Call it irrational exuberance, over hype or cheer leading, but don't call it a bubble. That's the take away lesson from the recent tech start up meltdown. While sites like ValleyWag delight in the misfortune of the latest gaggle of VC funded companies and spin events as the end of the world, the truth is that this has been nothing more than a simple boom / bust cycle for tech.

Nearly a decade ago as Silicon Valley hype reached stratospheric levels many early pundits used words like "historic" and "new economy". Companies that were little more than a fancy website were raising immense amounts of capital with IPOs while communications companies laid thousands of miles of fiber optic cable. It was if the Internet commerce sector could not be stopped and millions of average Joes sunk their retirement funds into companies like Flooz and Pets.com. In the end many companies went bust others suffered with inventory or bandwidth they could not sell, and many others lost most of their nest egg as the stock market fell.

If the events of the first great Internet crash were any indicator what we are experiencing in no way approaches the events of those heady days. For starters most of the cash infused into the latest group of startups has been venture capital and not equity. This long touted point means that equity market forces have not played as great a factor in the fate of many outfits. However the VC companies bankrolling many organizations do rely upon both equity and credit markets which given the recent crisis has meant that most forms of funding have dried up. Essentially companies are cut off from further cash injection and as such are subject to the same fate as a generation before: sink or swim.

Hype was another factor during the tech bubble and in some ways achieved historic notoriety among other manias such as the tulip and railroad bubble. In contrast today's hype has largely focused on a handful of tech companies who've embraced the sycophantic love relationship of VCs and the Valley. While names like Calcanias, Cuban and Zuckerberg are common on the electronic pages of gossip rags and blogs, few outside the industry know who they are or what they've contributed to the Internet. Furthermore many of the recent tech failures have been anything but high profile and in fact are quite unknown to all but a few hard core industry watchers.

The last great divergence between Bubble 1.0 and the so-called Bubble 2.0 is the number of jobs created and lost. During the first boom hundreds of thousands of tech or IT workers inhabited the posh offices of Silicon Valley firms. These days companies are thinly staffed and typically located in lower-end rental space typically reserved for small businesses. While you can argue that the latest generation programming languages and hardware requires fewer people the fact of the matter is that start-ups have chosen to stay small and modestly accommodated due to budget concerns.

Finally the biggest difference is in the attitude of start-up entrepreneurs. In the early days founders often touted the lofty goal of "changing the world" however these days start-up folks are more concerned with simply bringing a good idea to market. The latter is more in line with the behavior or entrepreneurs in other sectors and represents a more pragmatic approach and more reasonable milestones of success. As such founders are more level headed as to the possibility of success and the statistical probability of disappointment.

Still despite these differences the current downturn in "Web 2.0" is not without consequence. For many who've committed countless hours, deferred job security and lavish compensation, and poured themselves into an idea the thought of failure can be outright depressing. Despite the fear and anger founders may feel in the face of an untimely demise it's important to take away the lessons of failure and apply them to the next iteration of innovation. After all there will new ideas and re-imagined concepts that will require the same effort and perseverance as in boom times before.

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