Today we continue my efforts to preserve the history of the ISP industry. Today it feels like the Internet is simply all around us all the time, but there are amazing entrepreneurial stories about how that crucial infrastructure was laid. Today we talk to Sonic founder Dane Jasper, who can not only give us the history of the industry, but the present day as well, as Sonic is still a thriving and important independent ISP.

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20 years ago, the acclaimed documentarian Doug Block released a landmark film, Home Page. Doug’s documentary accidentally chronicled the birth of blogging, featuring several people we’ve talked to on this very show, including Justin Hall. But the documentary also captured a moment in time, the web going mainstream, the beginnings of the dotcom bubble, the early days of Wired, Hotwired and Suck and also so many of the things I ask people about on here regularly. How people learned to live online, to begin to port all of modern life over to the digital. Well, Home Page is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a re-release, and starting this week, you can watch it yourself everywhere films are gettable, including iTunes. Today we speak to Doug Block about this amazing movie that I think is one of the best historical records of the era we have been interrogating for nearly 5 years on this podcast. Go watch Home Page yourself, and check out The D-word, Doug’s community for documentarians, at D-word.com.

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Dan Maccarone is a digital design veteran, websites, products, strategy. He's got some amazing stories about the dotcom bubble, about the aftermath, and the rise of Web 2.0. He shares some unique design lessons but also, the story of the birth of Hulu, which I don't think has really been covered anywhere before.

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Part two of the WSJ's online adventures intersect with several other stories we've covered on here over the years.

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We’ve had a couple of people come on here to discuss how the New York Times got online, but the spiritual yin to their yang is the Wall Street Journal and we haven’t done enough to explore their path to embracing the internet. It’s worth doing that because they embraced a different model from basically day one. Almost alone among the web media pioneers, the Journal went the subscription route. So, we’re going to talk to Rich Jaroslovksy, who headed the team that brought the Journal online, to see why they went that route, to learn about the path to the web and much more.

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It’s bothered me for a while that over the 5 years or so of this podcast, we haven’t focused very much on some corners of the history. For example… the legal side? Copyright law? Intellectual property law? How much have we talked about disruption and piracy and filesharing and all that stuff? So, I spoke to Richard Chapo, who has been doing Internet Law since the web went mainstream. We talk about the Napster era, we talk about how much of an influence the adult industry had on digital law, we talk about the state of digital law today, and actually, a whole bunch of contemporary law stuff like GDPR.

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Part three of our epic conversation with Stephan Paternot. Here's what happens when you've been through the wringer. When you've been to the top of the rollercoaster and also down to the bottom. Here's how you take stock of your life, how you reinvent yourself, re-find you entrepreneurial spirit... I feel like there are so many lessons in these three episodes. Lessons for entrepreneurs today. Lesson for... I dunno. People in the crypto space? My thanks to Stephan Paternot for an insanely great conversation. 

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Ok, part 2 of the Stephan Paternot mega-episode right now. This is where we get into the meat of it, the good stuff, the whole crazy roller coaster ride of being the hottest startup of the dotcom era. And I was going to make this the last episode, but as I was editing this, I realized that after we get done with this story, Stephan talks a lot about what happens after... what happens after you've been on a crazy ride like this. How you have to reinvent yourself, and your life, and your career. He said so many interesting things about that, that for the first time ever, we're going to do a part 3, coming in two weeks, to talk about the reinvention.

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I said in the book, I think TheGlobe.com was the quintessential dot-com company. We spoke to one of the cofounders previously, Todd Krizelman. Todd was great, but he was time constrained and he didn’t quite get as personal about the story as I would have hoped. Well, I finally got to talk to the other founder of TheGlobe, Stephan Paternot. And Stephan was… AMAZING. He shared the whole story, the whole wild ride, from a historical angle, from a business angle, from an entrepreneurial angle and also, from a very personal angle. THIS the dot-com era story I’ve been looking for for years. It’s also the story of probably the most important pioneer of social media before there was even a term for such a thing. And by the way… that TV Show that just came out on NAT GEO, Valley of the Boom? THIS IS THAT STORY. Stephan just re-released his book, A Very Public Offering: The Story of theglobe.com and the First Internet Revolution.

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David Schwartz is the Chief Technology Officer at Ripple, the company behind the cryptocurrency XRP. What is it like to start, build and build out a crypto startup? Is it different than the web and internet startups that we’ve covered on this show for years? What is Ripple? How is it unique in the crypto ecosystem? What is it trying to do for the world? All of this… and yes, why is crypto so tribal… and yes… where is the crypto space even at in this moment in time (December 9th, 2018, btw, for posterity).

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