...or, to be more strictly accurate, this episode covers the founding of AuctionWeb, the site that would become eBay. How Pierre Omidyar founded a company that brought auctions to the web and revolutionized what classified ads and ecommerce could be.

Summary:

• Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet, by Katie Hafner
• The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, by Walter Isaacson
• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, by Tim Wu
• Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, by Tim Berners-Lee
• How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web, by James Gillies and Robert Cailliau
• AOL.com, by Kara Swisher
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone
• The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, by Adam Cohen
• Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
• Infinite Loop, How Apple, the World's Most Insanely Great Company, Went Insane, by Michael S. Malone
• Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, by Ashlee Vance

Summary:

We continue our survey of the pioneering social/community sites by sitting down with David Bohnett, who, along with John Rezner, founded Geocities. David recounts how a lifelong passion for communications tech inspired the idea of Geocities, how and why the site grew to become one of the 5 most popular web destinations in the world by the late 90s, as well as the company's blockbuster sale to Yahoo.  We also marvel at how Geocities lives on, thanks to the passion and affection of the Geocities community.

Summary:

One of the biggest names of the dot-com era was TheGlobe.com. It had one of the most successful and storied IPO's of it's day, and it was lead by two early-twenties co-founders, long before that sort of thing was common. Todd Krizelman (along with Stephan Paternot) was one of those co-founders, and in the offices of his current company, MediaRadar, he sat down with me to remember the founding story of one of the earliest and most innovative community sites on the web. We're exploring these community sites as a sort of survey of proto-social-media websites, and as you'll hear, TheGlobe was one of the most interesting.

If you're interested in reading more about this story, check out the book A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business Excess, Success, and Reckoning.