[GFischer]

I actually talked to one of the developers recently thanks to an university course (Economics of Innovation).

Their story is very interesting :) , the founders were Arik Vardi, Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir.

We talked to Yair, from what he told us, they were using dial-up at the time, and they had to disconnect or use another phone line to know whether the others were online, and so they discovered a need for a tool to find if somebody was online, and enable communication between connected users.

They weren't very finance-savvy, fortunately for them one of their parents was, and he handled all the fundraising and stuff.