EGroups

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.

History

The company originally started by Scott Hassan in January, 1997, as an email archiving service called FindMail. Carl V. Page, Jr. joined the company part-time in May 1997. In December, 1997, Hassan 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 a venture finance round of $810,000 from Atlas Venture in May 1998. The post-money valuation was set at $4.5m. In June, 1998, the company was renamed 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 instead to take $5.1 million more investment money from Sequoia Capital.

In November 1999, ONElist and eGroups merged and started work on an initial public offering, as eGroups.com, with 13 million users exchanging more than 1.3 billion email messages each month. In January 2000, the company raised a further $42 million and filed a S1 with the SEC on March 23, 2000.

Under eGroups, each username could have one email address and no more, and thus someone who had an email address at home and another email address at work, had to have two eGroups usernames.

In August 2000 with 18 million users, the company was bought by Yahoo! for $413m in a stock deal and became Yahoo! Groups. Under Yahoo a username can have two or more email addresses.