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.

David Schwartz is the Chief Technology Officer at Ripple, the company behind the cryptocurrency XRP. What is it like to start, build and build out a crypto startup? Is it different than the web and internet startups that we’ve covered on this show for years? What is Ripple? How is it unique in the crypto ecosystem? What is it trying to do for the world? All of this… and yes, why is crypto so tribal… and yes… where is the crypto space even at in this moment in time (December 9th, 2018, btw, for posterity).

Ken Norton is a partner at GV, Alphabets venture capital arm, but before that, he was a product manager at Google, where he led the development of products like Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Mobile Maps. But he was also early at JotSpot which became Google sites, was a product manager at Yahoo, was an early employee at CNET and was CTO of Snap, a company probably none of you have ever heard of but I’ve been dying to talk about for years. No. Not snapchat. The original Snap. The dotcom era snap. So, this is another great episode with a guy who has played roles in a ton of our favorites companies and topics.

Matt Britton not only sold the first ads to and for Facebook, way back in 2004, he gives us a really insightful and, frankly, unbiased look at what Facebook was like as a company in its very earliest days.

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I figure most of you should know who Matt Cutts is, but if you don't, let's just leave it at this: he's about to give you the best, most behind-the-scenes oral history of early Google we've gotten so far on this podcast. He was the head of Google's web spam team for nearly 15 years. He's also the current head of the USDS, so if you what to know what YOU can do for your country—if you're in technology and you want to make the government work better—listen to this episode!

SUMMARY:

The history of Craig Newmark, craigslist and other odds and ends that didn’t make the book!

Simple enough: Part 2 with John McCrea. More on SGI, more on doing battle with Microsoft in the 90s. And... interesting stuff on VR and the future...

John McCrea is a Zelig-like personality who pops up in so many of the narratives we've already covered: Apple. Netscape. Doing battle with Microsoft. This is part one, mostly about Silicon Graphics, a company I had been thinking about doing an episode on for a while now, to really rejuvenate that company’s reputation, historically. For reasons that will be obvious when you listen.

On Google's 20th Birthday (September 4th) a re-cutting and re-airing of my comprehensive history of Google, from it's inception through its IPO. Happy Birthday, Google!

Nando.net was not only a very early experiment in bringing journalism to the web, it was also one of those local ISP's that flowered in the era of the early 1990s. Fraser Von Asch was not only one of the key players at The News & Observer (thus, "NandO") who brought the project to life, he is another person who has straddled the media industry between the print and digital eras and can give us some amazing insights into the transitions therein... or lack thereof.

This story has gone down in Silicon Valley lore as the ultimate cautionary tale. Digg was the earliest high flying startup in early social media. But then, other startups like Facebook and Twitter started to steal the limelight. So Digg tried to keep up by launching the infamous Digg version 4. And… it’s a disaster. Users hate it. So much so, that many people feel that the reason Reddit is Reddit today is because the Digg community fled their en-masse. Digg Version 4 has become a much cited horror story for when a redesign can be so disruptive it can kill a company. So, what’s the real story behind this urban legend? Today, we talk to Will Larson, who today is at Stripe, was a young engineer working on the launch of Digg version 4.

Today, we're going to continue our occasional project of getting oral histories and personal anecdotes about how, exactly, the Internet and the web came to various places around the world. On this episode we're going to look at how the Internet came to—and is still in the process of coming to—Pakistan. Imran Haider is a listener to the show, works in the tech industry, and analyzes the south asian tech scene at his blog, arkito.co. Today, he tells us how the digital revolution came to Pakistan, how it's still in the process of rolling out, what that has meant for Pakistani society and what the startup and tech scene IS in Pakistan. My thanks to Imran Haider for being a longtime listener to this show, and for being willing to contribute to the project, and please, check him out at arkito.co... it's Ben Thompson level analysis of the tech scene in the sub continent.

Lisa Napoli got a job straight out of college at CNN in its earliest days, which is a crazy startup story in it’s own right. But then she worked for a time at Delphi, which was an early online service and competitor to AOL and Prodigy that I don’t think we’ve covered much here before. And then she helped bring the NYTimes online with CyberTimes, which, as she said, is forgotten to history even by the New York Times. Then on to MSNBC, a crazy hybrid tech and media startup that I don’t think we’ve discussed much either. There’s just so many great stories here. Please enjoy this conversation with Lisa Napoli.

Rosanne Siino has been on my list to talk to from day one of this podcast. As you know, I started by reaching out to Netscape folks and Rosanne was the head of communications for that very first dotcom company. She saw it all, she can give us her take on both the engineering side and the management side, since she was uniquely able to observe both. Rosanne and I were recently on a documentary series currently airing on A&E in the US, The Untold Story of the 90s. So, I reached out, and we recoded this fantastic extended interview about all things Netscape and about the very birth of the Internet Era.

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Today we're going to go back to take a look at early journalism on the web. Karl Mattson helped launched one of the first political news websites, ElectionLine. He helped cover the 1996 election when covering an election on the web was a completely new thing. He then moved to AOL, helped run their news channels and has some amazing historical details about he era, especially the Clinton intern scandal.

Claude Shannon was a mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory." In the pantheon of cool people who made the modern information era possible, he’s right up there. Today, we’re going to talk about Shannon’s life with Jimmy Sony and Rob Goodman, authors of a great biography of the man called A Mind At Play, How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age. Especially you software engineers out there, if you don’t know who Claude Shannon was, get educated. You owe your livelihood to this man.

Buy the book!

Summary:

Robert Reid, the founder of Rhapsody, can be considered the Godfather (founding father?) of the streaming music reality we now live in. But guess what? That's only half of this episode! Because it turns out, Robert is the author of a book that was probably one of the biggest reasons I started doing this podcast. The book was Architects of the Web, 1000 Days that Built the Future of Business. It was one of the first books to come out about the history of the web era. It was published in 1997, I think. I read it in college. I re-read it maybe 6-7 seven years ago and it helped inspire me to start this podcast. Those first interviews I launched the podcast with? The Netscape guys? Jon Mittelhauser? Alex Totic? I read about them in this book and I straight up cold-emailed them. So you're going to get a fascinating fly-on-the-wall account of early Netscape, early Yahoo, all sorts of companies we've talked about.

Robert continues to be an accomplished author.

Buy his books:

After On

Year Zero

And listen to his exceptional podcast, also called After On.

Jason Kottke, of kottke.org fame, was one of the early bloggers, one of the first bloggers to go pro, and one of the few solo bloggers still going. If you know Kottke.org, then you love it. How could you not? If you’ve never heard of it, you can thank me later. This episode examines what it means to be a publisher on the web for 20 years as well as the discipline required to find cool stuff on the web every single day (almost).

People have been yelling at me for years that I’ve not covered more technical aspects of the web’s history, especially things like Java. Specifically Java. The argument can be made that Java helped the web evolve into what it’s become. So, that’s why I was thrilled to sit down with Todd Sundsted, who is a developer who has been working with Java for more than 20 years. Todd walks us through the history of Java and why it is so important to the web’s general evolution.

Today, a man who needs no introduction: New York Times Technology Columnist Farhad Manjoo. This episode was recorded about two months or so ago, so we talk about the book leave Farhad is on that he only recently made public, but of course, we get into his whole career and his unique vantage point and views on the world of tech.

No joke, this is one of my favorite episodes we've ever done. Eugene Wei was an early employee at Hulu, so we get some details on that company for the first time, and he also worked at Flipboard and Oculus, so we get some important context especially on the future of VR and the like. But the most fascinating stories you'll hear will be about Amazon, where Eugene was the first analyst in the strategic planning department. As you'll hear, Eugene had a unique perspective on Amazon's early strategy and business structure, almost a historically unique perspective... he could see month to month, how Amazon was built, what Amazon was trying to do, and why. This is such an amazing perspective on such an important company.

Claire Evans is the author of the new book: Broad Band The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. This is the best tech history book I’ve read in a while and you know I read them all. Of special note, considering our 90s-heavy focus on this podcast, the book includes the stories of Word.com, which was a competitor to Feed.com (which we’ve previously covered) and Women.com which was a competitor to Ivillage (which, again, we’ve spoke at length about). But you also get an amazing portair of tech in the 1970s, hypertext as a movement outside of the web, and stories about amazing women like Grace Hopper and Jake Feinler.

Buy it today!

Podcast listener Thomas Ganter gives us a first person, anecdotal account of how the web came to Germany in the 1990s.

Gregg Spiridellis has been making things go viral on the web since before the term VIRAL was even a thing. His company, JibJab has been producing web videos since the dialup dotcom era, producing hits you might remember such as Elf Yourself, Nasty Santa and This Land Is Your Land. JibJab has survived the dotcom bust, the coming of broadband, the coming of YouTube, the coming of social media and the mobile internet. What you’ll hear today is absolutely a masterclass in pivoting, in adapting a business model to thrive in every new technology environment and embracing every new platform and paradigm.

David Pakman is a well respected venture capitalist at Venrock, but also a lifelong musician and music fan. Earlier in his career he played a significant role in bringing music to the web. David tells us about cofounding Apple’s Music Group, his role in facilitating the first digital sales of music online at dotcom-era companies N2K and MyPlay, and competing directly against iTunes when he was at eMusic. As a bonus, he gives us some background on the more recent founding story of Dollar Shave Club.

It gets my goat that these days, the history of ecommerce begins and ends with Amazon. There were so many companies and big ideas that got us where we are today, and one of the most important companies was Open Market. Jeff Bussgang is here to tell us the (today) often overlooked story of the earliest days of trying to sell stuff on the web. Today, Jeff is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners.