I was at a startup in the UK before the first dotcom bust and we took VC money. It was extraordinary. A key metric that the VCs seemed to be interested in was head-count. We had this system that effectively acted as a trading exchange and I was sitting there saying 'hang on guys, with a little bit of work, this can pretty much be automated and you can sit back and watch the money roll in' but there was tremendous pressure to keep hiring people to demonstrate growth. I was not very young - but clearly naive.