Jeff Bezos: The Web was growing at about 2,300 percent a year. I made a list of 20 different products that you might sell online. I picked books because books are very unusual in one respect. And that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category, by far. There are millions of different books active and in print. I was also looking for something that you could only do on the Web. And having a bookstore with universal selection is only possible on the Web. You could never do it with a paper catalogue. The paper catalogue would be the size of dozens of New York City phone books, and it would be out of date the second you printed it. And you could never do it in a physical store. You know, the largest book superstores carry about 150,000 titles, and there aren’t very many that big.
When we launched, we launched with over a million titles. There were countless snags. One of my friends figured out that you could order a negative quantity of books. And we would credit your credit card and then,  I guess, wait for you to deliver the books to us. We fixed that one very quickly.

The Internet auction site eBay was created in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar, a French-born Iranian computer programmer, and it now has some 276 million registered users in 39 countries. (Not everything can be bought on eBay; restrictions cover many items, including lottery tickets, locksmithing tools, and human body parts.)

Pierre Omidyar: By ’94, ’95, the first technology to make Web pages interactive had come out. I was really interested in the theory of markets, this idealistic theory that says if you have an efficient marketplace, then goods are traded at their fair value. So finally I came on this notion that with the Web, with the interactivity of it, we could actually create a place, a single market, where people from all over the world could come together and actually trade with full information on a level playing field and do business with one another regardless of who they were. And so that’s when I sat down, frankly, over Labor Day weekend in September of ’95, and wrote the original code for what I called Auction Web—very rudimentary.
I founded it on the notion that people were basically good, and if you give someone the benefit of the doubt, you’ll rarely be disappointed. I think what eBay has shown is that, in fact, you can trust a complete stranger.

Jeff Bezos: When we started out, we were packing on our hands and knees on these cement floors. One of the software engineers that I was packing next to was saying, You know, this is really killing my knees and my back. And I said to this person, I just had a great idea. We should get kneepads. And he looked at me like I was from Mars. And he said, Jeff, we should get packing tables.
We got packing tables the next day, and it doubled our productivity.

In 1994, Stanford classmates Jerry Yang and David Filo launched Yahoo, an early Web portal and search engine. It remains one of the most visited sites on the Internet.

Jerry Yang: The challenge was always trying to keep up with what users were expecting and what they wanted. We remember counting the number of different countries that used Yahoo in the early days, and it didn’t take too long before 90-plus countries around the world were using Yahoo without even our telling people about it. So it was just total word of mouth.

David Filo: When we first started, we had no revenue and we didn’t really have any definitive plans for how we would make money. It was probably six months after we started the company that we got our first check from advertising. In those early days there was obviously a big question whether we could really continue to support its development.

Craigslist, a network of online communities featuring mostly free classifieds, was set up in San Francisco in 1995 by Craig Newmark, a former software engineer. Craigslist today has some 40 million monthly users worldwide.

Craig Newmark: I really did grow up as a nerd. In high school I really did have thick black glasses taped together. I really did wear a plastic pocket protector. This is not an exaggeration. And I felt left out all the time. Nowadays, I remember that feeling, and I want everyone to be included, and that’s something we work on every day on the site.

In 1994, I was at Charles Schwab. I was looking around the Net, and I could see a lot of people helping each other out, and I thought I should do some of that. So I started a simple c.c. list, 10 or 12 people, told people about arts and technology events.

Then people started suggesting maybe putting out an occasional job or something to sell. And I said, Hey, how about apartments? And, boy, that worked out well until May of ’95, at which point the c.c.-list mechanism broke at about 240 addresses. I had to give it a new name. I was going to call it SF Events, but people around me said they already called it Craigslist, that I had inadvertently built a brand, and that I should stick with it.
I’d say our style is basically just, well, flea market. People have stuff to do, they’ve got to do it, no business-speak, just getting the job done. The site is about as mundane as you can make it. It deals with everyday life, but sometimes there are people who just really need to reach out to people, and sometimes our site works out for that. The best example might be the way people re-purposed our New Orleans site during Katrina, because immediately survivors started notifying their friends and family using our site to tell people where they wound up. At the same time, friends and family were looking for survivors by asking on the site, Hey, has anyone seen so-and-so?

One of the earliest ventures in online journalism was Slate magazine, created under the aegis of Microsoft by Michael Kinsley, a prominent columnist, a former editor of The New Republic, and a former co-host of the television program Crossfire.

Michael Kinsley: I read in Newsweek that [Microsoft C.E.O.] Steve Ballmer was quoted saying he’s looking to hire, quote, big-name journalists, unquote, to sort of shepherd their journalism on the Web. This was the summer of 1995. I knew him slightly, so I e-mailed him and said, Am I by any chance a big-name journalist? And next thing I knew I was out at Microsoft.
People thought I was being very daring. David Gergen—I remember telling him, and his famous google eyes popped open. He couldn’t believe it, that anyone would essentially give up television as well as print to go out into the Internet.
The only thing we were up against was Salon. They were our only competition. Oh, but dealing with Microsoft was—Microsoft was great in the sense that they did the key thing, which is pay for it. But getting them acquainted with a writer’s contract! They originally wanted us to make every writer sign three different documents which warranted the accuracy of everything they said and indemnified Microsoft. They even wanted us to get anyone interviewed to sign a release indemnifying Microsoft.
So there were 18 different ways that they just didn’t get it. On the other hand, on the committee that interviewed me was my future wife, so Microsoft is forgiven everything.

Vinod Khosla created Sun Microsystems with Stanford classmates Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and Bill Joy. He later joined the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s premier investment shops.

Vinod Khosla: The media people essentially did not think the Internet would be important or disruptive. In 1996, I got together the C.E.O.’s of 9 of the 10 major newspaper companies in America in a single room to propose something called the New Century Network. It was the C.E.O.’s of The Washington Post and The New York Times and Gannett and Times Mirror and Tribune and I forget who else. They couldn’t convince themselves that a Google, a Yahoo, or an eBay would be important, or that eBay could ever replace classified advertising.

Pierre Omidyar: I remember clearly in the early days when there was a community of Barbie-doll collectors. They found eBay sort of all at once. And I’ll never forget, we had an early focus group in late ’96, and one of the guys who came to our focus group was a truckdriver—he actually did long-haul truckdriving across the country—and when people were introducing themselves, going around the room, he says, I’m a truckdriver and I collect Barbies.
And then later there were Beanie Babies. Around the time that we went public we disclosed in our filing that Beanie Babies accounted for 8 percent of the inventory on the site.

The Internet made possible new forms of self-promotion. A former model on The Price Is Right and a “fembot” in the Mike Myers film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Cindy Margolis shot to fame in the 1990s as the world’s “most downloaded woman” (according to the Guinness Book of World Records).

Cindy Margolis: A lot of my success had to do with timing. In 1996, it was all about the Internet. I recognized it, embraced it, and went for it with everything I had. I wasn’t just a small part of Internet history. Hell, I started it all. Who do you think coined the phrase “cyberbuddies”? Before MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook—even before Yahoo and Google—became household names, Extra, the television show, took photographs from several of my recent swimsuit shoots and posted them on America Online. An idea started forming in this crazy little head of mine. If people were that excited about seeing my pictures, then why couldn’t I just post them myself? As it turned out, I could.

The Smoking Gun, a Web site that posts primary documents such as legal filings, arrest records, and mug shots, was created in 1997 by William Bastone, the former Mafia reporter for The Village Voice; his wife, Barbara Glauber, a graphic designer; and Daniel Green, a writer and editor.

Bill Bastone: When you obtain police records or F.B.I. memos or affidavits, oftentimes, for a print journalist, you end up using small portions of documents and the remainder still ends up being unbelievably fascinating. The narrative can be, you know, funny and profane and, maybe, not suitable for a family newspaper.
My idea was always that there can be a life for this material online. If I personally get a kick out of these documents, there could very well be other people out there who would find it interesting or bizarre, or whatever—they’re looking at things that the normal person wouldn’t be able to obtain.
We launched the site on April 17, 1997. I didn’t have an e-mail address. I remember actually faxing out like 40 press releases on paper. Boy, what a retard: I’m sending you a fax to let you know about this Web site that we just started.

The impeachment controversy led to a great deal of online political organizing and fund-raising, on both right and left. One of the most significant new ventures was the liberal group MoveOn.org, started by computer entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, co-founders of Berkeley Systems.

Joan Blades: Wes and I were in a Chinese restaurant hearing yet another table talking about the insanity of having our government obsessed with the scandal when there were other, important things the government might be doing. And we wrote a one-sentence petition: Congress must immediately censure the president and move on to pressing issues facing the nation.
We sent that out to under a hundred of our friends and family, in essence to sign it and pass it along. And within a week we had a hundred thousand people sign that petition. This was in ’98. I don’t think anything like that had ever happened before on the Internet. And very shortly we had half a million people. So we had the proverbial tiger by the tail.

Wes Boyd: I think the biggest shock for us, and it was from the very beginning, was not: Oh, boy, these big people are paying attention to us. It was that there are no big people; it’s up to all of us. And that’s a very scary thing, you know, when you realize what a vacuum there is in many ways in politics.