What Silicon Valley’s Orgy of Christmas Party Excess says about America

YahooSimon Black – Do you remember the first website you ever visited?

I do. It was Yahoo!

The year was 1995. Toy Story was the #1 movie in the world. The Oklahoma City bombings claimed the lives of 168 people. War and genocide raged in the ongoing Balkan conflict.

America Online and Prodigy, both early Internet pioneers, offered the public access to the “information superhighway” for the first time.

And a couple of engineers from Stanford University formally incorporated their new ‘search engine’ and brought it online as Yahoo.

It was mesmerizing. The site was a treasure trove of information with vast lists of other websites pertaining to every category under the sun.

And the search feature could help you find exactly what you were looking for. It was amazing.

The first time I used it I remember feeling like I had been transported into the future.

Yahoo quickly became one of the kings of Silicon Valley, drawing in more visitors than any other website in the world.

The following year they went public at a price of $13 per share. Investors loved the company and were convinced it would go to the moon.

And it did. For a time. Yahoo’s stock price peaked at $118 on January 3, 2000, marking almost to the day the top of the dot-com bubble.

Fast forward nearly 16 years and the company is a shell of its former self. Continue reading