aleksl - 11:28 pm on Jan 18, 2012 (gmt 0)

Perhaps when nobody knows what is the name, business model and direction of this pieced together, VC-financed, and showered with millions of dollars of wild banner ad money "advertising" company...it is time to hang your shoes and quietly leave with enough cash to start something else.

Sequoia Capital, the firm which had invested in Apple, Atari, Oracle and Cisco agreed to fund Yahoo! with an initial investment of around $2 million. Jerry and David hired Tim Koogle, an alumnus of Stanford and working in Motorola, as Chief Executive officer of Yahoo! and Jeffrey Mallett of Novell as Chief Operating Officer. After receiving another funding in 1995 from Softbank and Reuters Ltd., Yahoo! came out with its initial public offering (IPO) on 12th April, 1996. At tat time Yahoo! had only 49 employees. Yahoo! raised $33.8 million from the IPO by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each. Yahoo! started diversifying into Web portal just like other search engines and web directories were doing. The Web portal providers were acquiring companies to increase the number of services being offered by them. This was being done so that the user spends maximum time possible on the portal. Yahoo! acquired "Four11" in 1997 and the mail service being provided by Four11, Rocketmail, became now famous Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! Games was a result of acquisition of "ClassicGames.com". In 1998 Yahoo! acquired Yoyodyne Entertainment Inc., a direct marketing company and acquired "GeoCities" which is a web hosting provider. "eGroups" became Yahoo! Groups after being acquired by Yahoo! in 2000. To enhance the search services being provided by it, Yahoo! started acquiring other search engines. It acquired "Inktomi" in December 2002, "Overture Services Inc" and its subsidiaries "AltaVista" and "AlltheWeb" in July 2003. Yahoo! acquired HotJobs , the job-related site, in 2002 Yahoo! purchased the photo sharing service "Flickr" on 20th March, 2005. Yahoo! acquired "blo.gs", a RSS feed based service. "Upcoming.org", a social event calendar site was bought by Yahoo! on 4th October, 2005. Yahoo! took acquisition of "del.icio.us", a social bookmark site on 9th December and acquired playlist sharing community "webjay" in 2006 January. [theoriginof.com...]