The Company that Broke Canada on HackerTube: recommended by 3 Hacker News commenters across 3 separate months, 2024–2026.
documentary · evergreen
BobbyBroccoli documentary on the rise of Nortel Networks, once the dominant Canadian telecom giant, during the dot-com era. It is part one of a two-part story.
Recommended as a well-made documentary explaining Nortel's rise and the index-fund and bubble dynamics around it.
“BobbyBroccoli on YouTube does an absolutely phenomenal job creating documentaries.”
4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
BobbyBroccoli on YouTube does an absolutely phenomenal job creating documentaries. Related to the dot-com burst would be the story he tells about Nortel. - Part 1: ▶ this video - Part 2: [link]
in “When the Dotcom Bubble Burst” · View on HN
Any Canadians in the room should remember this as the exact mechanism by which Nortel Networks became astronomically huge. Any time Nortel got more valuable, index funds tracking the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) loaded up on Nortel, amplifying the price increase. This gave the company massive amounts of capital to buy other companies with, which generated more headlines, which brought in more investor capital, which brought more index funds in. In fact, at one point Nortel was so valuable it made the TSE too homogenous to legally index, at least until Nortel lobbied Canada to change the rules regarding diversified index funds. If you aren't Canadian (like me) you can watch this Bobbybroccoli video that explains it very well: ▶ this video Spoiler alert for the Bobbybroccoli video, but it turns out this trick doesn't work forever. And when Nortel inevitably crashed it left a good chunk of Canadians as bagholders. And looking at the stock market over the past few years, where basically all the the growth is seven companies, I'm starting to wonder if we're finally seeing America's answer to the Nortel fiasco. (No, Lucent doesn't count, even though they're literally America's counterpart to Nortel. The key factor that made Nortel a problem was the lack of diversity in the Canadian market. Lucent crashed and burned in a field of hundreds of growing big-cap stocks, Nortel was an extremely big fish in a tiny pond.)
in “Nasdaq's Shame” · View on HN
For those curious, I found this to be a very entertaining retelling of events from Nortel's persepective: ▶ this video
in “Anthropic raises $13B Series F” · View on HN
Im getting nineties Nortel Bay Networks all stock flashbacks. The Company that Broke Canada - BobbyBroccoli ▶ this video
in “Juniper Networks to Combine with HPE” · View on HN