Dec 23 2009
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Viral Loop
Read Adam Penenberg’s Viral Loop last night. Verdict: mosty unoriginal, but pretty readable of some valley/startup history. A good history of HotOrNot in particular. The book relied too much on second-hand sources from Andrew Chen’s blog and Sarah Lacy’s Once Your Lucky, Twice Your Good.
Fun factoid on eBay history. According to the book, eBay stood for “Echo Bay”. The site, orginally called, Auction Web, was launched on labor day wekend in 1995. Omidyar ran it as a free service, during his nights and weekends, until May 1996. By then, site traffic had dramatically increased his hosting bills, and he was forced to ask for money from auctions, which came via the mail.
