Everyone's expecting, and should expect, that these companies will continue to post very impressive gains. A lot of these companies are still growing 30-50 percent per quarter. There will be other issues that people will be looking at. With Yahoo!, it may not be just revenues, it may be page views. With an Amazon, it may not just be revenues, it may be number of new customers they've acquired over the last quarter. |
For many of the Internet leaders, you're paying a high valuation with only modestly higher growth prospects. |
I think everybody has been surprised at the speed of evolution we've seen in the sector. Usually new technologies take quite a while to catch on. The Internet has really changed the rules. |
I think we've had a tremendous run. I mean Nasdaq had a terrific year. A lot of the Internet names that we hold in the fund had terrific years and quite frankly I think going forward it's going to be more challenging. |
I've followed all of these companies. |
If you look at (Egghead.com and Software.net) as comparables, there's no way Software.net deserves their valuation. To me, Egghead.com is really compelling. They are on track to do $150-200 million in revenues this year; Software.net is nowhere near that. |
In 1999, we'll see more consolidation activity as leaders gain more scale. |
It was a very positive sign. I think a lot of people were expecting a little sell-off. |
It's pretty clear the fourth quarter of last year was pretty horrific, and we didn't need much of a bounce to post these kind of returns. |
Really, the Internet is broader than one sector. We're going to focus on companies that focus the least on technology. Tech companies just are not attractive. They are too competitive, and they have predatory pricing. |
Right now investors are looking at any earnings reports as the glass half-empty rather than half-full. |
Right now there's a lot of fear. |
Software.net has the potential of being a leader in this space and there are clear comparisons to Egghead.com, and also to some of the online companies that sell CDs. They're really not that much different. |
Something has changed (with Internet investing). You don't have the craziness of a wild IPO market. |
The biggest change in the past five years is that you can find very reasonably priced companies and most are making money. That's obviously a big change from the late 90's when these companies were just starting out. |