Dot.Com Dreams

Date: 2005-09-25 | Tags: cisco, dot.com, stock-options

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According to many reports coming out recently, including this NY Times article, venture capitalist funding is on the rise once again. Some see the coming of another Dot.Com era. Hopefully everyone has more wisdom than before and we can sustain the growth.

This has reminded me of my Cisco Systems silicon valley experience. I joined Cisco on October 1999, having signed up with them a few months before. My recruiter gave me a graph with projections of salary and options that got me very excited, so I went home and created my own projections. I looked at the 3 year history of Cisco's stock performance and saw that is was doing 2:1 splits every 11 months. Given this information and other analisys, I projected that in 4 years time, my options would have a valuation of between $4M and $16M.

While the first six months were better than my projections, the dot.com crash was a rude awakening (not just for me). For the purose of entertainment, I present the following graph which shows my projections and the actual valuations of my Cisco stock for the four years that I was there. Enjoy, and remember me during the coming dot.com wave...


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