Where are they now?

At its peak in 2000, Ken Fox's Internet Capital Group, which aimed to fund business-to-business Internet startups and take them public, had a bigger market cap than General Motors. Then came the crash. Fox is tight-lipped about his stint as a poster boy for dot-com mania. "I was very young" is all he'll say.

Now he's running a new Manhattan-based buyout firm, Stripes Group, whose investments have included MatchLogic, an Internet advertising company that was acquired by Excite. What does he know about valuing companies now that he didn't know then? "My appetite for risk is different," he says. "It's highly unlikely that we'll find the next Google, but the companies we have are growing like weeds and are highly profitable. It's less about financial engineering and more about operating talent."