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When one of the Sac Street dealers told the Mercury News that he was just another businessman in the Bay Area, his specific references might have been lost on the average reader. “You expect me to work at McDonald’s or Home Depot?” he asked reporter Sean Webby a couple of years after the shopping c…

In the following years, before the Facebook IPO, Milner vehicles DST and Mail.ru increased their positions in Facebook, pleasing their investment partners by offering to take their shares off their hands if they lost their nerve, and pleasing Facebook by financing an 8–10 percent stake in the compa…

As Google grew, it combined the monopolistic business strategy of Microsoft with the disrupting scraper speed of Napster. It’s a potent combination, and it left Google strong enough to defend its book scanning from the Authors Guild all the way to the top courts. Not even Bill Gates himself could h…

The real problem with the delivery dot-coms was that the people running them didn’t understand their historical context. In 2013, Peter Relan, the founding head of technology at Webvan, published a post on TechCrunch discussing why the company failed and how the next round of delivery start-ups cou…

Despite some victories on the cultural and legal fronts, Netscape had to match Microsoft and give up on charging users in the meantime. Software tended toward free, and the internet was made of software. Netscape pivoted to advertising, which became the standard move for companies with nothing to s…