It could have been me. I’m glad it wasn’t me.
Updated at 6:10 p.m. ET on May 18, 2022
“What do you think of this company Netscape?” my parents asked. It was 1995, and they had called me on the landline, which back then just meant the telephone. Netscape was a company that made a graphical web browser—the web browser, really—but gave it away for free. Its income statement showed only modest revenue (and substantial losses). The web was new and exciting but unproven, so I steered my folks away from Netscape’s IPO.
Hahaha. Netscape stock doubled its $28 offering price the day it went public, making its founders half billionaires and ushering in the dot-com era. By the end of the year, the stock hit $174, and when AOL acquired the company in 1999, just before the dot-com crash, the deal was worth $10 billion.