At the pinnacle of the internet bubble our stock peaked somewhere around $113, and then after the internet bubble burst, in less than a year our stock went down to $6. My annual shareholder letter for 2000, as noted in Part I, starts with a one-word sentence: “Ouch.” That whole period is very interesting because the stock is not the company, and the company is not the stock, and so, as I watched the stock fall from $113 to $6, I was also watching all of our internal business metrics—number of customers, profit per unit, defects—everything you can imagine (see the 2000 letter for details).
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