fueled industrial productivity.
Overbuilt fiber networks → enabled YouTube, Google, Amazon, Netflix.
Scaled financial infrastructure → increased mortgage availability.
Bubbles waste capital —
but leave behind infrastructure.
Long term:
That’s why bubbles ≠ scams.
They’re chaotic, but they accelerate progress.
The AI bubble is doing the same:
Expensive now…
but it becomes the foundation for the next decade.
We are somewhere between 1998 and early 1999:
The pattern is repeating:
Understanding this pattern helps you make better decisions as a builder, leader, worker, and investor.
Because:
The internet didn’t end in 2001. It began.
AI won’t end with the next correction. It will begin.
Chapter 5 — The Duality - Why Understanding Both Sides Protects You From Fear and FOMO
How balancing optimism and realism helps leaders, workers, and investors navigate the emotional chaos of the AI decade.
Chapter 7 — Electricity & Industrialization
What the electrification era teaches us about AI, productivity lags, workflow redesign, and why the true AI boom will arrive years after the hype.