Web & Flow: The List

Posted on Nov 20th, 2009 by Nate Bolt with 4 comments

As preparation for our stop-motion animation project on the history of web companies in San Francisco, we’re putting together a timeline of companies and the years they showed up. Please drop us a comment with anyone we’ve forgotten or to add your company. We’re not saying everyone will make it in the final video, but we don’t want to forget anything important!


Organic 1993
CNET Networks Inc 1993
Studio Archetype ?
Craigslist 1995
Ave a Razorfish 1995
Salon.com 1995
Hot Studio 1997
Esurance Inc 1998
Salesforce.com 1999
Linden Lab 1999
Live Journal 1999
Stamen Design 2001
Adaptive Path 2001
Wikimedia Foundation 2001
Six Apart Headquarters 2001
Mule Design Studio 2001
Three Rings Design 2001
Zinio 2001
Technorati 2002
Bolt | Peters User Experience 2002
Yelp, Inc. 2004
Digg Inc 2004
Flickr 2004
Bit Torrent Inc 2004
Current TV LLC 2005
Blurb Inc 2005
Metaweb Technologies Inc 2005
Kiva.org 2005
Bebo Inc 2005
Twitter 2006
Kongregate 2006
Justin.tv 2006
Big in Europe (CompFight) 2006
Zynga 2007
Get Satisfaction 2007
SlideShare Inc 2007
80/20 Studio 2008
Kicker Studio 2008
Mochi Media 2009
Small Batch Inc. 2009
  • http://danharrelson.com Dan Harrelson

    Your list covers just two angles of the web scene in SF, and perhaps that on purpose. There’s design agencies and there’s startups. For more completeness, I wonder if you should include web enablers like Laughing Squid and Engine Yard, development firms like Pivotal Labs and media companies like MySpace and Wired.

    Was ZDNet in SF prior to the CNET merger?

    Also, just for fun, have a couple of dot-bomb blow ups appear for 3 frames ;-)

  • http://www.clicktime.com David Brockman

    Clicktime.com started in 1999. We spun off of Mann Consulting which was in SOMA by 1995, building web and multimedia projects during the early days in South Park (and long before the first boom/bust).

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  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/henryeakland Henry Eakland

    LookSmart. Founded in Australia by Evan and Tracy Thornley, moved to SF in 1997 (?). Right before the dotcom crash, a pretender to search supremacy, with an eye on Yahoo! as the company to beat. Still in business at http://www.looksmart.com but having morphed from a search engine developed by human editors into a search ad network. When I worked there from 1998 to 2000, we were right there in the thick of things off South Park, in the fantastic, renovated warehouse on 2nd Street that the company still occupies. Would you want images of the old home pages that we developed way back when?