Dot-coms have come and gone. Even Yahoo! is struggling, and the brief days when 25-year-old kids were out making millions on the public markets and driving new Porsches in the warm California sun, or frantically writing code in San Francisco lofts and Palo Alto garages with dreams of the Nasdaq, seem like they’ve been gone for years.
But amid all the jokes about ambitious business plans that somehow forgot to account for revenues and profits, and the investors (everyone from venture capitalists to day traders) who jumped on the bandwagon, not too much has been said to explain what some entrepreneurs were thinking when they launched dot-coms — especially those who founded companies, got well funded and didn’t find a way to pull through. Many have dismissed the dot-com explosion as a “get rich quick scheme.” Was it? Or are all of those dot-comers a sadly misunderstood bunch.

Amar Goel can say that he was there. Goel founded golf e-tailer Chipshot.com in August of 1995 while still an undergraduate at Harvard. He built it up and ran it in his spare time during summer jobs at Robertson Stephens and Netscape. When Goel graduated, the company got seed capital. He and his co-founders paid themselves $1,100 a month.

“While my friends were getting well-paying jobs,” Goel explains, “I was back in my garage.” Goel confesses that some would-be entrepreneurs “did see it as a get rich quick scheme,” but insists that others, like him, “were trying to build real businesses.” Money was obviously a motivating factor, but Chipshot was, astoundingly, the fifth company that Goel founded — most of the earlier ones, he admits lightheartedly, were somewhat “stupid.”