Tech Brew Ride Home - (IHP) TheGlobe.com Saga Part I

Episode Date: December 30, 2023

The story of the quintessential dotcom company. Also, if you squint, you can see the birth of social media. I said in the book, I think TheGlobe.com was the quintessential dot-com company. We spoke to one of the cofounders previously, Todd Krizelman. Todd was great, but he was time constrained and he didn’t quite get as personal about the story as I would have hoped. Well, I finally got to talk to the other founder of TheGlobe, Stephan Paternot. And Stephan was… AMAZING. He shared the whole story, the whole wild ride, from a historical angle, from a business angle, from an entrepreneurial angle and also, from a very personal angle. THIS the dot-com era story I’ve been looking for for years. It’s also the story of probably the most important pioneer of social media before there was even a term for such a thing. And by the way… that TV Show that just came out on NAT GEO, Valley of the Boom? THIS IS THAT STORY. Stephan just re-released his book, A Very Public Offering: The Story of theglobe.com and the First Internet Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Internet. Internet History Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Brian McCullough. Oh, man, am I thrilled by today's episode? I've been hunting for five years now to try to capture the quintessential story that would

truly capture and do justice to the dot-com era. I've said on here before, and I said at length in the book, I think the globe.com was the quintessential.com company. We've already spoken to one of the co-founders previously, Todd Krieselman. Be sure to look up that. episode, it's great. Todd was great, but he was time-constrained, and he didn't quite get as personal about the story of the globe as I would have hoped. Well, I finally got to talk to the other founder of the globe, Stefan Patterno. And Stefan, as you'll hear, was amazing. He shared the whole story, the whole wild ride from a historical angle, from a business angle, from an entrepreneurial angle and also from a very personal angle. We spoke for two and a half hours. Stefan was so generous with

his time and his recollections. I'm going to break this up into multiple episodes because we talk so much and we got so deep into this. And we actually also had some recording issues as well. So this is part one and part two will come out in two weeks. This is maybe our longest ever interview, maybe my favorite ever interview. This is the dot-com-era story I've been looking for. It's also the story of probably the most important pioneer of social media before there even was a term for such a thing. And by the way, that TV show that just came out, you might have heard about it on Nat Geo called Valley of the Boom. This is that story also. And because Valley of the Boom was based on it, Stefan just re-released his book, a very public offering, the story of the globe.com and the first internet revolution. So buy that book, look up a very public offering. There's a link in the show notes.

In the meantime, please enjoy this amazing conversation with Stefan Paternoe, and be sure to come back for part two in two weeks. Stefan Paterno, thanks for coming on the Internet History podcast. It's exciting to be here. Yes, and timely, which we'll get into a little later. But I start at the beginning. You're a San Francisco native, but by way of like Switzerland and Great Britain? You're like really cosmopolitan guy. Yeah, I mean, I had a bit of a nomadic journey. I started off literally in Palo Alto, born at Stanford University. And my mom and dad, my mom's American, but my dad is Swiss,

Swiss French. And when I was four years old, we relocated back to Switzerland where his family, is. And so by far and large, the American part of my childhood was almost erased overnight. And what's crazy is here I am 40 years later, 44 now,

back in California. I'm actually based down in L.A. But I feel strangely comfortable and familiar being back here. And a few years ago went back and visited my old

house where I grew up and spent the first four years of my house up on Derasno Way in Palo Alto. So I've come full circle. When I read your book the first time a couple years ago, you described sort of like, and this is, I feel like this is a really, you know, common story, but that computers were sort of your way into, maybe not being social, but like a way into finding yourself. I think you learn about programming at the American school when you're in London, when you're living in London. Am I right about that? Maybe because of your nomadic lifestyle, like computers were sort of like a way to find who you were.

Absolutely. I mean, they were – a computer became my best friend. I didn't – because my languages kept changing English, French, back to English, then British, English, then British, then back to American. I was missing. I wasn't, I didn't have idiomatic ease with the language, neither in French. I didn't have all the cultural touch points that could make me easily bond with friends talking about music or anything else. So the two things that brought me comfort were actually movies, which were much more universal, but also, yeah, using a computer and playing games, which just felt incredibly comfortable and natural for me.

You, well, I'd like to ask this question. First computer. First computer you use, yeah. Well. Or first computer. My first real computer was a Commodore 64. I was actually thinking about an Atari I once played with. That's a console and that was actually after my Commodore.

I think, Jesus, maybe I'm getting my timelines messed up. But I definitely think of my Commodore 64 with a cassette player as the first real computer I ever had. Given that you were in Europe and Britain, did you run across things like acorns and stuff like that? Yeah. Spectrums, acorns. Those were computers that, of course, that were only available in a school. Nobody owned these things personally. Or if they did, it was very rare. By the way, I just want to make sure you're not hearing these pings in the background of my computer. No, no, no, no. Okay, terrific. We can cut that out if we need to.

But yeah, so spectrums and acorns are really something I discovered in the British schools I was in, the city of London school and Hill House because they were too expensive. And then eventually, you know, one or two friends would have one of these spectrums with the rubber keys. And I don't remember what we did on those computers. They sort of came in and out of my life real quickly. I remember really the Commodore, that was what I was most fond of until eventually I discovered Apple. And so that's what you learned a program on. Yeah. So in the American School of London, I was one of those few students who really actually enjoyed taking the computer science class.

And yeah, there was a room full of Apple 2 E's, I think. I don't remember the exact model numbers, but with big clunky monitors that were monochrome. And I think they had the 5.5.5 inch floppy diskette drives. I'm remembering correctly. And that's where I first learned how to program. And, man, I loved it. Honestly, I could stay up all night long, trying to figure out how to make some sort of a program work better, work faster, more efficiently, do some sort of crazy computation

that a human couldn't do easily. And it was incredibly fulfilling. You got into BBSs also around that same time? Yes. So, yeah, BBSs were something that, You know, one or two of my really well-connected friends had told me about and computer magazines. I heard about them. You know, they're really primarily in the U.S.

And so since I was in London, I had to do international calls over the phone line. And I had somebody donated. It may have been my computer science teacher at the time, gave me an old 300 bod modem. So I didn't know whether that was fast or slow at the time. All I knew is if I plugged it in, I could only make my calls overnight when everybody was asleep. and, you know, once upon a time, I downloaded, I think, a half meg, 500K game and had an eight-hour international phone call bill. The parents absolutely freaked out and forbade me from doing that ever again. So that was my first BBS experience, I think.

Yeah, I feel like all of us kids from that era have the story of when our parents freaked out about a weird bill. All right, I'm going to jump ahead to college. You come back to the U.S. for college to Cornell. First of all, what year? And then what are you studying? So it's 1992. And I believe I started with environmental engineering. Mostly because I'd watched TV programs and read articles and I heard a lots of things about the environment going to hell.

So I felt like a calling to try and help solve environmental problems. But I literally took one environmental engineering class, and that was enough for me to realize, no, that's not for me. And the environment was worsening, but it was happening on a decades-long scale. Obviously, nowadays, it's much more of a hot topic. But back then, it was like, I guess going into astrophysics. You're going to spend your whole life waiting for very small incremental things to happen. So then I pivoted over to computer science, which until then I thought was just a fun thing to do. I didn't really know it as a field of study or as a real career area.

But again, I got myself a new little power book and dove in completely, absolutely loved computer science until not long thereafter. Once I was my junior year, the classes were getting sufficiently advanced that I realize now that just not hardcore enough to be really good at it. I like computers. I'm more of a layman programmer. I'd learned Pascal for years. Everyone was migrating over to LISP and other programming languages that might be more for AI or some sort of new C language or whatever it was that was new at the time. And I realized at that point, do I really want to be the worst computer science student in my class or do I want to find another way to stay in this field and leverage technology and computers, but maybe in a way that is placed to my advantages, my skills better. Okay, we're going to talk about that real soon, but what's the first

story that I want to hear, meeting Todd or memories of like your first experiences with the web? Well, I could definitely talk about meeting Todd the first time. So, he's a lot. So he's a He was roommates with a guy that I'd become friends with during Cornell summer school the year before. So I met Todd by chance because of that guy. And it was funny because when I met Todd, you know, my first impression was that, you know, he was this very young-looking guy, curly brown hair, big brown eyes. He still looks so young. He still looks 10, 15 years younger than he is. He's got a bit of a, you know, gremlin's quality.

When he smiles, it has a big Jack Nicholson type of smile. And I just remember that when I saw his computer, his MacBook, I think PowerBook at the time, it was the most advanced MacBook I had ever seen in my life with a 16 shades of gray active matrix display. You had it hooked up to a color monitor. I was blown away. But I remember that as soon as I saw all of this, Todd was just very cagey. Like I could tell he didn't really want some stranger touching his gear and wanting to play all his games.

And so I feel like the friendship I started with Todd was one where he was a little apprehensive about who I am. And am I going to mess with his stuff. And, you know, he was a little standoffish, whereas I was just excited and wanted to play with the game that he had, a flight simulator, plus some other games that I love. So I think Todd was cool on me to begin with, and it took a few months or a year plus. It took until we really actually decided to start the globe before I would say a real friendship blossom. So maybe it took another year or two before we really became buddies. So, all right, let me come at this another way. I apologize because I didn't look up actually the timeline.

When I had Bo Peabody of Tripod on the pod, I gave him the title of the first. dormroom.com. But maybe it was you guys. I don't know actually the exact chronology. So, okay, we're used to this idea now of companies being started in dorm rooms.

I don't know if that's always, like maybe start bars or something when you're in college, but why, how do you decide to start a business? Yeah, so it wasn't typical at all back then, right? I mean, I had never heard of anyone starting a business from their college dorm room.

And, yeah, there were definitely some college students paying their way through college and having jobs off campus or on campus. So that was the only thing I'd really been exposed to. And I'd heard of some, you know, there were some famous stories like Bill Gates, or maybe even Steve Jobs dropping out of college and starting. Right. Gates drops out to start a company. Right.

Definitely not. The whole startup and your dorm room culture just didn't exist. In fact, you know, with Apple, it was, you know, in a garage. of his house. But with us, you know, it was 1994 at this point, right? So Tim Bernard Lee had invented the World Wide Web and HTML stack back in 92. I hadn't heard of it yet, but by 94, I just started hearing a little bit about it in various publications that were talking about the web and HTML. And it was some circuitous path that had to do with my sister's university. She'd been to Vassar and I was reading a quarterly magazine, alumni magazine. And in that magazine,

I saw a blurb about these two guys. One of them was selling t-shirts for the, I guess, the 94 Winter Olympics with T-Harding having broken Nancy Kerrigan's leg. And, you know, break a leg, Nancy was sort of the slogan. And he was selling these t-shirts. And he'd figured out, he'd connected with this other guy, he had a website and he was selling the T-shirts online. And when I saw that, it struck me instantly that this whole online thing, you know, there was something to it. And when I saw this picture of these two guys, I just remember thinking about Todd and going, oh my God, Todd and I've talked and joked before about one day we should do some sort of thing in tech together. And so I raced back up to Cornell and spoke to Todd and was like, Todd, Todd, you got to check this out,

the story, let's go on. And we blogged onto the internet from the same room. You know, so both of us I don't remember if we had two phone lines or how we did it exactly. But both of us were on our modems and we logged onto the site, cyber site, where they had the guy selling T-shirts. But what was more interesting in captured our imagination was a chat room, this really, really arcane, black and white chat room where it was just text handles and IT addresses. And there must have been a dozen or two dozen people talking to each other. And it was instantly addictive.

Todd and I jumped in there. We pretended like we weren't in the same room and we were just two random strangers. and we started talking to each other and then talking to the others. And that was at that moment, the entire thought possible future of what the online universe might be like, I think flashed in my head, flashed in Todd's heads, and we were giddy. It's the addictiveness of, I've said this before on the podcast. People didn't think that computers were good communication tools. It turns out they're the best communication tools.

But like that's maybe what you intuit it right there. Yeah, well, I mean, most people, you know, but most people didn't know that computers can even communicate, period, right? Back then, a computer is the thing that, you know, my mom would think, oh, well, my son goes into his room, locks his door, and then is on the computer playing games for hours. And she has to pry me out of my room to go play outside and go be social with friends. Right?

So the computer was a completely anti-social device, totally isolates you, had nothing to do with communication because they just didn't do that back then. Right. So when we were in college, Todd and I were among the first few to get these modems hooked up. Right. So not even everyone in college had a computer. It wasn't an actual requirement. People could to own a computer.

Right. Back then it was starting to just be required that you needed to type in your essays. They all needed to be typed up. Right. It was the same. I got to college in 96 and it was the same thing. Even when I graduated in 99, you wouldn't see laptops. in everyone having, yeah.

And there were computer labs, right? So you're required to turn in a paper. It has to be typed up, double spaced, you know, here's a computer lab. It's free. Use it. Right. And then those people who didn't want to own computers, you know, reluctantly accepted that they could go to the lab and do this.

But they definitely didn't. There were people. It was countercultural, right? Cool people didn't want computers. Didn't want to be caught dead with them. You know, cool people were watching MTV and were plugged in. I was the one who was pretending to watch MTV. and trying to connect with cool people.

But really what I was doing was using my computer and using a slow modem and trying to figure out what the hell is going on online. And really back then you're using, when it was online, I'm talking about local university networks, right? Where you can download some software and then if you could,

you might figure out using some sort of a gopher browser or something, how to log into other universities and see what software they had. There was no browsing of the web. That didn't exist. So you guys, you decide you want to do a chat thing. This thing that enraptured you, you're like, well, let's just do that. Yeah, so the chat thing, what was so incredible is that number one pointed to us that

you could talk to anyone in the world in real time and actually, you were actually engaging with another real human and you could do it from your room and you could do it without having to make a telephone call literally. I mean, obviously, we were dialing up through a modem, but there was something about it that was so futuristic and exhilarating. And I think subconsciously it was instantly solving this notion of being alone and not knowing how to bond with people. So I think it was much more on a subconscious level having a huge impact on us. On a conscious level, it just, it seemed neat. And we had to figure out like, okay, well, how does this work on a bigger scale?

Can I interrupt it to give a little context here? because, okay, message boards had existed for a long time. But what you guys... You're talking about Usenet messages. Exactly, exactly. So it's like you post a message, somebody comes back in comments or whatever. What you guys saw, again, I don't know if you even remember what the site was, but what you guys saw is what we're familiar with today from chat, where it's real time,

where I type out something, hit enter, you type out something, you hit enter, and we see it in real time. Yeah, it's the closest, you know, it's the closest thing to WhatsApp and real all social media has become because there's a real time nature to it now. So, yeah, the big difference was is that message boards like Usenet, again, great for primarily going and finding pictures to download or videos and, you know, people posting a thought and then sometime later you stumble across that thought. There wasn't a, there was not nearly as much the social engagement side as a slow knowledge sharing side, somewhat akin to posting a note on somebody's door, I guess. And then sometime later, someone else stumbles across that note and adds a message to it. A bulletin board. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, you know, even Facebook wall, which was really a first time I saw an online literal wall or virtual wall, not a literal one, but mimicking what. an offline

message, offline wall looked like or the experience was like that was, that was still radically different

than what we were talking about, which was, I'm in, like I'm talking with you right now, Brian, except doing it

without audio. And that's what blew my mind away. Okay, so then how do you, how do you and Todd do it? Like, what do you,

actually, maybe the way to frame it is, if you can, if you can do, do it, can you put yourself back in the mindset of, all right, this is the project we're going to do, this is the concept of what we're going to develop. Do you remember what that was? Yeah, I mean, I remember that Todd and I started, Todd is very visual, and he would immediately go and start drawing, whether it was on paper or on a whiteboard or, yeah, I think it was a whiteboard.

he would start drawing schematics and then I would add to it. It would help us brainstorm. And I think the idea was, it was not long after the chat experience. To do the online chat, we use some sort of beta version of mosaic. So part of the discovery was this whole browser system. And we could see very shortly thereafter as the mosaic iterations got better and better that it could support graphics. And that's when Todd and I, the light really went off.

like, okay, we're going to create a graphical world where you can hang out, right? These like cyber cafes. And I don't think we knew, you know, the extent or the detail of what would be in there, but just the idea that people could group together around topics of interest or that you could also go get the news for the day. Right. So this was some sort of version of what we had seen maybe AOL had or Apple's E-World had. But for those you had proprietary software, you had. to download. But we were going to just borrow from those concepts and say, okay, well, how would

that work on the web? So what capabilities do exist on the web that are different from AOL and EWorld? So we would borrow from, we'd create some sort of a visual map that would give people a way of navigating around a site and then click on certain links and be dropped into different chat rooms that had different personalities. And maybe we would add some forums to that, right, for people who didn't want real-time chatting. And we would also borrow from what all the universities were doing, which was providing tons and tons of downloadable software, some for entertainment, some for education, some for research.

We're like, okay, well, we'll mirror a university site so that at the globe, you can also go and download software, right, if that's all you're interested in. So it was like a primarily social-driven, but a little bit of a one-stop shop for anything we thought anyone might want to do on the internet. That was sort of the initial impetus for it. We didn't obviously build all that. at that. Well, actually, my immediate question is, you're still in school. So is this, do you sort of pawn this off as like, well, this is just our project that we're working on for whatever,

for computer science? It was a bit of a nightmare because we had, Todd and I, we weren't confident at all in ourselves and what we were going to be able to build here. So it was pretty clear to us that we couldn't just use the old excuse that Bill Gates had used. Like we're dropping out to go create Microsoft, right? To our parents, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, we've spent a fortune on your educations. Your juniors at Cornell, you're halfway through your education. You need to finish it up.

And I think Todd and I were in agreement like, yeah, let's get our degrees done, which just made this a whole sort of nightmarish experience in terms of workload because, you know, junior and senior years actually when stuff starts to get really hard, right? Especially in computer science, right, when I finally decided I needed to drop out of computer science. And Todd was doing biotech, and so I think we're bioengineer or whatever it was. His workload was increasing exponentially. Plus, you know, my engineering program is a five-year program, and Cornell had finally decided to condense it into a four-year program. So it really felt like a five-year workload in four years.

And I spent every single summer just trying to keep up, taking extra courses, and starting junior years, starting to build the glow. So Todd and I just decided to muscle through and at some point, I think middle of junior year when we were at a breaking point is when Todd and I came up with the idea of, hey, maybe we can convince one of our professors that this should be a sponsored course. It was called CS490, which was a way of getting credit for independent research. And luckily, I had very supportive teachers in the computer science department who liked the idea of what we were trying to do with the globe and therefore, like, didn't mind so much the idea that we would extend off of the business idea and do some basic research. That might be enlightening. Of course, what Todd and I ended up doing was, you know, nothing, nothing of real academic value. but they let us get away with it just enough to get me some extra credits and bias, you know, some goodwill and some breathing room for a semester.

And that's what allowed us to, you know, keep juggling both things, academics and the business at the same time. Before I get into the next obvious question about money, really basic question, though, is you were talking about like putting together, well, maybe we'll do a chat room or whatever. Today, you want to do anything. You can grab stuff off the shelf to put it together bespoke. Most of it is open source, so it doesn't cost anything. So when you're building the site from the earliest days, you guys are just coding it all yourselves? Todd and I, yeah, we first had to learn what HTML was. Of course, there's no online resources to teach you.

So it was a question of us looking at the source code in the web browser. And then, you know, what happens if I move this little bracket? Oh, okay, what if I add this one? And then eventually we found some online resources, you know, that could help us show how to do a line break and bold and italics. And, you know, with every iteration of the web browser, the feature is increasing complexity. But initially, Todd and I were really just, we were building out flat, non-dynamic pages to the website. In fact, at some point to even just try and make a little bit of money, we were building pages. you know, very flat, non-dynamic pages for other people we knew that had real businesses

where we were pitching them. Yeah, we were like, oh, we could build you a site to help promote your business. And so, whoop, two thousand dollars paid. We built them a site, which, you know, was complete crap by today's standards. But back then it was just this whole new concept and blew them away. So we were making money, you know, in bits and pieces experimenting. But to build the first real chat room, I brought in, uh, One of my friends, Philip Carlson, who I had been in computer science classes with, and he was just this really funny, fun, Nordsk-looking dude, a little bit bigger-boned, long blonde hair.

He looked like he was from a long descendant of Vikings. He wore a leather jacket and a Metallica T-shirt, and he was part of a band and just like classic college rock and roll wannabe dude and loved watching Beavis and Buthead. He and I hit it off and he was just really great at computer science. Like often I was copying his homework just to try to get through the class. And so he came on board. He was one of our first employees, if not the first, and paid a minimum wage and free beer and pizza. And he programmed on Apple, using Apple script, the first chat room.

And I mean, it was so rudimentary, but it had little iconic graphics icon, little icons that could represent who you were. So that was a really novel concept, right, to have a little picture representing who you are. This still required manual refreshing of the chat room to get the chat messages to move down the page. But eventually... Oh, that never occurred to me. Yeah, you had to hit reload. And then if there were more messages, the whole page reloaded with the new messages, right?

So it was reload, message moves down. Reload, message moves down. Reload, message moves down. It was very, very archaic. I mean, it was maybe another year or two later before we had auto-refreshing. capability, you know, frames, auto-refresh frames built into mosaic, or maybe it was Netscape, you know, by 94, 95, or 96. But, you know, then it was another year or two before Java came along and a lot fully automated scrolling, right? So we had to go through three different

generations of chat rooms before it became anything close to what we take for granted today. So I want to, actually, we should frame the time frame. These are from my notes. So if it's incorrect, let me know. You began work on the globe in, like, let's say March of 95, and the site launched April 1st, 1995. Yeah, I mean, we started the company in the fall of 94, started writing the business plans and experimenting with HTML during the end of 94, and then started coding everything up during the first quarter of 95 and launched it, yeah, April 1st of 95.

Okay, where's the money coming from? So, I mean, first, a little bit of money, bits and pieces from these random little side projects we were doing for people we thought we could help. But, you know, a few thousand here, a few thousand there wasn't quite enough. So eventually Todd and I used our, we wrote up our first business plan. And we were looking to raise $15,000. So I would raise $7,500,000, Todd the other half. And I went back to Switzerland that Christmas, 94, and pitched to my dad. And, you know, that was a little scary because he's a highly experienced businessman.

But first it was me showing him how to log on to the internet, telling him what this internet thing was. And the first thing he wanted to do was go look up stock quotes, which was next to impossible to do, look up company research on public companies, which was, again, next to impossible to do. But there were little bits and pieces here or there. And I mean, he looked very unimpressed and basically was saying, okay, stuff, look, I think this is great. You're trying to be an entrepreneur. That's the life I had. I'll be supportive.

And he wrote me, I think, a thousand dollar check and then said, listen, if you can convince, you know, my dad is a little clever that way. He's always like, I'll match, you know, whatever else you can raise. So go to your, go to your grandfather and go to your grandmother and go to your mom and go to your stepdad and go to your sister and let's see what they all put in. And so ultimately, you know, I got 500 from my grandfather and 500 from my grandmother. mother and 500 from my mom and 200 from my sister, et cetera. And then my dad ultimately put in $1,000 and told me, oh, go talk to my best friend and colleague, Steve Pond. I'm mentioning him in part because he resurfaces multiple times throughout my career. And Steve Fawn put in $1,000.

And so ultimately, I got my $7.5K, came back that winter to Cornell. Todd had raised his 7.5K from his, I think, his mom and dad and maybe some friends. And that was the first real money that allowed us to buy our first couple or server. I want to give you guys credit because again, I was there in 1995. I know, like, see, it's so hard more than 20 years on where we live in this world of where entrepreneurs are rock stars. I was there. In 1995, people didn't think of starting businesses as like a cool thing to do. So like the fact that you guys even had the Hutzpah to do it, it sounds like that that was in your background business and entrepreneurship. entrepreneurship and things like that.

But that was an incredibly rare impulse to have in 1995 and follow through on. Yeah, no, it was totally rare. And I'll give more credit to Todd because he actually, he's just a very industrious guy. And when he was a teenager, he launched a couple little what he called businesses. I mean, maybe Todd would often try to project himself, maybe because he looked so young, He always tries to come off as older and wiser and put on, you know, glasses to look a little more intellectual. And he was doing that back then. And maybe he was upselling what his real experience building his businesses were.

But he told me he'd built a small little publishing business. And he was also, he'd run a little magic show where he'd get paid to go and entertain other kids. And I was like, wow, this guy just keeps taking what might just be ordinarily fun little projects or hobbies and keeps finding ways to make money from them. I wasn't an entrepreneur at all. I mean, my dad may have been an entrepreneur, but my, you know, my parents were divorced. I grew up with my mom and my stepdad. My dad had, my stepdad was a banker and had always been a banker. So there was nothing entrepreneurial in my immediate life.

I happen to just love computers. And I am a very visual thinker and was always thinking in the future and loved movies and, you know, play out movies in my head of what the future might be. And I think if anything, I was just a futurist who had, you know, technical competence. And Todd knew how to create a little bit of structure around that so that we could between the two of us move the ball and do something interesting. That was the extent of it. Right. And then we were definitely the ones taking ridiculous risk by doing this project while all of our other friends were trying to get, you know, a-mine, and A-plus and Dean's List level grades and their late, their junior years, you know,

they're trying to burnish their resumes with great internships and then started going on on interview circuits during job fair weeks. And Todd and I were like, oh, my God, we're not doing any of this. We're falling behind now. This is a disaster. We were very nervous about continuing here because no one, no one knew what we were doing. No one understood it. The internet was not the internet, you know, that we know. And so it was just this ridiculous. ridiculously risky thing. And we just decided, fuck it, we're just going to keep going and see where it goes. So I think it's always important to do this, especially for things like this that there's no wayback machine for. Explain to me if I was someone that discovered the globe, maybe not on day one. Maybe let's go six months out or whatever. So like you've added some features.

Describe for me what the globe would be if I discovered it around the time that it started to get traction. It would immediately feel like a, what we call the destination site, like you've arrived, a place you've arrived, that's like a new home for you to live in. It's very graphical. It is a website. It's the globe.com. Yeah, it's a website. We were very graphic heavy right away because we, Todd was very visual and I love the visuals as well. So we made a homepage graphic using these comic book characters that we created of, Net Surfer and Glitch. And NetSurfer was this really cool dude on a surfboard, and he was obviously, we were obviously playing up the whole surfing the web concept. But we wanted to make this appeal to the tech geeks and nerds out there. So we're like, okay, he's going to have a sidekick glitch, and he's got this bad guy

called Mainframe and Megabyte and these little characters. But they're just there to sort of warm up the page and the story a little. You log onto the homepage. There's this astral quality. You feel like you're in space in a supernova. There's net surfer flying by. And you've got a chat section. You've got forums.

You've got downloadable software. I don't remember what else we had. That was necessarily there. But right away, you had this warm feeling that you had arrived somewhere. Because most of what was on the internet so far felt like either directory, website directories like Yahoo, right, which were very bland and you just went in there and yes, they had an extensive directory of other places to go, right? All they were doing is trying to organize websites. And then eventually you would land on a website that was usually some sort of converted offline

magazine where they just sort of dumped all the content online or random eclectic assortments of content. But there was no sense of socialization going on online. It was just random little information hubs. So with us, we were like, we want, we want to create a better mousetrap. We want people to arrive and feel like they've got a home to hang out in. And so as soon as you'd go in the, the chat was the main feature and you'd go in there, we created a whole bunch of chat rooms because our chat rooms started filling up real fast. And what happens, by the way, is once you have over 20 or 30 people chatting on a party line is the screen. Every time you hit refresh, so many messages keep appearing, it's hard to keep up. Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on a second.

Number one, so how did you promote the site? How did people find it? It was all word of mouth. When we launched the site, I don't remember why we picked April 1st. I had no idea. It seemed like a bad idea right after we launched because it probably didn't occur to us. Wait, April 1st? Oh my God, it's April Fool's Day. That's probably the stupidest idea, you know, way to launch a site. No one's going to understand we're doing. They're going to think it's a joke. But I remember we launched April 1st, and then people started trickling in. I think we probably emailed some people and told some people. And as soon as, you know, it goes up exponentially, right?

As soon as two people land on the site at the same time and enter the chat room at the same time, a conversation begins. The minute you add a third person, the noise goes up geometrically. So you don't need to add that many people before it just starts to go up and up and up. For our first month, we had a few thousand unique users, which may have meant that at any point in time, there were only a dozen people in the chat room, right? But there's constantly another, you know, cycle of a dozen people coming in or leaving. But then the next, the next month, it jumped up to like 15,000 and then 30, 40, 50,000, and then 70, 80,000.

I mean, that's, you know, for a little website run by, you know, two guys and a couple of programmers. It was insane to have tens of thousands of people hitting our site every month. And not just for landing and leaving, but landing and spending an hour. per day talking. Well, but also that's what's so hard again, 25 years on, is that we're used to, oh, an app has two billion users or whatever. No, in 1995, to get, I think by 96, again, this is from my notes, you reach 100,000 users.

That's great, insane, crazy numbers. Yeah. I mean, when we started in 90, when we went online in 94, I think it was estimated there only maybe one or two million people on the internet, all in academia. By the time we hit maybe 95, 96, there were 5 million, 5 to 10 million in climbing. I mean the TV show that I've seen and we could talk about that later, they reminded me at some point, I think in 96 that basically a population half the size of California was on the global internet.

The whole world, yeah. The whole world, it amounted to half of California. So it sounds to me like by 96, there were somewhere in the order of, and that was a, God, so it must have been like 20 million people on the internet by 96-ish. So yeah, getting 100,000 people a month is sort of meaningful. And, you know, at our peak, eventually we got up to, you know, 17 to 20 million users a month, which was at that time 10% of the entire internet was hitting our servers every month. So it felt huge.

Of course, it feels like a joke by today's standards. Right. But again, that's the problem with looking at it through the lens of now. But, okay, so you, I think you signed with double-click early on to put ads on there. You're monetizing early on. Yeah. By the way, if you want to talk about crazy metrics, when we started, right, obviously we were using dial-up modems until we got on to the university's network to use their bandwidth to launch the globe. But then we decided very quickly, whoa, we don't want this to become an academic problem.

project, we don't want Cornell to take over. So we moved off campus and got our first T1 line from Sprint or MCI WorldCom at the time. And just for comparison, back then, one megabit of bandwidth was $4,000 a month. So that was where all of our capital was going. The one line we needed to handle, you know, and imagine 50,000 to 100,000 users a month all cramming through a one megabit connection. So that's what we were, that's what we were dealing with back then. what was your next question? The question was, again,

you guys were thinking of this as a business early on. So you go with ads, yeah, advertising. So back, until then, advertising hadn't been invented online yet. We were thinking about it

because that's how magazines did it. We weren't thinking of our website at that point yet as being like a TV show where you sell ads against it. We were thinking like, oh, well, there are these images, these pages you navigate to, and everything could be counted in terms of page views. Or some people called it hits, but hits was misrepresentative because if you had 10 graphics

on a page, it created like 10 hits. But the idea was we have pages. So what do magazines do? They sell ads against them. So first we tried to evangelize the idea of these paid ads to whatever businesses that were local, but nobody was interested and nobody understood what the hell we were talking about. And at some point shortly thereafter, Yahoo, moved off of campus. That originally when we started, Yahoo was being run at yahobono.

Stanford. And we originally got listed on their server. We emailed Jerry and David, and they personally responded and said, yep, we'll put you in. We'll put you in the directory. But eventually they moved off campus. Eventually they raised money from Sequoia. and sometime around 1995-ish is when I remember them launching their first ads. And it wasn't banner ads back then.

They had something called WebJump or some sort of, it was like a page where they put lots of logos and lots of buttons to a lot of different sites that were paying them money. And so if you landed on the Yahoo site, there was this one button that if you clicked on, it showed you all the advertisers. and it looked really good, right? And actually drove traffic. So we bought a spot on that page and it drove tens of thousands of users to our site. So that was our first experience with the power of advertising. And then not long thereafter, Yau started standardizing things into these banner-shaped graphics or skyscraper-shaped graphics or button-shaped graphics. And we wanted to do the same thing.

But again, Todd and I didn't have any experience selling ads. we hadn't raised enough money to hire salespeople. None of this, this was all foreign to us as to what to do. And I don't remember through what relationship we connected with a company called Double Click in New York. And when we visited their offices in New York, they were just setting up. I remember everything were in boxes still. They were unboxing things. And we met with Dwight Merriman and Kevin O'Connor.

And those guys were just unusually friendly and generous with their time and seemed to like care about us like maybe we reminded them of their youth or something yeah i was gonna say i've had kevin on the show he couldn't have been much older than you guys i mean maybe 10 years maybe but not that much older but that 10 years obviously made him yeah it's like where we are his younger brother or something and because i mean normally you wouldn't waste time you know talking to a company where you think they're fumbling in the dark and they're just going to waste your time but he was like sure no problem let's let's let's we can make this work they were trying to build out their ad network as fast as they could. And they were based in New York and had a sales team already set up. So these

guys knew what they were doing. And even though they were just getting set up, it seemed like they already had something running. So shortly thereafter, we dropped their double-click code into our website at the top of every single chat room and had a little auto refresh going. So if you're sitting in a chat room every minute or two minutes, a new banner ad loads. And our revenues exploded overnight. Think up until then, I don't remember how much money we'd been making, but with double-click, we very quickly went to, you know, 10 grand a month, 20 grand a month, 30 grand a month, and we hit a peak at one point of like $80,000 a month in revenue. Yeah.

When we were burning around that much per month. This is, you know, this is like 1990. We were at least a couple years in at this point. By the way, from my notes, October 96, $85,000 a month in revenue from the ads. By the way, the only reason I even vaguely remember the timeframes is, because I put it all in my book. So I'm cheating. I wouldn't remember this otherwise. So yeah, so around there, we got that level of revenue.

So we actually had a profitable month or two from double-click ad revenue. Oh, we had done subscriptions. That's right. Oh, right, right, right. That's how we were generating revenue before that and for a while during and after was that we had decided to launch some subscription tiers where you basically, you know, you sign up and you get the globe for free for like a month. that thereafter, I think it was, you know, two or three bucks a month for one tier and five

bucks a month for another tier and ten bucks a month for another tier. And you get private chat rooms. You get more graphics, more storage space, a homepage. So we were generating, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 a month with some subscriptions plus double click ad revenue, had a brief flirtation with profitability. But by 97, we, we, we, we. We had kept staffing up and we had graduated and decided to relocate to New York and basically our expenses just sort of doubled from where they were. So then we were losing money again. I think at that point we had raised a couple million dollars, right around the time we'd graduated,

we'd probably raised half a million cumulatively and then by the end of 96, beginning of 97, we'd raised two million, including from David Duffield, the co-founder of PeopleSoft and from a whole bunch of other notable angel investors in the valley. And we decided, okay, we're done with Cornell. We can't build the business further here. The Ithaca community is too small. We really need to sell more ads and build relationships with advertisers. What are our options? And it was between San Francisco that Todd and I, Todd had no interest in moving back to San Francisco. And I felt like San Francisco was too much of a one industry town. And I really wanted to feel plugged into diversity and coolness.

And I had, you know, a fantasy about what New York might be. So Todd and I decided, okay, New York is where all the advertisers are. There'll be a ton of talent. We won't have to compete with Silicon Valley. All the Silicon Valley companies trying to get the same talent. And New York sounds freaking cool. So we went down to New York City. And I think at that point, our burn rate, you know, again, doubled up.

And Todd and I were back, you know, trying to grow the business faster. Maybe we would raise more money, although with $2 million in the bank, I think we felt pretty comfortable in the beginning of 97 that we'd be able to last at least a year or two.