Originally Posted by LegendaryLars

2. What happend with the webtv deal?


Ok so I was running cyberzine.com and I took a wrong turn down a road one day in 1994. At the end of this road was a store and on the store was a huge sign that said SYSTEM V internet highway.. This was very unusual hardly anyone even know what the interent was in 1994 and to see a huge sign even more crazy. So I pulled over mind you I was 25 and still wet behind the ears. I walk in and there are like 3 guys running this unix house. I tell them about my site and at that time you gotta understand like I am 1 listing out of like 500 on yahoo. At that time is was Jakebono.stanford.edu there was no yahoo yet but that was it.. So the guy says I know your work I have seen it and think its good. So they say hey you should team up with us. After much wrangling I entered into a partnership with these guys. everything was kewl. One of the guys was a gold medalist in swimming, and he had the gift of gab. We were all ready to move into the netcom building netcom was a dial up ISP one of the first big nationwide ones and we had ties to them. The day we moved all our stuff in the swimmer guy got pissed about something snuck in in the middle of the night and walked with the equipment. I ended up with all his stock in the company since I took over all his work. My partner had registered the name webtv.com and we started doing buisness as this name for our design and hosting company. About 6 months into this company 2 guys came one day and offered to buy the name for 15K My partner said no thank you. We ended up changing the name of the company to IPP.COM internet presence providers, and we let the webtv sitre just be like a co brand. but pushed everyone to IPP.COM some years went bye and the 2 guys came back an said we are webtv give us the name. And they started to sue my partner. Somewhere in there being the dumb fuck i am said you should just have webtv.com since you were the one who originally bought it. anyway long story short because we did buisness as that name we had first right on the name and they had dick. They ended up settling. And i told my partner he was settling too cheap. The next day after he settled Microsoft bought the company they were just waiting on this one deal to go down in order to close th 400 million buck deal with microsoft. hahah he had them by the balls and let it go. He still made out good but he could a done better and i got LARSED. IPP was eventually sold to a public company and I made a nice chucnk of change in tthe hosting biz long before anyone even knew what hosting was. That was the most work I ever did for the least ammount of money though !