With that exit money the Viaweb founders (Paul Graham, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell) went on to start a rather well known seed accelerator and a popular hacker news aggregation site.
Yahoo stores, once the pioneer that unleashed ecommerce in US, is a joke in ecommerce inner circles. It could have dominated ecommerce, had it not been for Yahoo management's complete and utter neglect of the platform after acquisition.
The main reason Yahoo Stores is in business today is because it's difficult to move your ecommerce platforms, once you are beginning to grow. Despite that stickiness, there is a daily bloodletting of Yahoo Stores defecting to the new, nimbler and customer-centric enablers such as Shopify. Users are frustrated at the zero innovation at Yahoo Stores.
Marissa Meyer has never brought up Yahoo Stores as one of Yahoo's key properties. I suspect it's because Yahoo Stores is so small today that it just doesn't register at her level. That should not be. There are probably only 40,000 Yahoo stores today (the business started 18 years ago). Compare that with Shopify (started 9 years ago), which is slated to sail past 80,000 stores this year.
Check out this almost $6 billion redirect, http://broadcast.com.
Hope the Geocities founders cashed out in time (and weren't locked into unvested shares). I'd hate to get a tenth of the agreed upon price for my company.
http://investmentxyz.blogspot.com/2006/05/cubans-collar-anat...
Some companies even prohibit selling covered calls, regardless of strike price. (A deep enough in the money call behaves somewhat like a put.)
I'm a little surprised that Cuban would be locked out of selling the shares but able to enter into the collar. I'm sure it was legit (since it's well known), but still...
Many codebases end up pretty different after 15 years. It doesn't mean the original codebase wasn't a useful starting point. It's lower risk to adapt and improve based on customer feedback than figure out, "what should a build-your-own e-commerce tool do?" in the first place.