In the late 1990s, as the dotcom bubble made it cheap and easy to raise funds, anyone who followed the money was becoming an entrepreneur. Even within companies, the place to be was the dotcom division. Chief executives were throwing money at the new technology.
With an almost perfect lack of foresight, I moved out of dotcommery and into traditional newspaper journalism. That gave me a great vantage point from which to observe my friends, and some former colleagues, become entrepreneurs.
Whether they made money or not came down to timing: if they sold before March 2000, they became obscenely rich. If not, they went back to the corporate world or consultancy. Only one of them built a sustainable online business.