A research network that became the substrate for everything.
Free is a vertically integrated French ISP that built its own networks, hardware, and pricing model — rejecting reliance on incumbents and subscription lock-in. It achieved profitability and low churn through infrastructure control and disciplined bundling, not venture funding or hype.
Tencent is a Chinese multinational technology conglomerate and holding company, co-founded in 1998 in Shenzhen. It is one of the highest-grossing multimedia companies globally by revenue and the world’s largest company in the video game industry by equity investments. Its first product, OICQ, launched in February 1999 and reached over one million registered users by year-end 1999. In 2000, Tencent secured $2.2 million in venture capital funding and adapted its platform for mobile messaging — generating 80% of revenue via telecom operator fee-sharing deals. After losing a U.S. arbitration case over domain names, it renamed OICQ to QQ in December 2000. By 2004, it held 74% of China’s instant messaging market and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Myspace was the first globally reaching social network. It grew fast, peaked at 115 million monthly visitors, and was acquired for $580 million. But it never built infrastructure, governance, or trust to match its scale — and collapsed when attention shifted to platforms that treated users as people, not pageviews.
Reddit is a community platform whose founding mechanics—Lisp prototype, Swartz-led rewrite, rapid acquisition, deferred monetisation, and founder re-entry—reveal how infrastructure survives without a clear business model.