Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
March 31, 2012 02:00 pm GMT

Why Google Might Be Going to $0

googleEditors note:James Altucheris an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest books are I Was Blind But Now I See and FAQ ME.You can follow him on Twitter@jaltucher. Ken Lang could perform miracles. In 1990 we would head off to a bar near where we were going to graduate school for computer science, and we would bring a Go board. Then we would drink and play Go for five hours. At the end of the five hours, after a grueling battle over the board, I remember this one time when magically Ken would show up with two girls who were actually willing to sit down and hang out with two guys who had a GO BOARD in front of them. How did Ken do that? Fast forward: 1991, CMU asks me to leave graduate school, citing lack of maturity. The professor who threw me out still occasionally calls me up asking me when Im going to be mature enough. Fast forward: 1994, one of our classmates, Michael Mauldin is working on a database that automatically sorts by category pages his spider retrieves on the Internet. The name of his computer: lycos.cs.cmu.edu. Lycos eventually spins out of CMU, becomes the biggest seach engine, and goes public with a multi-billlion dollar valuation. Fast forward: Ken Lang starts a company called WiseWire. I was incredibly skeptical. I read through what the company is about. No way, I think to myself, that this is going to make any money. 1998: Ken files a patent that classified how search results and ad results are sorted based on the number of click-thrus an ad gets. He sells the company to Lycos for $40 million. Ken Lang becomes CTO of Lycos and they take over his patents.

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/CRFOjax0P28/

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article

Techcrunch

TechCrunch is a leading technology blog, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

More About this Source Visit Techcrunch