The backstory: I began writing these memos in 1990 and continued to do so for ten years despite never receiving a single response. Then, on the first business day of 2000, I published bubble.com, a memo with warnings about excesses in the tech sector that turned out to be timely. The inspiration for the memo came from a book I’d read the preceding autumn: Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, by Edward Chancellor, an account of speculative excesses starting with the South Sea Bubble of the early 1700s.