So no one is to blame? Or we all are?

Yeah, the only people I would exempt are the government, because the government really and truly plays no role in valuation.

This was a valuation bomb, not a disclosure bomb. Enron and Global Crossing -- those are issues of disclosure. They simply didn't tell us how bad things were. If you go back and look at all the dot-com prospectuses, they're filled with how bad things are.

The great Wall Street promotional machine accentuates whatever happens to be the mood of the public. Wall Street was complicit and the public was complicit and the companies were certainly complicit and the venture capitalists were complicit.

It takes all of those to make it happen.

So, how was this bubble different from others?

We've seen this particular kind of boom thousands of times before, but it had never before had one particular element that no one banked on, which was this love affair by the public with their computers and their fast phone lines, and the enabling brokerage houses that allowed you to be able to get in on the hot deals for the first time even if you weren't an institution.

That took a conventional weapon and turned it into a nuclear weapon.

You write that the IPO of TheStreet.com could have made you believe, like a Marxist, that capitalism would collapse under its own weight. How could you go along with the deal when you knew how bad it was?

Take a look at the operating structure of the company. I had no operating role, and I think that most of the substance of the book [that deals with] TheStreet.com is how it was hijacked from me.

They let me have some lip service. Periodically, I was allowed to play a role. But this was a rogue company. And it's a company where if I had said no, or if I had said yes, it really wouldn't have mattered. Not until we took the dramatic action at the top [firing the CEO and replacing board members].

I hated it. I just hated it. It was just stupid.

A friend asked me the other day, "Do you regret that you did it?"

And you know, I thought about it for a long time, and I said: "Yeah, I do. I just do." I'm proud of what we've accomplished now, but I don't think that it was worth it.

Why not?

Because it caused too many problems in my personal life.

I mean, I wish that we could have done it without all the heartache. And if you told me, "No, the heartache comes with it," I would have told you that even as great as the product is, the heartache was just too hard. I just feel awful about what everyone went through with this thing.

Now, the end product is good, and we'll make it as a company, but I think a lot of what happened that went wrong with me in my life had to do with TheStreet.com, not with Cramer Berkowitz.

Why has TheStreet.com survived when so many other dot-coms haven't?

Because we have an unbelievably good CEO who came in and was an adult, Tom Clarke. He very quickly realized when we had $120 million in the bank that we were about to lose $120 million, even though the board disagreed with him.

And that was amazing, because all these companies thought that their $100 million was going to last forever. We happened to be blessed with a CEO who said: "Look: $120 million, we could piss that away overnight."

So we were able to change the culture of the company, but it was brutal.

The brutality of getting the company to be in the right shape was unparalleled in terms of the cruelty of it. When you shrink a company from 310 employees to 120 employees, that's just Bethlehem Steel, and coming from the point of view of an ex-socialist, it was hideous. But coming from the point of someone who says, "Listen, we can save 120 jobs," it was great.

Do you think that there's anything about The Street's business model that makes it different from all these dead companies?

Yeah. We stuck with paid [subscriptions] the whole way, even though our previous CEO, Kevin English, wanted to get rid of it. And sticking with paid was brilliant, and it saved our lives.

You write that the old Wall Street hands hated the dot-coms because they knew the whole thing was a bubble. Your wife, for instance, was shorting these stocks. So, did some of your colleagues think you'd gone over to the dark side when you were doing this dot-com?

People only thought it was amusing until that weird confluence of retail investors who kind of hijacked the process, and the excess liquidity that the Fed pumped into the system to beat the Long-Term Capital morass.

Until that, everyone just thought it was just the ultimate folly. And then suddenly it was: "Well, holy cow. This company is worth more than Cramer's real company. The joke company is worth more."

To me, as someone who is torn and conflicted and passionate about everything he does, it was just a nightmare for me that it was like that.

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