osts were lower, and they were even stronger competitors. That indeed was the pin that pricked the bubble. The Great Telecom Meltdown Investors Subsidized Prices A company can only continue to sell below cost for as long as it has the capital to do SO. But in the boom era, capital seemed to be the easiest thing in the world to come by. So the business model that most publicly traded Internet companies followed in the late 1990s was fairly simple: Sell stock at inflated prices and use the money in lieu of adequate revenues. The real product was stock; customers were merely icing on the cake. This applied to both the ISP business and to the businesses that became their flagship customers, the so-called e-commerce companies, or "dotcoms." The stock value of publicly traded ISPs and Internet-related companies rose, along with that of many new telecom companies. Initial public offers were typi- cally oversubscribed, and if the company ran low on cash, it could, during the boom, typically go back to the well for another round of equity. Privately traded companies also found equity easy to come by, as venture capitalists poured cash into anything even remotely related to the Internet. The goal, of course, was to cash out, usually by going public. So long as an IPO could bring in huge returns, venture money would be plentiful. Take, for instance, Teligent, whose primary business was operating a CLEC using wireless connections to large buildings, which also operated an ISP, and which was headed by a well-reputed former AT&T executive, Alex Mandl. Its 1997 IPO raised $118 million, while Nippon Telephone threw in another $100 million of equity. Microsoft and Hicks Muse put in $400 million in con- vertible preferred stock, while more than a billion dollars of debt financing was obtained. That would certainly have been enough cash to build a sustainable business, if the company had a sustainable business model. By 1999, annual revenues were only $31 million, and losses were growing [25]. Its subsequent bankruptcy was not a su