Its not that they were excessive... and they do last for years. Its that immediately after getting funding the startups of the period immediately spent a good chunk of it on high end quality of life items. The most visible was the chair. And they weren't that cheap then either (they're much less expensive now - in 2000, the chair was $1100 - which is $1650 in today's money. I can find a new Aeron chair for about half that and a refurbished one for a quarter)

https://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/21364/

> Aerons were hailed as triumphs of industrial design and were a whole different beast from the overstuffed leather power chairs that dominated the Old Economy. “They’re not in my mind an example of hubris as much as they are an example of companies trying to treat their staff more generously than they could actually afford,” says information architect Chris Fahey.

They were the most visible symbol of the excesses of the dot com startup office. The new pool table, the foosball table, ping pong table, espresso machines in the break room in the office that they just moved into. The chair is the one that people can point to being common to everything (and was also part of the stuff that was getting sold after the 95% layoff).

These are not companies that had lasted years to get the value out of the chair but rather in the range of months to a few years. They were spending money like it was free in hopes to get acquired before they had to sell it all and try again.

The chair? I love it and I would have seriously considered (gulp) another a month or so ago instead of a different mesh chair if I had realized that the refurbished ones were as affordable as they are.

The traditional business mindset says that fancy offices with Aeron chairs are things you buy using profits. If you're not making a profit then everything you do should be laser focused on making more revenue to eventually turn a profit. While VC money obviously existed before the dotcom era, it was usually to buy expensive equipment or to do research - it was never really spent on offices. Consequently when dotcom businesses started landing million dollar seed rounds and spending that money on things that weren't directly revenue generating, or even necessary, people thought it was being wasted.

And, given the number of dotcom startups compared to the number of successes, it kind of was. If those startups had been focused more on making a profit instead of unmeasured 'growth' or some strange notion of 'coolness' then maybe more of them would have survived.

I've had an Aeron chair at home for about 15 years. Paid for it myself. I'd guess it's a pretty good purchase on a per hour basis. (Especially as they did a warranty repair at about the 8 year point.)