
Yahoo buys Viaweb for $49 million (1998) - ig1
http://news.cnet.com/Yahoo-buys-Viaweb-for-49-million/2100-1001_3-212001.html
======
Arjuna
_"A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a
snapshot of Viaweb's site_ [1]. _I thought it might be interesting to look at
one day."_ [2]

[1] <http://ycombinator.com/viaweb>

[2] <http://www.paulgraham.com/vw.html>

~~~
yial
"Over 1000 users!" Oh how times have changed...

~~~
hkmurakami
I think this is closer to "1000 enterprise customers", which is quite a feat
even today (not entirely accurate I know)

~~~
cube13
Or "1000 paying users", which could still be impressive, depending on
conversion rates.

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ig1
With all the talk about Yahoo acquisitions I thought it might be a good time
to remind everyone that back in 1998 Yahoo acquired a three-year old Viaweb.

With that exit money the Viaweb founders (Paul Graham, Robert Morris, and
Trevor Blackwell) went on to start a rather well known seed accelerator and a
popular hacker news aggregation site.

~~~
GabrielF00
Also worth pointing out that in 1999 Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.57 billion
in stock. Geocities had a similar audience and premise as Yahoo - it made
building and hosting simple websites easy.

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redthrowaway
Yahoo! bought Geocities on or about Jan 28th, when their stock was at $44. Two
and a half years later, after peaking around $108, their stock was trading at
$4.

Hope the Geocities founders cashed out in time (and weren't locked into
unvested shares). I'd hate to get a tenth of the agreed upon price for my
company.

~~~
adventured
Even if they were 'locked' into the shares, they could have always collared
them as Mark Cuban did (he was stuck in his Yahoo position when the market
imploded, but was protected via the collar he set up with Goldman Sachs to
limit the downside).

[http://investmentxyz.blogspot.com/2006/05/cubans-collar-
anat...](http://investmentxyz.blogspot.com/2006/05/cubans-collar-anatomy-of-
famous-trade.html)

~~~
sokoloff
In many public companies, employees (even rank and file) are prohibitted from
shorting or buying puts on their shares.

Some companies even prohibit selling covered calls, regardless of strike
price. (A deep enough in the money call behaves somewhat like a put.)

I'm a little surprised that Cuban would be locked out of selling the shares
but able to enter into the collar. I'm sure it was legit (since it's well
known), but still...

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swombat
Good luck to the founders! I'm sure some of them will go on to great things!

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tomasien
PG's thoughts on why he immediately saw that Yahoo had problems upon entering
the company have provided some really important context for me. The startups
in my town tend to be well funded for no discernible reason or non-existent,
and almost without exception I see founders who don't have any immediate
problems that force them to find PMF or die. As a result, they mostly die.

~~~
tomasien
To be clear: MOST startups die. I'm not hating on my community or well funded
startups that die, that happens. I think it tends to be that if a startup has
found PMF or is desperate to find it AND has money, they tend to grow not die.

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adventured
Almost boggles the mind how far the web has scaled.

"Internet-based selling is expected to quadruple in the next few years from
$2.4 billion last year to $12.1 billion by 2000, according to Forrester
Research."

Compared to (from March 13th):

"Forrester: U.S. Online Retail Sales To Rise To $370BN By 2017"

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/13/forrester-2012-2017-ecommer...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/13/forrester-2012-2017-ecommerce-
forecast/)

~~~
jebeng
Well, yeah. But you should have seen the numbers they were promising us in
1999...

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mratzloff
Hmm... do you think a SaaS web store could charge $100/mo for 50 items for
sale today?

\----

Small Store $100/month

For $100/month you can have up to 50 items for sale (plus as many additional
information pages as you want). You can upgrade to a large store at any time.

Large Store $300/month

For $300/month you can have a store with up to 1000 items.

Larger Stores

Larger stores cost $300/month for the first 1000 items, plus $100/month for
each additional 1000 items. So a 5000-item store would cost $700/month.

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danielzarick
Worth noting: Yahoo's share price on June 8, 1998 (date of the acquisition
article) closed at $6.84. The stock closed at $35.83 just one year later on
June 9, 1999. Then again, one year later, the stock closed at $72.00. The peak
was $108.17 on December 31, 1999.

Ignoring how much of the deal was in cash vs. stock, if they held on for just
a year or two more, their payout must have grown considerably.

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xal
Guess we are next ;-)

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purmac
I recently re-read pg's Hacker and Painter again. Some of the ideas are so
true if you look at today's computer technologies. Functional programming,
statistics in data classification (spam email filtering), web applications
etc.

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cmstoken
If Tumblr is an all cash deal, does that mean Yahoo has 100% power over the
company now?

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dopamean
They would even if it wasn't an all cash deal.

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sp332
Well, if tumblr employees got Yahoo stock, they could use it to influence the
direction of the company, at least a little.

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jaredsohn
A more extreme example of this would be that when Disney bought Pixar, Steve
Jobs became Disney's largest individual shareholder (7%) and joined the board.

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jld
Or when Apple bought NeXT, and shortly there after Steve became the CEO again.
Apple did the buying, but NeXT was still in control.

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LekkoscPiwa
Is it me, or that's like eleventh time this has been posted here in the last
12 months?

~~~
jacques_chester
Stuff is periodically reposted. I'm tempted to write a bot that reposts
popular things on a stochastic exponential backoff schedule.

