The Company that Broke Canada
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a well-made documentary explaining Nortel's rise and the index-fund and bubble dynamics around it.
What it is
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 by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2024 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec orc00 · 2025-03 · on “When the Dotcom Bubble Burst”
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]
Recommends month13 · 2025-09 · on “Anthropic raises $13B Series F”
For those curious, I found this to be a very entertaining retelling of events from Nortel's persepective: [this video]
Recommends kmeisthax · 2026-03 · on “Nasdaq's Shame”
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
Cites rasz · 2024-01 · on “Juniper Networks to Combine with HPE”
Im getting nineties Nortel Bay Networks all stock flashbacks. The Company that Broke Canada - BobbyBroccoli [this video]