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Interesting. The largest IPO in the original dotcom boom, above everything else on the chart except Google and Facebook, is a company I don't recall ever hearing of: Corvis Corporation.

They started in 1997 as "Nova Technologies", changed to "Corvis" in 1998, did an IPO in 2000, and promptly took a nosedive. In 2004 they became "Broadwing Corporation" (which I also don't recall ever hearing of), and in 2007 they were acquired by Level 3 Communications. It's amazing how little remains of them on the web. Except for some terse stock info, from which I got the above, all I can find are a couple of articles from 2000 talking about how everyone loves them.




The dot-com bubble was almost like a blister compared to the much larger telecom bubble.

Startups like Procket and Caspian Networks raised over $350M each, at multi-billion dollar valuations. In the public markets, Cisco's valuation reached $500B, now-bankrupt Nortel was $300B+, etc.


I found this interesting too. After doing some digging of my own I found this:

Corvis Corporation is the first company to make the intelligent all-optical network a reality. Our solutions enable telecommunications service providers to construct manageable all-optical networks that will accommodate the continuing growth of Internet, video, voice, and other data traffic

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20011103200605/http://www.corvis....




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