EGroups

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

eGroups.com was an email list management web site. The site allowed users to create their own mailing lists and allowed others to sign up for membership on the list. The web site provided archives of the messages as well as list management functionality. Each group also had a shared calendar, file space, group chat, and a simple database. It was bought by Yahoo! and became part of Yahoo! Groups.

The company originally started by Scott Hassan in January, 1997, as an email archiving service called FindMail. Carl Page, the brother of Google co-founder Larry Page, joined the company part-time in May 1997. In December, 1997, Scott decided to add the ability to host free mailing lists and called the new product MakeList.com. Martin Roscheisen joined as CEO in March 1998. Makelist.com quickly grew to 250,000 users before taking funding of $810K from Atlas Venture in May 1998. The post-money valuation was set at $4.5M. In June, 1998, the company was renamed to eGroups.com. In October, 1998, with 1.2 million users (growing at 12,000 users per day), the company had an offer on the table from Excite for $40M but decided to take $5.1M more investment money from Sequoia Capital.

In November 1999, Onelist and eGroups merged and started work on going public. The combined company was called eGroups.com, and it had 13 million users exchanging more than 1.3 billion email messages per month. In January 2000, the company raised another $42M and filed a S1 with the SEC in March 23, 2000.[1]

In August 2000 with 18 million users, the company was purchased by Yahoo! for $432M in a stock deal and became part of Yahoo! Groups [2]. Scott Hassan's 5.7% stake in eGroups was worth approximately $24 million at the time of the acquisition [3].