I started my internet career in the early 2000s during the dot-com bust. It's hard to picture this now, but the internet was a thing that people used only intermittently, to check email or plan travel or do some research. The average internet user spent about 30 minutes a day online, compared to about 7 hours today. To use the internet, you had to sit down in front of a desktop PC and "log on" (most people still had dial-up), nothing like the always-on, high-speed mobile internet we use today. In 2001, Amazon's stock price hit an all-time low, with a market cap of $2.2B, about 1/500th of what it is today. A prominent research firm published a study asking Americans if they'd adopt broadband and the majority said no. Email was the most popular internet use case and they didn’t see the need to make it faster. The National Academy of Sciences ranked the internet 13th in its list of great inventions over the last 100 years, beneath radio and telephones. The mainstream consensus was that the internet was a cool invention, but had limited use cases, and probably wasn't a good place to build a business.