

How Sabeer Bhatia started Hotmail on $300,000 and sold it two years later for $400 million - Rod
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.12/hotmale.html

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jwilliams
Interesting to read this in the historical context (1998). e.g. _... and with
Microsoft's financial muscle, Hotmail's juggernaut appears unstoppable._

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smokinn
Thanks for that.

I was wondering when this was written specifically because of that sentence.
Yahoo mail is so far ahead everyone else today that I knew this had to have
been written long ago.

Does anyone know how Yahoo mail caught up to and surpassed Hotmail?

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sam_in_nyc
For the most part, Yahoo started out as "personalized start page," like Excite
and a few others. They had, and still might have, far more people using any
one Yahoo service than Microsoft had using whatever it is they had back then
(I'm not even sure they had MSN).

Anyway, all Yahoo had to do was make mail, then their millions of users would
automatically get e-mail accounts. From there, it probably spread just the
same way as Hotmail.. your-name@yahoo.com, and a little message at the bottom
of each e-mail: "get your own email at yahoomail.com"

What's amazing is that it took 6 months for a competitor to come in.

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tlb
Yahoo Mail was the result of acquiring Four11 and rebranding their RocketMail
product. It was one of Yahoo's better acquisitions. For $65M they got a
product that now earns $6.5B/year.

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larrykubin
Yahoo's total revenue for last year was around 7 billion, and their net income
was 400 million. The company has a total market cap of 17 billion, so Yahoo
Mail earning 6.5 billion a year by itself seems inaccurate.

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tlb
So says Wikipedia:

    
    
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Mail
    

but you're right, it can't be that much.

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s3graham
See _Founders_At_Work_ pp. 17-29, if you're interested in a longer version.

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spaghetti
Nudist On The Lateshift is a great book by Po Bronson about the making and
selling of Hotmail. It was pretty inspirational for me.

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ajju
The book is not exclusively about the making and selling of Hotmail. It's a
collection of short vignettes about Silicon valley in the 90s.

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eterno
Po Bronson's "What to do with your life" is a great read.

This article though seems to be full of fluff and about reading too much based
on post-facto news. Sabeer is definitely smart, but he also definitely got
incredibly lucky, and a lot more than everyone else who is as smart or
smarter.

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titocosta
Nice article, even though I think that too much emphasis was on "having the
right idea" rather than on execution and timing.
[http://titocosta.tumblr.com/post/81087622/ideas-are-
overrate...](http://titocosta.tumblr.com/post/81087622/ideas-are-overrated)

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dhardy
I wonder what it is valued at today?

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sam_in_nyc
If you were to buy it now, you'd not be purchasing the nearly exclusively
rights to "e-mail" as it was back then. People would actually say: "Send me a
Hotmail." What made it valuable to Microsoft was they they got to capitalize
off of the leverage over the largest user-base of any online product of that
time. With it they kickstarted MSN.

Today, Hotmail probably pulls in quite a bit of revenue from advertisements,
but most of it's value was "spent" by herding the massive group of users into
other products, which may or may not have made MS more money.

I think Twitter is today's version of Hotmail, in terms of the concept...
except Twitter seems to have gotten much luckier.

What this ingrains into my head is: _give access to known technology in easy
ways_. Hotmail, Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook -- they allow people to
publish/share information where previously they'd need expertise in IT to do
it.

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herval
in other words, it would probably be worth the same 400 millions from 10 years
ago? :-)

