AOL became so proficient at doing these deals, so rapacious, in fact, that it gained a reputation for aggressiveness that, until recently, only Microsoft had enjoyed. AOL’s army of deal-makers were known internally as the company’s “hunter-gatherers,” because they descended on the dot-coms like predators and made them offers they couldn’t refuse. As one anonymous dot-com executive remembered AOL’s tactics, “For weeks it was, ‘You’re great, you’re great, you’re great,’ and then one day [we had to] give them every last dollar we had in the bank and 20 percent of our company.” Another dot-commer
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