Checked against primary sources: S-1 and 10-K filings, press releases, site archives, founder interviews. Where sources disagree or nothing confirms a claim, it says so: estimate unverified
Match.com
The first genuinely mass online dating service (1995).
What Wikipedia does not have: The access fee was introduced not against the strategy of attracting women but as part of it.
Netscape
Mosaic → Mosaic Communications → Netscape Communications
The company survived on its own for less than five years, but it was the one that turned the internet from an instrument for scientists into a product for ordinary people: Netscape Navigator, a free browser grown out of the…
What Wikipedia does not have: Netscape pointedly took not a single line of code from the university Mosaic into the new browser, and that decision was made before the decision to found the company.
Amazon
Cadabra → Amazon.com
An online bookstore that started in a garage in Bellevue under the name Cadabra and nearly kept that name, but for a lawyer who misheard it as cadaver.
What Wikipedia does not have: Amazon's "first book" was a test purchase by an acquaintance of a company employee, more than three months before the public launch (with a caveat).
GeoCities
Beverly Hills Internet → GeoCities
A free home-page service that began as a web host with webcams on a Hollywood street corner and in Beverly Hills, and grew into the third most visited site in the US of the late 1990s: anyone at all got a free piece of the web…
What Wikipedia does not have: The company was born out of personal tragedy, not out of a business plan.
Yahoo!
Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web
An internet directory that two Stanford graduate students assembled by hand as a hobby in a university trailer: lists of favorite sites sorted by topic, anything to avoid writing their dissertations.
What Wikipedia does not have: The first specialized category in the directory's history was created personally by Jerry Yang, in one evening, off one letter.
Craigslist
A free classifieds site (housing, jobs, stuff, personals) that grew out of one engineer's personal email list about events in San Francisco.
What Wikipedia does not have: The 1997 refusal to run advertising was one man's arithmetic, not a declaration of principle.
Hotmail
The first mass-market free web email service: a mailbox that opened in any browser, with no internet provider of your own.
What Wikipedia does not have: The term "viral marketing" was coined by the company's own investors, not by journalists after the fact.
eBay
AuctionWeb → eBay
In 1995 Pierre Omidyar launched an auctions section on his personal site as an experiment: could the internet support an honest market between strangers.
What Wikipedia does not have: The Pez dispenser myth was invented not by the press but by the company itself.
Booking.com
Bookings.nl → Bookings B.V. → Booking.com
An online hotel booking service that a recent university graduate from the Netherlands (by his own account in one interview, still a final-year student) launched with two servers under his desk in 1996, copying the idea from the…
What Wikipedia does not have: The 5% commission was chosen not from a calculation but because nobody there knew any other figure.
Two Stanford graduate students studied the link structure of the web as an academic problem, with no intention of building a business, and ended up with an algorithm more accurate than any search engine of the time.
What Wikipedia does not have: Google was nearly sold to Excite for less than a million dollars, and not because of the quality of the search.
PayPal
Confinity → X.com → PayPal
An online payment service that ran on email, grown out of a company that had tried to sell encryption for the Palm Pilot handheld.
What Wikipedia does not have: The "Pay with PayPal" button was invented not by the company but by an eBay seller.
Blogger
Pyra Labs
A tool for publishing web pages instantly, grown out of a side internal tool at a company that was selling something else entirely: Pyra, a web-based task and project manager.
What Wikipedia does not have: The deal that saved Blogger was discussed and agreed in outline over dinner at a sushi bar.
Napster
A program for sharing MP3s free over the internet, written by an 18-year-old freshman at Northeastern University.
What Wikipedia does not have: From day one Napster sold itself as a community rather than as a file-download tool.
The same thing, about today
The same breakdowns, but of projects launching right now: what the product is, where the first users came from, how they charge. The card is free, the full dossier is $5 (the dossier itself is written in Russian).
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