JDSU

Any clue? Yeah, the famous ones.

First of all, Cisco Systems, JDS Uniphase, AOL.

Two out of three of those went bankrupt.

And they were the ones that were the high flyers, the build-out.

The problem is if the stuff that they built is worthless or doesn't pay for a long time.

So I remember a company named, what was it called? JDS Uniphase that made fiber optic cable.

I think that's what they did.

or they buried it, or they were involved in that part of the world during 2000.

...

Jungle Jim, there's a reason his name was Jungle Jim, covering JDS Uniphase in these things, right? And you sit there as a salesperson, and you sit there as a financial a- as an analyst covering financials, which you can't really meme.

Book value this, ROE this.

It's hard to get past the stuff.

Before that, I had my own company.

It was also in the telecom and the assurance business and JDSU at that time before it became VIAVIA acquired me.

And I've been with them from there.

But I have a long history in the telecom industry since it started with the assurance, with optimization.

Where do you stand on that whole issue?

It goes back to what I said earlier on, which is I think that lots of people will hark back to the world of building I mean I was around in investment banking working for a west coast investment bank and we had the biggest I think we were Montgomery the Bank of America we were the biggest players in the whole fiber optic network so I used to take Kevin Kalkovan from JDS Uniphase around and And Sienna, JDS, Uniphase, I still remember the companies going back those days, and they were the companies that named all the sports stadiums around San Francisco.

It was the same gig.

But the issue really was we were putting a lot of fiber in the ground, fiber optic cable in the ground that wasn't being lit up.

But I think that eventually a lot of people will realize that they have been turkeys.

Just ask the last buyers during the Tulip Mania, those who purchased something like JDS Uniphase during the dot-com bubble, [laughs] or the final buyers of Luna for that matter.

It looks very attractive to join the Bitcoin train right now, but what happens when overnight Lamborghini stories are replaced by, "I extended my mortgage and now I'm broke," stories? Then Bitcoin must have a user case which it can rely on because the speculative demand will be gone.

You're not exactly the first person who suggests the death of Bitcoin, Mr.

Most of them are burning money today with no real path to profitability.

Now, if you wanted to bet on internet growth in the 1990s but thought it was safer to bet on infrastructure stocks rather than the riskier dot-com companies, you would have invested in companies like Cisco, Corning, JDS Uniphase, and Lucent, none of which turned out to be great investments.

You can be right about the growth of a company or a sector, but what you pay for a stock still matters, and back then some of these companies may have been great, but you were paying too much for growth that never came.

Sun Microsystems was an infrastructure play in the late 90s.

Because even though the dot-com bubble was ruinous for a lot of people, it was ruinous for the telcos and the various SELEX, whatever it was, the local exchanges that allowed people to pop up with ISPs.

Those were, other than maybe JDS Uniphase, fairly newish companies, but the standard tech companies, the Oracles, the early days of Amazon, Google, and so on, they were early but fairly stable.

They weren't wrapped up in the dot-comness of it all.

However, well, Microsoft made some investments, but nevertheless, they weren't existentially tied to it.

But what I always think about is, do you want to be running in front of the bubble? Do you wanna be, you know, buying the most hyped names and not know whether it's 1997 or early in 2000 where you're gonna suddenly be sitting on a company that you thought was phenomenal.

JDS Uniphase was, was mine back in those days.

That ended up being a complete disaster.

So how do you think about positioning yourself in a moment like this, both from a risk and an opportunity side?