When bubbles burst, what comes next can be better, if we build it differently

It was December 1999. Tech investors were riding high, convinced that a website and a Super Bowl ad were all it took to get rich quick. Spending was mistaken for growth; marketing was mistaken for a business model. In just a few months, the dot-com boom would go bust: $1.7tn in market value vanished, and the broader economy took a $5tn hit.

Yet something remarkable emerged from the wreckage. The post-crash internet wasn’t defined by speculation, but by creation: the rise of web 2.0 and open-source software – and the birth of platforms like Firefox and Wikipedia. The lesson is simple: when bubbles burst, what comes next can be better, if we build it differently.

Mark Surman is the president of Mozilla