Founding: DrKoop.com was launched in July 1998 by Donald W. Hackett and John F. Zaccaro with $6 million from Superior Consultant Company Inc., a healthcare IT firm in Bloomfield, Michigan.

History: Unlike most dot-com celebrities of the era, Koop owned a famous face before co-founding an Internet company and, indeed, before the Web even existed. As President Ronald Reagan’s surgeon general from 1981 to 1989, Koop and his iconic beard led a well-known anti-smoking campaign.

Hackett and Zaccaro, both seasoned entrepreneurs, recruited Dr. Koop with a package of consulting fees and stock options to lend his name to a business that aimed to provide consumers with information to manage their personal health. Seven months after launch, the site had 83,000 registered users and 2.6 million uniques, (IPO filing) and claimed to be “the No. 1 Web healthcare initiative in America!”.

The less impressive reality: It notched just $43,000 in 1998 operating revenues, but that didn’t keep the company from going public in June 1999 and achieving, briefly, a peak market capitalization of $1 billion.

What Happened: DrKoop.com’s business plan rested on advertising, and in 1999 there weren’t enough healthcare advertisers to support it and the many other healthcare dot-coms trolling for ad buyers.

It didn’t help when a group of shareholders sued, charging DrKoop.com executives had squandered cash on lavish salaries and had granted massive options to cronies.

However, Hackett says insufficient capital was the real obstacle. “Compare it to WebMD,” he says now. “They raised half a billion dollars before the market crashed in March 2000. That’s the difference between WebMD and DrKoop.”

In any event, Koop’s vital signs flat-lined quickly and much of its later name recognition came from the incessant speculation as to when it would fold. A summer 2001 infusion of $27.5 million and new management team proved too little too late and in December 2001 its assets were liquidated for $186,000.

Where Are They Now? Dr.Koop.com is today an active, advertising-supported website, having become the property of HealthCentral Network. Hackett has since held a variety of corporate positions, most recently as CEO of healthcare software company Mirixa, which he left in February.

He is currently consulting, but tells The Standard that several ex-DrKoop.com staffers still work for him. He also reveals that Dr. Koop was a shareholder in MyDNA.com, a startup Hackett sold in 2005 to Steve Case when Case was getting Revolution Health off the ground. "[Koop] made a nice profit on the sale," Hackett says.

Dr. Koop, now 92, still lectures students as a professor of surgery at Dartmouth Medical School and a scholar of the Koop Institute, a non-profit health advocacy organization. His Dartmouth profile makes no mention of the Internet or DrKoop.com.

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