There has been a subtle change recently in my so-called public speaking career. Lately, I am being called to speak at conferences on entrepreneurism and specifically on starting high tech companies. The attendees are typically a mixed bag of would-be technology zillionaires, a few real Internet millionaires, second- and third-tier venture capitalists, and guys wearing suits who work for big companies and can't decide whether they are there for the golf or to learn something. There are workshops on this and that, but the relentless underlying theme at these conferences is a yearning for the Good Old Days of easy money, quick IPOs and soaring stock prices. Have we hit bottom yet? Does it all get better from here? A year from now will, we look back at today and laugh?

No.

This reminds me of the Cargo Cults that arose among primitive island tribes after World War II in the Pacific. For cultures just this side of the Stone Age, the Second World War was a bonanza of stuff. Cargo planes were crashing, errant parachute drops were sending supplies to the wrong places, and troops were always leaving things behind as they pushed forward or pulled out. All this lost material was a boon to the tribes that found it, ate it, wore it, traded it, or beat it into something else that had commercial or cultural utility. It must have been a wonderful time to be a headhunter. But then the good times ended, leaving these same tribes in shock. Having spent half a decade awash in Baby Ruth bars and parachute cloth, they suddenly had to do without. So the cults arose, rituals of paramilitary activity — marching around in fake helmets carrying fake guns — that were intended to coax from the sky more cargo planes, more parachutes, more PXs.

Cargo cults of the Internet Age are more subtle, but the theme is the same: How can we get the good times to return? What's missing in both cults is much of an understanding WHY the boom should return or even why they happened in the first place.

We're just past the end of the Internet liquidity bubble. This bubble was fueled by three separate cash sources. First, venture capitalists pumped up to $100 billion per year into high tech startups. Second, you and I pumped probably $500 billion per year into Internet stocks. Third, established companies pumped another $100 billion or so per year into their own high tech ventures or into financing the dreams of customer companies that needed to buy computers and routers. From 1995-2000, we built a stack of paper equity $3 trillion tall. Then the stack fell over.

First, the climate soured for Initial Public Offerings of stock. Then the shares of companies already public but still unprofitable began to slide. That's when the venture capitalists stopped being so eager to fund new startups. Without a new source of outside financing, the still-private startups began to shrivel and die, often taking down with them the equipment suppliers who had financed most of their network growth. I detailed this last scam May 27, 1999, in a column titled "Cooking the Books" that explained how companies like Lucent, Cisco and others were using accounting tricks to create profits and growth where maybe they didn't really exist. And finally those very companies, ESPECIALLY Lucent and Cisco, suffered as they had to write-off billions in bad debts at the same time tons of not-very-used equipment hit the resale market in competition with their new products. And that's how we got to where we are today.

I'm not here to say that growth won't return or that there won't be boom times in the future, but it isn't going to happen until the debris of the last bubble is swept away and forgotten. Japan had its bubble ecomony in the late 1980s based on inflated real estate values and that wreckage is still around — and the Nikkei stock index is still depressed — a decade later.

Our bubble will repair itself quicker than that. First the established and profitable companies will fix their balance sheets and recover their stock values, which might take another year. During that period the wannabe venture capitalists will find new careers, or at least I hope they do. Lots of stupid money was poured into the VC industry in the last two to three years and most VCs were stupid to start with and their judgement was made only worse by being given additional billions by people who had no idea at all in what they were investing. Can you tell I have a low opinion of venture capitalists? And finally the IPO climate will improve as a new class of companies with good ideas and even a few quarters of profitability will begin selling shares to the public. I predict this will all happen by 18 to 24 months from now.

Until then, should people with good ideas continue working at Burger King or should they take a chance and start new companies anyway? I say they should start new companies. But the model for startups will be a different one. Or maybe it will be an old one — the model from the 1980s — not the Internet model that just failed us. The new businesses will have to have profit as a motive. It's not enough anymore to build a brand and count user eyeballs. We need some of that user moolah, too. Gone, too, is the model of "get an idea, choose a clever name, do a $25 million venture deal." Successful startups in this decade will start smaller and take venture funding later, if at all. They'll require founders who are smarter, more original, and harder working, which is to say a whole new generation of founders, because most of the last crowd still has too much of our money and won't be motivated enough to do it the old fashioned way.

And that's one of the saddest parts of this transition. There are lots of smart people who built Internet companies but will never do anything like that again. Maybe it was too easy the last time compared to this time. Maybe the fact that they turned some of their phony stock into real money has made them risk averse. Maybe they just feel a bit guilty along with dazed and confused. But what is true is there are hundreds — maybe thousands — of millionaires wandering the streets of Silicon Valley whining about how great they once had it. Remember these are people who still have seven figure bank balances. I meet them at these conferences where they spout buzzword platitudes about B2C versus B2C versus P2P, but the truth is their success and failure came so quickly they don't really know how it happened or if it can ever be replicated again.

But just watch. Two years from now we'll go from recovery to rebuilding. Half a dozen new ideas will have come along by then and we'll have new business models straddling the old Internet. And probably this time around the businesses will have real customers and real products and get paid in real money that adds up to more than the cost of goods sold. At least that's my hope.

But what won't happen is a return to the Good Old Days. That boom is over and done for good. What we'll have are Good New Days, and the quicker we come to understand that fact, the quicker it will happen.