Nothing Ever Goes to Waste

Attended a TIE San Diego meeting featuring B.V. Jagadeesh, CEO of NetScaler on Wednesday night.

Before NetScaler, Jagadeesh was co-founder and CTO of Exodus. Remember Exodus?

Jagadeesh spent a lot of time talking about the dot-com bubble burst in general and Exodus' decline in specific. Some data points:

• Exodus founded 1994, 2 employees, $10,000 personal savings
  
• Went from 2-4000 employees in less than 5 years
  
• At its peak, Exodus served 40% of the Internet's traffic
  
• $0.00 to $1,000,000,000.00 in annual revenues in 5 years
  
• 80 square feet to 5,000,000 square feet of leased space in 5 years thanks to all the data centers
  
• At its peak, Exodus commanded a $28 billion market cap.

Jagadeesh said the straw that broke the camel's back for Exodus was its ill-fated acquisition of Cable and Wireless in early 2001, when signals were already strong in the market that a massive correction was underway and yet they went ahead and did the deal.

He also spoke of the incredible push to build more and more data centers all over the country and the world, at a time when the data centers averaged only 20% occupancy rates.

One particular data center he mentioned: Atlanta. He couldn't understand why they built this huge data center out in the middle of nowhere.

Well, fast forward to today.

Nothing ever goes to waste. Google now occupies the data center.

Battelle mentioned it here and over here is a local Atlanta newspaper story about it (annoying but free registration required). Google's trying to keep mum about its new Georgia presence (well, except in Craigslist).