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good find. The only SEC document that was a pleasure to read was the Google S1. Lets see how this one is.
by prakash 18y ago
good find. The only SEC document that was a pleasure to read was the Google S1. Lets see how this one is.
- byrneseyeview 18y agoIt's not fun at all. I recommend it only for the incurably curious. The only interesting part is how fast Viaweb was growing -- for all of 1997, they had $343K in revenue; for the first quarter of 1998, it was $290K. You don't have to extrapolate that too far to see a great deal for Yahoo.
- nostrademons 18y agoThe other interesting thing was their balance sheet vs. cash flow statement. For the first quarter 98, they had $106K in cash. In the same period, they burned $200K on operating activities, and only avoided bankruptcy ($14K at the beginning of the quarter!) with a $300K cash infusion from investors. They would've been dead in another month and a half. Talk about playing chicken!
- byrneseyeview 18y agoI think PG has mentioned this in an essay (and in the Founders at Work interview). They were running out of cash during the Yahoo negotiations. Edit: "It was really close, too. When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper." http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
- pg 18y agoIt wasn't quite that close. I think we may have had a line of credit we could draw on.
- akkartik 18y agoDid Viaweb have employees by the end?
- pg 18y agoYes, around 20.
- furiouslol 18y agoSo at what point of time do you and your cofounder stop developing Viaweb yourself and delegate it to your employees?