Queen of the Net

In the late 1990s, Barron's dubbed Mary Meeker the Queen of the Net. The nickname captured both her visibility — she was the most prominent public analyst of internet companies during the bubble's peak — and the industry's ambivalence about analysts who became as famous as the companies they covered. Her bullish assessments of internet companies drew criticism after the 2000 crash, when many of the companies she had championed saw their valuations collapse. But the criticism missed what made her framework durable. Meeker was not selling stories; she was tracking trajectories. The companies whose long-term trajectories she had correctly identified — Amazon, Google, the durable infrastructure players — vindicated her methodology even as the short-term speculative bubble she had been part of collapsed around her. The survival of her reputation through the crash, and her subsequent decades of influence, rested on the discipline she brought to the work: data over narrative, trajectory over moment, structure over sentiment.