By the middle of 1999, the VCs were competing with one another for the privilege of financing the next Internet business plan that came through the door, and all prior rules had been suspended. “It was absurdly easy,” a young Harvard Business School graduate who helped raise several million dollars for an Internet start-up in the fall of 1999, recalled. “You would walk into offices in New York and people would immediately offer money to you if they thought you looked smart. We didn’t have any data on the market; we didn’t have a product demo; we didn’t have anything. We had a business plan,
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