An even more interesting and funny perspective is from another programmer beforehand:
In this post-mortem talk [0] on Diablo 1. The creator mentioned his worst business decision - the Hotmail guy offering 10% of the company in return for an office in the back they weren't even using, and he rejected it.
According to him, the pitch was: "I'm going to make email over the Internet".
His response: "Dude, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard! What are you talking about, I already have my email over the Internet - this isn't even an invention!".
14 months later, that 10% was worth $40 million. Meanwhile they agreed to do Diablo only for $300k for Blizzard, and that was a bad deal - they even had to find more contracts to compensate it.
I had one. My point is that was the finished thing. And it’s appeal to me was that it was free not that it was web based. Freeness required a VC. Was making web based email (if that era standard) a real hard technical challenge that only one dev team could do it?
I'd been building increasingly sophisticated CGI-based web apps at the time (as a hobby) and still remember being blown away with what appeared to be a fully functional email client running inside Netscape. This was before Javascript was commonly available or standardized, and certainly no XmlHttpRequest etc.
> The name "Hotmail" was chosen out of many possibilities ending in "-mail" as it included the letters HTML, the markup language used to create web pages (to emphasize this, the original type casing was "HoTMaiL").
The founders had an idea for a database hosted on the web(?), and pitched it to some VCs. They had been working on it as a side gig.
Naturally, the VCs asked: did you do it on company time? Did you communicate via the company's email system?
Nope, came the answer. We thought about that and built this email system to exchange messages while we worked on the product.
And the VCs eyes lit up: tell us more about this email system!