And since this is HN, you probably wonder where the ICQ founders are now? As far as I know, 3.5 out of 4.5 (one quit early) are busy having fun and enjoying life, and the remaining one has since started and sold companies for $100m each at the rate of about one per two years.
America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)
121–130 of 145 posts
Re: America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big difference: Skype had many more than the handful of employees needed to run WhatsApp. Their cost base was hundreds of millions. WhatsApp seems to run lean and mean, and that makes a big difference in terms of keeping it profitable.
This is slightly misleading in that a business with no revenues doesn/t have that much work to do.
WhatsApp makes $1/user/year after the first year, and appears to keep users around pretty much forever because it's such a good deal.
So that's a revenue that, today, is probably a sizeable fraction of $400m/year. All that with a few dozen employees.
Re: America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)
#123I remember when this happened. I was quite the upset teenager :)
Re: America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I win with 104006. Was offered job as employee #1. Didn't take the offer. I was 15 y/o.
Are you serious?
Yes. Met Yair and Sefi (two of tech founders) via my uncle who was doing biz Dev for them. I was writing a shareware win32 app at the time called "AoLOL!", an add on for AOL 2.5 and up that would extend the AOL toolbar and add a bunch of features. One of those features was called "keep in touch". You could specify a list of AOl screen names and it would run through that list and perform AOL'd "check if online" function. It would tell you if your friends are online and of so, what chat room they're in (if any). A precursor to the "buddy list."
The icq guys are Israeli. My parents are Israeli. I spoke Hebrew fluently. I helped them fix the broken English on their web site. Later I gave them access to my AOL account so they could take a close look at AOL's buddy list when it did launch.
They also offered me UIN (the icq #) "007". I laughed it off, didn't even know at the time what 007 meant.
Always wondered what would have been if I was a few years older, not living with my parents, able to drive, and would have taken their offer seriously. To me they really kicked off the dotcom boom and for me, my focus in startups.
Re: America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes $20 million in revenue . I've read that they're profitable, but never the number.
Goes to show that only 20 Million out of 430M paid the $1/year (which has something to do with it not being charged everywhere and people having a 1 year grace period and a majority of their target market having no credit card (young audience in emerging markets)). Let's see how Zuckerberg plans to change that drastically.
With advertising or selling user information? That seems to be the most likely to me given Facebook's history
Re: America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)
#126I remember when this happened. I was quite the upset teenager :)
So was I! Funnily enough, I was right, AOL killed ICQ. Then again, AOL killed most everything they touched.
Re: America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is slightly misleading in that a business with no revenues doesn/t have that much work to do.
WhatsApp makes $1/user/year after the first year, and appears to keep users around pretty much forever because it's such a good deal. So that's a revenue that, today, is probably a sizeable fraction of $400m/year. All that with a few dozen employees.
Assuming Google/Apple maintain respective strangleholds, continue to share the wealth, etc. The "app store" craze could fizzle out, nobody knows for sure.
Re: America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is slightly misleading in that a business with no revenues doesn/t have that much work to do.
WhatsApp makes $1/user/year after the first year, and appears to keep users around pretty much forever because it's such a good deal. So that's a revenue that, today, is probably a sizeable fraction of $400m/year. All that with a few dozen employees.
You guys are taking this comment to litterally.
Sales, marketing, accounting, legal, and financial controllership are going to skyrocket when this company has a revenue stream that is worth NPV=$19B.
This is a credit to the company; who like instagram was able to build much value with few FTE's. But building a company "worth money" and building a company "making money" are really different things.
This is smart from a founder's perspective, because in a sense all of those other employees would just be dilutive of attention and likely equity. But from an economic perspective, it's jumping the gun a bit to conclude what the steady state economics will be.
Re: America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)
#129Someone mentioned about trying to find out if their have ever been any other chat services that have really made a lot of money on it's own, and it sparked memory of an acquisition that didn't happen quite that long ago, Microsoft buying Skype in 2011, and here is a good recent article about it: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/30/skype-micr... The bullet point that stands out for me is this: • Problems…
One thing many people failed to take into account in the skype deal was that was cash sitting in overseas accounts and had microsoft repatriated those funds they would have been hit with a 30% tax or something on them. By buying an overseas asset they effectively got a huge discount on their money.
It was 30% off, I saved a fortune!
Re: America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Screw all you guys and your good memories, why can't I remember mine? :P
I remember when switching from ICQ to Microsoft Messenger thinking "good riddance". Messenger employed the not the least bit novel approach of letting users sign in using a self selected textual screen name.
My god those were awesome. A great friend of mine typed in his name, Ben LastName. It said it was taken, but how about Ovenproof Ben? Mine was also taken, how about Mucous Robin? Both have stuck. Its name generator was fantastically random.