What if you bought Excite@Home in 2000?
US Tech · Internet. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
Every dollar is gone. Excite@Home went bankrupt in 2001, so $1,000 invested in any of these years is worth exactly nothing today.
The story
Excite@Home was born in 1999 when @Home Network, which sold high-speed internet over cable TV lines, bought the Excite web portal in one of the era's grandest all-stock deals. The idea was a perfect stack: own the fat pipe into the home and the front page people saw when they arrived. Its cable partners, AT&T above all, gave it distribution to millions of households at a time when most of America still dialed up.
The pieces never fit. Portals were quickly commoditized by search and by users who simply typed in addresses, and advertising revenue collapsed with the dot-com bust. Meanwhile the cable operators who controlled the customers had little reason to share the broadband economics with a middleman. Huge goodwill write-downs followed the merger, management churned, and in September 2001 the company filed for bankruptcy. Its shutdown that winter briefly left a large number of cable-internet subscribers offline while providers scrambled to migrate them. The broadband idea was right; the company owning it was not.
The lesson: Owning a layer that depends on partners who control the customer is fragile; in a value chain, profits flow to whoever holds the relationship.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $40.00 | $0 | $4,626 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
There was no good entry point: every starting year ends at zero. The same $1,000 in the S&P 500 from 2000 would be $4,626 today.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Excite@Home is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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