Comment by drumdance
10 years ago
I was one of the first 100k ICQ users. I was working on a similar idea at the time and so tried every chat client that I came across. I was really impressed with ICQ and somehow tracked down the phone number of one of the developers. I called him. He was an Israeli living with his sister in NYC. I think there were three other people involved, all developers. We chatted for a bit about the software and I remember telling him I was impressed.
Any, several couple months later they sold to AOL for something like $250 million. I was living in Chicago at the time and coincidentally the Hancock building had just sold for ~$280 million. I remember thinking that four guys had created as much value in a year as thousands of construction workers and real estate managers had created in three decades.
I actually talked to one of the developers recently thanks to an university course (Economics of Innovation).
Their story is very interesting :) , the founders were Arik Vardi, Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir.
We talked to Yair, from what he told us, they were using dial-up at the time, and they had to disconnect or use another phone line to know whether the others were online, and so they discovered a need for a tool to find if somebody was online, and enable communication between connected users.
They weren't very finance-savvy, fortunately for them one of their parents was, and he handled all the fundraising and stuff.