theGlobe.com was an

internet startup The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

founded in 1995TheGlobe.com to Cut Staff, Fold Sites
at news.com. Dated August 3, 2001. Retrieved on June 27, 2007. by

Cornell Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

students

Stephan Paternot Stephan Paternot is an IT entrepreneur, known as a co-founder of theGlobe.com, the internet's first social network, during the late nineties dot-com bubble. He is currently the CEO of Slated, an online crowdsourcing marketplace for film financing ...

and Todd Krizelman. A

social networking A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

service, theGlobe.com made headlines by going public on November 13, 1998 and posting the largest first day gain of any

IPO An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

in history up to that date.TheGlobe.com's IPO One for the Books
at news.com. Dated November 13, 1998. Retrieved on June 27, 2007. Part of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

, the company's stock price collapsed the next year, and the company retrenched for several years before ceasing operations in 2008.

History

Early success

While undergraduates at Cornell, Paternot and Krizelman encountered a primitive

chatroom The term chat room, or chatroom (and sometimes group chat; abbreviated as GC), is primarily used to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology, ranging from r ...

on the university's computer network and quickly became engrossed.The Story of Bubble Boy
, review of Stephan Paternot's book, A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business, Excess, Success and Reckoning at smartmoney.com. Dated August 6, 2001. Retrieved on June 27, 2007. Realizing the business potential, the two raised $15,000 over the 1994

Christmas Christmas is an annual festival commemorating Nativity of Jesus, the birth of Jesus, Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people Observance of Christmas by country, around t ...

break and purchased an

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

Internet Server. They founded a programming company, WebGenesis, and spent the next few months programming what would become their primary website. theGlobe.com went live April 1, 1995, and attracted over 44,000 visits within the first month.A Student-created Company is the Talk of the Web
, Cornell Chronicle. Dated April 11, 1996. Retrieved on June 27, 2007. They readily recruited talent from the Cornell computer science department and had 17 employees by the site's first anniversary. The pair used the popularity of the site and the increasing interest in the internet in 1997 to secure $20 million in financing through Dancing Bear Investments. As a result, Paternot and Krizelman received salaries in excess of $100,000 and revenues from preferred shares sales of $500,000 each. Both were 23 years old at the time. In 1998, plans were made to take the company public. On Friday, November 13, 1998, theGlobe.com issued its IPO. The stock's target share price was initially set at $9, yet the first trade was at $87 and the price climbed as high as $97 before closing at $63.50. At the end of the trading day, the company had set a record for IPOs with a 606% increase over the initial share price. The company floated 3.1 million shares, raising $27.9 million and bringing its

market capitalization Market capitalization, sometimes referred to as market cap, is the total value of a publicly traded company's outstanding common shares owned by stockholders. Market capitalization is equal to the market price per common share multiplied by t ...

to over $840 million. Based on their holdings, the young founders were worth close to $100 million each.Spinning theglobe: The Net Bubble Through the Eyes of Callow Youth
, review of Stephan Paternot's book, A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business, Excess, Success and Reckoning at thestreet.com. Dated September 1, 2001. Retrieved on June 27, 2007. During the late 1990s, theGlobe.com expanded into gaming, purchasing ''

Computer Games A personal computer game, also known as a PC game or computer game, is a type of video game played on a personal computer (PC) rather than a video game console or arcade machine. Its defining characteristics include: more diverse and user-deter ...

'' magazine, happypuppy.com (a computer gaming site), and Chips and Bits, an online store for computer and console gaming.

Decline and downfall

As the fortunes of a number of very young people grew almost overnight, the public and the media began to scrutinize these new economy wunderkinds. In 1999,

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by the M ...

filmed Paternot during a night on the town. He was shown in shiny vinyl pants, dancing on a table at a trendy

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

night club with his girlfriend, model Jennifer Medley. During the piece, he made the statement, "Got the girl. Got the money. Now I'm ready to live a disgusting, frivolous life." He was derisively dubbed "the CEO in the plastic pants" and became a visible symbol of the excesses of dot-com millionaires. That year also marked the change in the momentum of the

dot com boom The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...

and theGlobe.com's stock price was hit heavily. As investors grew increasingly skeptical of the "new economy", share prices began to decline rapidly. theGlobe.com saw its share price drop from a high of $97 to less than 10 cents and its market capitalization shrink by more than 95% to around $4 million in 2001. In 2000, Paternot and Krizelman were forced out of the company and it was taken over by a former VP of the AICPA, but the company, which had never turned a profit, was forced to cut back severely. theGlobe.com closed its flagship site and laid off 50% of its employees in August 2001. The company continued hosting some of its partner sites and publishing ''Computer Games'', but the domain of www.theglobe.com displayed nothing more than an informational message about the site's termination until 2003. That year, theGlobe.com launched GloPhone, a

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...

phone service similar to

Skype Skype () is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, deb ...

, and used its eponymous domain as the product's website. Although teamed with networking site

Friendster Friendster was a social network game based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003.Eric Eldon, August 4, 2008.Friendster raises $20 million, nabs a Googler to be CEO VentureBeat. Retrieved December 4, 2 ...

, reviews were bad and sales were poor. A lawsuit was filed by

Sprint Nextel Sprint Corporation was an American telecommunications company. Before it merged with T-Mobile US on April 1, 2020, it was the fourth-largest mobile network operator in the United States, serving 54.3 million customers as of June 30, 2019. The co ...

for patent infringement. theGlobe.com had continued publishing ''Computer Games'' and it was considered one of the top 3 PC gaming magazines in the US (along with

Ziff Davis Ziff Davis, Inc. is an American digital media and internet company. First founded in 1927 by William Bernard Ziff Sr. and Bernard George Davis, the company primarily owns technology-oriented media websites, online shopping-related services, an ...

' ''

Games for Windows Games for Windows is a discontinued brand owned by Microsoft and introduced in 2006 to coincide with the release of the Windows Vista operating system. The brand itself represents a standardized technical certification program and online service ...

'' and Future Publishing's ''

PC Gamer ''PC Gamer'' is a magazine and website founded in the United Kingdom in 1993 devoted to PC gaming and published monthly by Future plc. The magazine has several regional editions, with the UK and US editions becoming the best selling PC games ma ...

'').Game Mags Gone Because of MySpace Spam?
Dated March 13, 2007. Retrieved on June 27, 2007. The company expanded its print enterprises to include '' Now Playing'' magazine (2005) and '' MMO Games'' magazine (2006), publications focusing on popular entertainment and

massively multiplayer A massively multiplayer online game (MMOG or more commonly MMO) is an online video game with a large number of players, often hundreds or thousands, on the same server. MMOs usually feature a huge, persistent open world, although there are ...

gaming, respectively. theGlobe.com made a decision to send unsolicited messages to MySpace.com users and was subsequently sued under the

CAN-SPAM The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 is a law passed in 2003 establishing the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail. The law requires the Federal Tra ...

act and a similar anti-spam law in California. A California court ruled against theGlobe.com. Subsequently, the magazines stopped publication, Chips & Bits' home page announced the site's closing, and GloPhone ceased operations on March 13, 2007. The anticipation of a large federal judgement (estimated as high as $120 million) effectively spelled the end of theGlobe.com.

Lawsuits

The company was subject to six putative shareholder class action lawsuits. It was sued by vendors to the discontinued VoIP business. And in October 2011, it was sued in connection with the 2005 sale of a subsidiary called SendTec to RelationServ Media, which company subsequently failed.

Tralliance

On May 9, 2005, the company acquired Tralliance Corporation, a company which maintains the

.travel The domain name .travel is a top-level domain in the Domain Name System of the Internet. .travel domain names are available to individuals and / or organizations who provides or plans to provide services, products or content in or to the travel in ...

top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...

. By mid-2007, the domain theglobe.com redirected to the home page of Tralliance. The company then sold Tralliance on September 29, 2008. theglobe received

earn-out Earnout or earn-out refers to a pricing structure in mergers and acquisitions where the sellers must "earn" part of the purchase price based on the performance of the business following the acquisition. Description Earnouts are often employed when ...

rights from Tralliance Registry Management, which will constitute the only source of future revenue for theglobe. With the sale of Tralliance, theglobe.com became a

shell company A shell corporation is a company or corporation that exists only on paper and has no office and no employees, but may have a bank account or may hold passive investments or be the registered owner of assets, such as intellectual property, or s ...

with no operations or assets other than its rights in the Tralliance earn-out. The company operates out of borrowed offices, and as of March 1, 2012, it reported having no employees other than its executive officers, each of whom devoted "very limited time" to TheGlobe's business, and received no compensation for doing so.10K filing for fiscal year ended December 31, 2011

As a shell

The company's stock continues to trade on the

OTC Bulletin Board The OTC (Over-The-Counter) Bulletin Board or OTCBB was a United States quotation medium operated by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) for its subscribing members. FINRA closed the OTCBB on November 8, 2021. The board was used for ...

under the symbol TGLO. As of the company's 2011 annual report, it reported $6426 in assets versus $3.2 million in liabilities. Management has stated that the Tralliance earn-out must perform very well, or they will need to raise additional capital, or the company will file for bankruptcy. On December 31, 2017, Delfin Midstream LLC, an

LNG Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is natural gas (predominantly methane, CH4, with some mixture of ethane, C2H6) that has been cooled down to liquid form for ease and safety of non-pressurized storage or transport. It takes up about 1/600th the volu ...

exporter, purchased almost 71 percent of the outstanding shares of TheGlobe.com as a vehicle for possibly going public through a

reverse merger A reverse takeover (RTO), reverse merger, or reverse IPO is the acquisition of a public company by a private company so that the private company can bypass the lengthy and complex process of going public. Sometimes, conversely, the public compan ...

. In November 2022, TheGlobe.com reported that it expects to continue operating as a public company for the next twelve months with funding from Delfin.TheGlobe.com 10Q filing, November 3, 2022, p.7 Frederick Jones (a founder of

Glencore Glencore plc is a Swiss multinational commodity trading and mining company with headquarters in Baar, Switzerland. Glencore's oil and gas head office is in London and its registered office is in Saint Helier, Jersey. The current company was c ...

) from 2018 continues to serve as

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

and

CFO The chief financial officer (CFO) is an officer of a company or organization that is assigned the primary responsibility for managing the company's finances, including financial planning, management of financial risks, record-keeping, and financ ...

References

External links

theGlobe.com's
current website.

with Paternot and Krizelman {{DEFAULTSORT:Globe.Com Defunct online companies of the United States Defunct companies based in New York City Companies traded over-the-counter in the United States 1995 establishments in New York (state) 2008 disestablishments in New York (state) Dot-com bubble 1998 initial public offerings Internet properties established in 1995 Internet properties disestablished in 2008