How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

by Brian McCullough

Everything changed over the course of 1998. If you bought $1,000 worth of Yahoo and Amazon each at the time of their IPOs, over the course of 1998—merely twelve more calendar months—you would ring in the new year of 1999 to discover that your original $1,000 investment in Amazon was now worth $31,000 and your $1,000 worth of Yahoo stock had ballooned to $46,000. Turning a $2,000 investment into $77,000 is phenomenal on any time scale, but to do so in less than thirty months is unheard of. And the funny thing was, getting this sort of return wasn’t exactly rocket science. In the twelve months of 1998, Yahoo stock returned 584%, AOL 593% and Amazon 970%.5 These were three of the best-known, most talked-about stocks of the mid-nineties, widely heralded as the vanguard of the new economy that the Internet was supposedly bringing into existence. They were hardly needles in the haystack.