Where 5 Internet Businesses Got Started
by Yolandi on 25/01/10 at 2:12 pm
1 comment
Ever wondered where Google, Youtube and Facebook got started? Michael Dunlop posted an article on where his favourite top internet businesses were started and I thought to share 5 of these businesses with you. Quite a few of these businesses were started in dorm rooms and bedrooms with just laptop and an idea.
1. Facebook
You all should know Facebook by now. Mark Zuckerberg started the social network from his dorm room at Harvard with classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes in the beginning of 2004. In 2007, Facebook Inc. sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft for $240 million. In other words, by this time Facebook had a market value of $15 billion and last year it was estimated that Facebook has attained over 350 million users.
2. Google
In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded their own search engine known as Backrub in a garage. They decided the name was not suitable and after some brainstorming they came up with Google – a play on the word “googol: which is a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages.
3. Youtube
YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal at the time. After that fateful dinner party, where Hurley and Chen wanted to create a simpler way to share their videos of the night, they went to work at the office creating the answer. In December 2005 Youtube was officially launched. By that time they were serving over three million videos a day.
4. eBay
In 1997, Pierre Omidyar sat down over a long weekend to write the original computer code for what eventually became the auction site eBay. The first name eBay used was Echo Bay Technology. When the company tried to register the domain name echobay.com, they found that it was already in use. They shortened the name to eBay.com and the Website was born. As of July 2008, Omidyar’s 178 million eBay shares were worth around $4.45 billion.
5. LinkedIn
LinkedIn was officially founded in 2003and was launched when the five founders invited about 350 of their most important contacts to join the professional social network. LinkedIn reached profitability in March 2006. At the end of the first month, LinkedIn had a total of 4,500 members.
I hope this inspires you to believe in turning your ideas into a reality. This shows you that it’s possible and that all you need to do is to get started.
Yolandi Janse van Rensburg writes about social media, marketing, life and, of course, cars. We say “of course” because Yolandi is nuts about anything on 4 wheels. Besides moonlighting as the Heavy Chef girl at World Wide Creative, Yolandi runs Autofemme, a blog about cars, as a business on the side. View more articles by Yolandi.
Tags: facebook
Tyron Bache
Jan 26th, 2010
Hopefully I will send you guys a picture of my old room some day..