Before I Was CEO

Chapter 2The Dot-Com CrisisThe Stories of David Kenny, Kris Gopalakrishnan, and Raf Keustermans

NEW YORK, MARCH 2000

People in the tech world were still partying like it was 1999. The Internet revolution had people from Silicon Valley to Wall Street and far beyond dreaming of a world where the new technology stood front and center, and Internet-entrepreneurs were the new billionaires. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. In less than five years, shares in the technology stock index NASDAQ grew by more than 500 percent. On March 10, 2000, it hit an all-time high of 5,048.62 points. But that was all about to end.

For some companies, like Kris Gopalakrishnan's Infosys, the dot-com era meant a breakthrough after decades of hard work. The IT outsourcing company was founded by seven engineers in 1981, and it took them 23 years to make their first billion dollars in revenues. But it took only another two years to make the second billion, and only a year for the third billion. On the back of those successes, the company's U.S.-listed stocks exploded in value, from a little more than $1.30 in March 1999, to just under $21 in March 2000, a fifteen-fold increase.

The same was true for Digitas, an advertising company that was created in the early '80s, but that had morphed into a digital advertising agency in the mid-'90s. On March 14, 2000, it was the last company to go public in the Internet ...