FireDrop, renamed; Khosla from a houseboat party; $900m paper valuation; merged into MetricStream 2004; patents sold for a low six figures
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Zaplet — founded as FireDrop in August 1999 by David Roberts and Brian Axe — built 'living' interactive email: active applications embedded in a mail thread, updating when reopened. Superficially similar to Consilient's Sitelets, and structurally different in exactly the ways that mattered: no asynchronous protocols, none of the capabilities for long-running, cross-organizational, cross-platform operation that real B2B processes require — a consumer-facing play on the mainstream web platforms of the day. Through Jonathan Hare's DC and defense-intelligence network the word that reached him was blunter: a cheap knock-off of what Consilient was doing, technologically. Recorded as what he was told, by people whose names the record holds.
Its financing is the record's cleanest specimen of top-tier market-making: Vinod Khosla discovered the team at a houseboat party, took a founder-level stake via a $5 million seed (around 20 percent by Hare's account), drove a stepped-up Series A with KPCB and Venrock — and then a $90 million round in October 2000 at a $900 million valuation, in which the lead 'set the price' while investing below pro-rata. Hare's analysis, marked as his: leads at that stage aren't valuation-sensitive and aren't really setting the price — they make a market in late-stage followers, and the press release does the rest. Zaplet got the runway and the marketing; the bubble got Zaplet; MetricStream absorbed it in March 2004, and its foundational patents eventually sold to Xobni for a low six-figure sum. A $900 million paper valuation, priced by market-making rather than by the technology, and the technology's whole patent estate cleared for less than a starter home — the episode draws the moral.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Present at two junctions of this record's financing story, from opposite sides of the table
Open →co-founded byHarvard MBA, former agency officer, co-founder of FireDrop/Zaplet; known to Hare from PC Forum
Open →co-founded byMet at PC Forum; the record holds the fact and the venue
Open →led by, from June 2000Sun's Java chief, hired as Zaplet's CEO in June 2000; a rivalry that never cost the relationship
Open →the lookalike ofA name that succeeds by becoming unnecessary
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.
Correct this entry → Add a story, photo or link → Browse the graph →