7 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Steve Case's Virginia online services company — the first mass-market internet service provider — famous for its CD-ROM distribution strategy, AIM instant messenger, and the catastrophic merger with Time Warner in 2001.
American internet media entrepreneur — founder of Breitbart News and The Huffington Post's initial helper — who pioneered the aggregation-plus-outrage model of political internet media before his death at 43.
Jonathan Abrams's Sunnyvale social networking site — the first viral social network (reaching 3 million users before MySpace or Facebook) — famous for its early traction, technical failures that drove away users, and refusal of a $30M Google acquisition offer.
Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe's Los Angeles social networking site — the dominant social network from 2005 to 2008 — famous for its music features, HTML customization, and its dramatic loss to Facebook.
Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark's Mountain View web browser and internet software company — whose 1995 IPO launched the dot-com era — creators of the Netscape Navigator browser that made the World Wide Web accessible to non-technical users.
Jerry Yang and David Filo's Sunnyvale internet portal — the defining internet company of the late 1990s — notable for declining to buy Google for $1 million, refusing Microsoft's $44 billion acquisition offer, and a decades-long decline from internet dominance.
Elon Musk's first company — an online city guide and business directory — founded with his brother Kimbal in 1995 and sold to Compaq for $307M in 1999, giving Musk the capital to fund X.com (which became PayPal).