DoveBid is that rare sort of company for which bad times can mean good business. The family-owned auction firm has built its success on the excesses associated with economic fads and stock-market bubbles. Back in the 1980s, DoveBid sold off the pieces of many bankrupt PC makers, starting with Osborne Computer. "We'd rent a truck from Avis, load it with computers, and drive to Holiday Inns in Portland or Sacramento," recalls CEO Ross Dove. "We'd do the auction in the ballroom, and then we'd FedEx the money back to the office to make payroll."

DoveBid has come a long way since then. In the early 1990s, it helped the FDIC sell $430 million worth of real estate from the savings-and-loan debacle. And over the past 18 months, the collapse of the Internet boom has meant more boom times for DoveBid. The company has run high-profile auctions for Webvan, the failed online grocer, and Excite@Home, the bankrupt Internet-service provider. It even auctioned off the contents of Enron's European headquarters.

Indeed, there's almost nothing that DoveBid hasn't sold, from factories that make microchips to those that make meat pies. It sold a casino to Debbie Reynolds. It sold Michael Milken's coat rack in front of one of the biggest auction audiences ever (nearly 10,000 people at New York's Jacob Javits Convention Center). It sold all of the buildings in the town (read: "historic" tourist spot) of Winkelmann, Texas.

Ross Dove says that a big reason for the company's success is that it has convinced clients that it can assemble the biggest and best audiences for their auctions and that it can therefore command the highest prices for whatever is being sold. At the Enron auction, held in London and online in late February, DoveBid got such high prices for Enron's high-end plasma displays that a few days after the auction, a London electronics retailer ran advertisements in local newspapers saying that its prices were actually lower than those paid by winning bidders at the Enron bankruptcy sale.

"The reason that we can get such great prices is that our auctions reach a truly global audience," explains Dove, whose younger brother, Kirk, serves as DoveBid's president of auction services. "We've extended the back of the auction room in Philadelphia all the way to Singapore."

Another reason that DoveBid has succeeded is that it has learned from the excesses that turned once healthy companies into its clients. Strolling the hallways at company headquarters in Foster City, California, Ross Dove challenges a visitor to try to spot two offices with similar furniture. "There are no two offices here that match," he declares, "because we buy used furniture from our own auctions." The building itself was a bargain: The company bought it when 3M decided to move out. "We got a pretty good deal on it," Dove crows as he walks past posters on the wall that advertise auctions that DoveBid has done for Boeing, Levi's, and a poultry breeder's facility.

All of which makes DoveBid's own brush with irrational exuberance deliciously ironic. During the dotcom mania of the late 1990s, with investors gripped by the feverish rise of online auctions in general and eBay in particular, DoveBid became something of a venture-capital darling. Could this become the corporate eBay? The company raised $125 million, acquired 17 companies in less than two years, filed for an IPO (which was later withdrawn), and started losing money in search of frenetic growth.