The reason late 90's start-ups invested the way they did is because they had no meaningful way to track the effectiveness of their ads, much less the payback. A Super Bowl ad for Pets.com seems fine if you can (more or less) guess that it adds a bunch of customers.
Since then, start-ups have built a bunch of tools to track customer acquisition costs and paybacks in a pretty sophisticated way, and some of the obviously crazier ads dies (or at least become more one-off).
But now we are in a fintech/crypto era and nobody really knows how to calculate paybacks once again, because the business model is so new vs. a traditional ads or commerce business (will this new crypto.com user do $1k of transaction volume every year for the next ten? sure why not?)
As a result of all this, we see crazy 'spaghetti on the wall' style advertising again, usually focused in the crypto/fintech space (See: this year's Super Bowl). I wonder when the music stops.
Remember beanie babies? We call them NFTs today.
Remember HYIP and e-gold? We call them cryptocurrencies now.
The point is that crowd behavior, especially markets driven by envy & greed, lead to the same outcome. every. single. time.
this is why guys like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger keep making money.
Who cares? Champagne on the Concord, and let's order a bunch of Starfire servers from Sun Microsystems!
I wonder if any doomed startups will order a rack from Oxide Computer. I hope Oxide's primary customer base is established companies that actually need serious efficiency at scale.
here we go, this is late 90s all over again