
Better Offline Working In The Dot Com Bubble ft. Matt Rosoff
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Jan 26, 2026 Matt Rosoff, longtime tech journalist and editor-at-large at The Register, recalls life inside 90s web startups and CNET’s rapid rise. He tells stories of early product misses, the cultural excesses that hinted at a bubble, and comparisons between dot-com burn and today’s AI hype. Conversations touch on telecom excess, retail trading mania, and why many premature ideas later succeeded.
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From Early Web Rookie To CNET Insider
- Matt Rosoff joined CNET in 1995 as employee number 42 and launched its first email newsletter, Digital Dispatch.
- He watched the company grow to 500+ staff and go public during the dot-com boom.
The Startup With No Content System
- Matt describes a 2000 startup that had no CMS, used Visual Source Safe, and was incompetently run despite ample funding.
- He left quickly and found steadier work, noting many dot-com firms were 'hot air.'
Failure Often Came From No Business, Not No Idea
- Many dot-com failures lacked customers, revenue, or realistic unit economics rather than tech promise.
- Rosoff cites Pets.com and Cosmo.com as early ideas that later found viable second attempts.





