Many people think the teen social networking craze started with MySpace in 2003, but you actually have to go back five years or more to find the genesis of the concept. One of the biggest teen networking sites from the 1990s was Bolt.com, which attracted millions of users and a big list of advertising clients. While it managed to survive the dot-com downturn, the service couldn't survive a legal onslaught, which killed its finances and torpedoed an acquisition. Where Are They Now author David Cotriss picks up the story.

Founding: The teen-focused Bolt.com was co-founded by CEO & President Dan Pelson and executive vice president of product development Jane Mount in the late 1990s. The two had earlier started Concrete Media, a Web development company that built sites for clients such as Bertelsmann and Tripod. They launched Bolt while at Concrete in 1997 and spun it off as a separate company in 1998. Bolt raised $55 million in three rounds of funding. The lead investor was Highland Capital. Other major investors included Oak Investment Partners, Sandler Capital, Moore Capital, Bechtel Corporation, Ford, AOL, and Time Warner.

History: From the beginning, the focus of Bolt.com was the teen market. The founders knew that teens had money to spend, and the Internet was going to eventually be their medium of choice. However, the old media approach that Bolt initially employed – a top-down model that relied on content created by adults – had to be retooled not long after launch. Mount explains why:

"We launched the site in 1997 with the intent of providing content to teenagers, but quickly realized they cared far more about what each other had to say than what we did," Mount recalls. "We then re-focused the site to become the leading ‘community site' (as it was then called, now known as ‘social networking') for teens, and created many tools and applications to foster communication between members and to filter the best user-generated content to the top. By 2001 we had over seven million members between the ages of 15-24. We made most of our revenue through advertising, but also through e-commerce, including producing and selling member-designed and picked t-shirts. We had versions of Bolt running in the UK, Canada and Australia, and various early mobile applications as well."

Dan Pelson tells The Industry Standard that major advertisers included Proctor & Gamble, Ford, AT&T, Kodak, and Cadbury Schwepps, among others.

However, getting advertisers to accept this new medium was difficult, Mount admits. "In the beginning, in 1996 and 1997, we had to spend a lot of time and energy evangelizing to advertisers that teens were going to be a big market, and that the Internet was going to be a great marketing tool. Now these things seem obvious to everyone, but at the time they were very new ideas," she says. "Later, the challenges were in trying to grow as quickly as our investors expected and demanded without compromising quality and job satisfaction for everyone."

Pelson says that 1990s social norms held back early social networking efforts. "[Although] Bolt was growing dramatically and reaching millions of teens every month, it pales in comparison to MySpace when it was growing dramatically, largely because it became socially acceptable to have a profile page," Pelson explains. "In 2000, it was probably considered ‘weird' by many people to put a picture of yourself online and list out everything about yourself. Also, the cost of building a social network (and Web businesses in general) in 2000 was very different from today." Other teen sites were also struggling at the time in a crowded field.

According to Pelson, Bolt filed to go public with a projected market capitalization in the range of $350 million, but the IPO was cancelled in 2000. "After the IPO was pulled, we stabilized the company's costs and brought it to