theGlobe.com

» see theglobe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

in 1998 i was fourteen, online from turkey on a 33.6k modem, and theglobe.com's IPO was something i would have read about months later in a magazine if i read about it at all. theglobe was the kind of website cornell students built for cornell students, ported into a us community portal that competed with geocities and tripod for the personal-homepage demographic. stephan paternot and todd krizelman started it as undergraduates in 1995 with 15,000 dollars they had raised over the previous christmas break and an apple internet server. by the end of the first month it had 44,000 visitors, mostly recruited from their own campus.

the product was a community portal. members could build a profile and host a small personal homepage on a subdomain, with chatrooms attached for the in-site community piece. by 1997 the founders had raised 20 million dollars in private financing and were drawing six-figure salaries plus half-a-million-dollar share buyouts at age 23. the company never had a clear revenue model. the bet was that a young community network with chat and homepages would print money on banner ads once broadband arrived. the IPO was supposed to fund the wait.

the IPO date was november 13, 1998. bear stearns priced the offering at 9 dollars a share, a number the underwriters thought was already aggressive. the first trade printed at 87. the stock peaked at 97 and closed at 63.50 for a one-day gain of 606 percent. that record stood as the largest first-day IPO pop in history at the moment of close. cnbc had paternot on air the same week in a black vinyl shirt saying "got the girl, got the money, now i'm ready to live a disgusting, frivolous life." the clip became the b-roll the financial press cut to whenever it wanted to illustrate dot-com excess.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it actually ended ~

the operating business never caught up to the share price. through 1999 and 2000 theglobe.com burned cash on ad sales infrastructure that did not produce ad revenue at the rate the cap table required. the founders were forced out of executive roles in 2000 by the board. by 2001 the stock was trading below ten cents and the market cap had shrunk by 95 percent to roughly 4 million dollars. the company laid off half its staff that year. there was no rescue acquirer. there was no pivot that worked. the broader bust took the rest.

what was left of the company spent the mid-2000s as a holding shell with a tiny voip subsidiary called glophone, which itself ceased operating in march 2007. in august 2008 the parent corporation stopped operating altogether and continued only as a publicly traded vehicle with no employees and no product. it has been delisted and reused as a reverse-merger vessel several times since. the website itself does not exist as a destination anymore.

~ what it left ~

the 606 percent number. every retrospective on the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s leans on that single trading day as the visual peak. paternot wrote a book in 2001 called "a very public offering" that became a financial-press standard for what raising too much too fast on no revenue actually looked like from inside the building. the book sold reasonably well and the founders both ended up fine personally, but the company they built was used by every later observer as the warning shot for what an irrational IPO market could do. when ai-boom IPO commentary started up in the mid-2020s, theglobe.com was the first comparison point reached for in almost every column.

the personal-homepage product itself was unremarkable next to geocities or tripod, both of which actually got bought rather than just delisted. theglobe's footprint in internet history is not really what users did on it. it is the chart of one trading day in november 1998 and the cnbc clip from later that same week.

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