I worked for the guy who invented Webcrawler. The company has gone through several buyouts since I worked there, but Webcrawler still exists, it’s just part of a much more complex product and is now part of Microsoft’s Intranet program. At the time I worked there, the main use was for indexing and searching large corporate databases.
I worked at this company during the dot com boom and it was one of those companies started up by a handful of people that all got wildly rich. I learned they had started the business on credit card debt; there were about 30 credit cards in the business name and they had a spreadsheet to make sure the payments were made on schedule for each and every one. The owner’s sister was responsible for making all the payments on time.
The people who started the company became millionaires on their stock options but it was weird to see all the people who founded the business getting shoved out during the corporate buyout. I think that for all the money that was being shoveled at them, they had a lot of pride in their work and their product and the money was not that much of a comfort. I just saw this again at another company recently where the owner got even richer in a buyout - seems like he lost more than he gained.
