5 Dot-Com Busts: Where They Are Today

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Thursday, March 10 marks the 11th anniversary of the dot-com bubble burst, when dozens of early Internet companies saw their stock prices soar as the tech-heavy Nasdaq peaked at 5,048.62 before tanking several months later.

While the insanely-big valuations of some of today's most well-known Internet companies have prompted worries of a second tech bubble, the ripple effect of the dot-com bust should have taught everyone a lesson: The stock market crash of 2000 led to the loss of $5 trillion in market value of companies from March 2000 to October 2002 as well as the beginning of a mild economic depression.

While some large dot-coms like Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY) survived and are thriving today, many early start-ups ran out of capital and were acquired or forced to liquidate.

The dot-com bust led to the end of the Silicon Valley gold rush, where venture capitalists invested zillions of dollars into companies with unproven business models, when college students became millionaires over night and when spectacular growth was prized over profitability and sound business plans.

Read on for the stories of a few key dot-com era start-ups that went spectacularly bust -- and how their founders have rebounded.

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