This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Chi-Hua Chien: Historical Take on the Internet Revolution" created on November 24, 2010. It features Dan Rosensweig discussing the evolution of the Internet, his personal experiences with early technology, and his career decisions, including his time at CNET and Yahoo.
Chapters
And you all grew up with the Internet, right? You've never known a day without the Internet. You've never known a day without broadband. You never know what a day feels like without your iPhones. You've never known a day without YouTube. You know, you're a generation. This is what you take for granted. My generation back then, I was at the beginning of when email came and it was something called MCI mail. And I remember I signed up for it and I got 14 messages in one day. And I'm like, shit, how am I going to keep up with this? Got 14 messages, got a fax machine and voicemail all at the same time. I'm like, oh my God, working sucks. So that was at the beginning of all this stuff. So I had no interest in moving to California and I met Terry Semmel, who I absolutely fell in love with at the time and changed my life, as did Jerry. And they came a calling. And basically the pitch was, do you want to be an 80 year old Jewish guy sitting at your house in Scarsdale saying what if? Or do you want to be a 40 year old guy sitting in California running Yahoo with me and saying, here's how we could change the world? And so I actually debated that for a while because, you know, I don't mind being a grandfather sitting on the front porch. But the attraction was everybody had given up on the Internet right at that point. ZDNet and CNET had merged. I was the president of CNETworking with a great guy and great friend, Shelby Bonnie, who's just one of the great unsung unknown entrepreneurs. He's now got a company called Whiskey Media, which is doing great. And this was the largest technology site in the world and it was very exciting. But the market had collapsed, the stock had dropped. We had to lay off 800 people. Dropped from 100 bucks to four and a half bucks. Four and a half bucks? Yeah. That's why I went broke. Yeah, that sucks. Sell stock early is one of the lessons that I will impart with you today. It's like growing up in my generation, the big thing was, could you get 100,000 miles first in a year and then you realize what an idiot I am. Who the hell wants to travel that much? And so the early Internet people was like, I'll never sell a share. And 99% of the companies went to zero. So think about that.
