I can still vividly remember the day when we decided to just stop talking to the investors. There was this guy who was widely regarded as a genius by all he worked with. He was bright, but his real genius came from the fact that he talked very, very fast and never met a buzzword he didn't like. Nonetheless, he was our investment banker guy--at least until we fired him.

He was absolutely convinced we'd make a great, fundable Internet company. All we had to do was go into e-commerce and become a mall.

"But, we're a magazine publisher," we said.

"That's OK," he said. "If you become a mall, you'll be an e-commerce company."

"But, we're a magazine publisher," we said. "We don't know anything about running a mall or an e-commerce company."

"That's OK," he said. "We'll bring in another management team."

"But if you bring in another management team and you turn our wonderful magazine publishing business into a mall, what's our part in it," we asked?

"Oh, probably not much," he said.

Thanks loads. We decided to pass on that wonderful opportunity. About two weeks later Pets.com tanked. So much for e-commerce.

Mr. Wizard came back to us again, and this was the conversation that ended our foray into moron-investor land.

"I have this great idea," he said.

"Uh oh," we said.

"No, seriously, it's a great idea," said our genius. "I think you should publish books."

"Well, ebooks are an interesting business," we said.

"No, I don't mean ebooks," he responded. "I mean real, printed books. See, you print these books, and here's where it gets exciting. You put Web addresses in the books. Right inside, you stick lots of links to sites on the Web. Isn't that amazing?"

"Uh huh," we said.

It was then that we formally notified him we were no longer in need of his services.

But, you see, that was the mind of the investor at that time. It wasn't that these guys were fundamentally stupid or fundamentally greedy. It's just that no one had ever seen the opportunity to make that much money that quickly, and so everyone tried it. They tried anything that seemed, at that particular moment, to be the formula for success. It's just that most failed.

I know this is a long editorial, but this is important stuff. Give me another few minutes of your time, and I'll let you go.

One problem with our economy right now is that, as we've seen in the dot-bomb boom, greed isn't always good. According to The Industry Standard (which, with a 62% drop in ad revenue from dot-coms, may well have been its own worst enemy) there have been 76,529 Internet industry layoffs as of March 29, 2001. Given the average burdened salary of $100,000 (and that's actually pretty conservative), and hoping I've gotten my math right, we're talking about $76 billion or so that's not flowing in the economy.

Add to that all those investors who bought hundreds of shares of stock that are now worth, if they're lucky, a couple of bucks a share, and there's a lot less flow in the economy.