Yahoo became the web’s first truly great company, and in this episode, we examine why. Turning to advertising as a business model, Yahoo was among the first to find a way for the Internet to generate real money. In addition, we look back at the “portal wars” as Yahoo, Excite, AltaVista, et al, competed to become all things to all internet people, and in the ... Show More
Oct 2021
203. Shirish Nadkarni On Microsoft, Hotmail, MSN and Blackberry Internet Email
Serial entrepreneur Shirish Nadkarni came to the U.S. as a teenager with $25 in his pocket. After graduating from Harvard Business School, he worked at Microsoft where he engineered the $400 million acquisition of Hotmail and launched MSN.com, the world’s leading web portal.Strik ... Show More
34m 18s
Oct 2020
202. The del.icio.us Story With Joshua Schachter
Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, is someone I’ve wanted to talk to from the very first day of this podcast. As we’ll discuss, del.icio.us was such a standard bearer of the web 2.0 era. Of user generated content. Of sharing long before Facebook or Twitter or any of that. ... Show More
1 h
Aug 2019
201. The History of Audible With Angelika Fuellemann
Angelika Fuellemann is a designer who worked early on with BookSense.com, then got hired by Audible early on, so this is the early story of Audible. It’s funny… audio, streaming music, podcasts, audiobooks, it seems so obvious now, but it really is funny to look back and think ab ... Show More
25m 4s
Oct 2019
(Bonus) The Fate (And Legacy) Of Yahoo, With Harry McCracken
The news that Yahoo was shutting down Yahoo Groups, as I said, was another gut punch when you realize how much of the web’s history is so ephemeral. It also got me thinking that Yahoo as a company might be about to go down the memory hole, and that got me thinking about Yahoo’s l ... Show More
20m 25s
Nov 2021
Fighting for MySpace | Millions of Emails | 1
<p>Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson had no intention of starting a tech revolution. But when their website, MySpace, took off in 2003, it changed social media and the internet forever. As MySpace grows into one of the biggest sites in the world and attracts media giants like Rupert ... Show More
37m 35s
Jul 2020
Dating App Wars | Lighting Up Match.com | 1
<p>It’s 1995, and computer dating is in its infancy. Most people think it’s a dark, sleazy world for desperate losers and horny perverts. But that’s all about to change. Pioneer site Match.com paves the way for cyber dating to move toward mainstream culture, but—in an era when fe ... Show More
23m 40s
Jul 2018
eBay vs PayPal - Going Once, Going Twice | 1
<p>At the dawn of the dotcom era, a Silicon Valley tech geek on a personal vendetta rolls out the world’s first e-commerce site. Vintage lunchboxes? Second-hand guitars? B-list celebrity autographs? It all finds a home on AuctionWeb, and before long the site’s growth is skyrocket ... Show More
23m 46s