The dot-com crash saw the collapse of high-flying startups that first commercialized the web. It also set the stage for Jesse Powell’s debut as a tech entrepreneur.
“All the companies that blew up were liquidating their laptops and office equipment,” the Kraken co-founder told Protocol, recalling how he built a business by going to startup bankruptcy sales during the crash. “I was buying stuff and selling it on eBay.”
Fast forward two decades: Instead of bankruptcy fire sales, Powell now runs a tech powerhouse of his own, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges estimated to be worth $11 billion that has raised more than $125 million in funding.
The role has become freshly challenging as Powell finds himself having to navigate a market meltdown with eerie similarities to the turn-of-the-millennium tech-stock crash.
Layoffs, bankruptcies and the rapid evaporation of wealth: the parallels are everywhere. The dot-com crash wiped out about $5 trillion in investments, far more than the $2 trillion lost in the total market value of cryptocurrencies over the past seven months. It marked the end of the go-go ’90s.
The crypto crash is a less isolated phenomenon: It coincides with a global economic slowdown triggered by inflation, rising interest rates, the lingering COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain chaos and the war in Ukraine.
But it’s also in some ways more isolated, with far fewer households holding crypto now than had tech stocks in their portfolios during the…
