David Bohnett

Cofounder of GeoCities

• Born: August 2, 1956
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

Primary Company/Organization: GeoCities

Introduction

David Bohnett is an entrepreneur who cofounded the free web hosting service GeoCities, founded the Los Angeles venture capital firm Baroda Ventures, and has been involved in many other online ventures, including OVGuide.com, Wireimage.com, and Xdrive.com. While remaining active as a technology entrepreneur, he has become a noted philanthropist and patron of the arts. As of 2024, his Bohnett Foundation has provided more than $127 million in funding to a variety of arts, educational, and civic programs, as well as LGBTQ causes.

Early Life

David Bohnett was born in Chicago and had an early interest in electronics, including ham radio, a hobby that allowed him to communicate with other people around the world. This interest would be reflected in the development of GeoCities, the company most identified with him. Bohnett received his bachelor's degree in business administration in 1978 from the Marshall School of Business of the University of Southern California, and he earned his master's degree in business administration (concentrating in finance) from the University of Michigan in 1980.

Life's Work

Bohnett began his professional career working for Andersen Consulting, the consulting wing of the major accounting firm Arthur Andersen (later Accenture). From 1988 to 1990, he was the chief financial officer for Essential Software, which merged with Goals Systems; Bohnett served as Goal Systems' director of product marketing from 1990 to 1994.

GeoCities began as an Internet service provider (ISP), originally called Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) because of its location in Beverly Hills, California. Bohnett has described the genesis of the company as a sort of “do it yourself” project built on a Sun workstation in Bohnett's dining room table; he and collaborator John Rezner did all the early work for the program, including writing the code, creating web pages, and answering e-mails. One of Bohnett's early coups was attracting widespread attention in 1995 when he established a live video feed on the company's web page, showing the corner of Hollywood and Vine in the Beverly Hills neighborhood. Bohnett's interest in establishing a sense of place was also reflected in the names of the home pages on BHI, such as RodeoDrive, SunsetStrip, and WallStreet (all named after real geographic locations). Bohnett often referred to users of GeoCities as homesteaders or residents, strengthening the geographical analogy between physical and virtual communities.

The guiding principle for GeoCities was to create virtual communities through digital “neighborhoods” within which users could create their own web pages for free. GeoCities provided templates through its Personal Home Page Generator to make it easy for nonspecialist users to create web pages, a concept that proved extremely popular and has since been imitated by many other companies. The virtual communities were organized around common interests; for instance, WallStreet for those interested in investments, Athens for those interested in philosophy, and Heartland for those interested in parenting and pets.

In 1995, as the business was growing rapidly, Bohnett moved GeoCities to an office in Beverly Hills, and the name GeoCities was adopted in November 1995; at the time, GeoCities had 10,000 members, and number that increased to 135,000 by the end of the year and to more than 1 million by 1997. In 1998, Bohnett moved GeoCities again, to a location in the Los Angeles suburb Marina Del Ray. The staff of GeoCities grew rapidly to accommodate the number of subscribers; by 1999, it employed more than 250 people. Bohnett was the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of GeoCities (and later of Yahoo! GeoCities) from 1994 to 1998; Thomas R. Evans, formerly the publisher of U.S. News and World Report, took over as CEO in the spring of 1998. The same year, Bohnett founded Baroda Ventures, a venture capital firm focusing on early-stage investments in the digital media, Internet, mobile, SaaS (software as a service), and related industries, and in companies based in Los Angeles.

GeoCities became a public company in August 1998, at the height of the dot-com bubble. At the time of its initial public offering (IPO), it was an immensely successful company with more than 17 million pages and 2.1 million residents and experienced more than 14.8 unique visits per month, while its closest rival, Tripod, had about 1.8 million members and 2.7 million pages. GeoCities' stock opened at $17 per share and closed at $34 per share. Less than a year later, in January 1999, Yahoo! purchased GeoCities for $4.6 billion in stock. Most of GeoCities' revenue by then came from banner advertising, with a smaller amount derived from partnerships with companies such as Amazon.com, which shared some of the revenue from sales generated by referrals from GeoCities.

At about the same time that GeoCities held its IPO, it became the first Internet company charged with violating the privacy of its members. The charges related to GeoCities' practice of collecting demographic and interest information from new members, claiming it would not share the information without permission while in fact selling it to third-party advertisers who used it to send targeted advertising to members. On August 13, 1998, GeoCities signed a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stating that it did not admit wrongdoing and would create a stringent set of guidelines guarding user privacy; the incident did not interfere with the IPO.

Although GeoCities had a large number of users, monetizing those users (creating revenue from them) proved to be a more difficult problem; in fact, GeoCities is sometimes cited as a demonstration of the fact that having large numbers of users does not guarantee that a website will prove profitable, and more specifically that displaying advertising to a large volume of users does not guarantee sales. In addition, the personal and creative aspects of GeoCities declined after Bohnett sold the company, and other ventures began offering similar services to users, increasing competition for the same market. In April 2009, Yahoo! announced that the U.S. GeoCities services would cease in October of that year, although GeoCities continued operations in Japan; at the time of the announcement, an estimated 38 million GeoCities accounts existed around the world.

After the sale of GeoCities, Bohnett founded the venture capital firm Baroda Ventures, oriented toward tech startups. He also created the David Bohnett Foundation, a social justice grant-making nonprofit.

Personal Life

Bohnett has devoted much of his time and finances to philanthropy (he reportedly gained about $300 million in the GeoCities IPO). Bohnett has credited his life partner Rand Schrader, a Los Angeles municipal court judge and AIDS activist who died in 1993, with demonstrating to him the importance of taking a stand on issues of personal importance. In the 2000s, Bohnett's partner was Tom Gregory, a writer and broadcaster. Bohnett is the chairman of the board for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, a trustee for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a trustee for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR). He is chair of the David Bohnett Foundation, which has provided funding to many political, social, and arts organizations and causes. Through the foundation, Bohnett has helped create and fund more than sixty Bohnett CyberCenters, providing Internet access to local LGBTQ community organizations and thus providing members of those organizations and their guests with the ability to use the Internet without feeling they are being scrutinized. Other causes supported by the Bohnett Foundation include the Fund for Los Angeles; leadership programs at several universities, including Harvard and the University of Michigan; various initiatives to reduce gun violence; animal protection organizations; and various initiatives to increase voter registration and support voter rights. In 2023, the Bohnett Foundation gave more than $3.2 million to various causes, including the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, the Kennedy Center, the New York Philharmonic, Sandy Hook Promise Foundation, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and the UCLA Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Campus Resource Center.

Bibliography

“Grant Database.” David Bohnett Foundation, 2024, www.bohnettfoundation.org/grants/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Hiltzik, Michael. “Internet Pioneer Pushes Social Change through Investing, Activism.” Los Angeles Times 29 Nov. 2011: n. pag. Print.

Lehoczky, Etelka. “Cyber Center Stage.” The Advocate 26 Oct. 2004: 49. Print.

Lunau, Kate. “Lessons from GeoCities' Death.” Maclean's 122.34 (2009): 29. Print.

Nagourney, Adam, and Brooks Barnes. “Gay Marriage Effort Attracts a Novel Group of Donors.” New York Times 23 Mar. 2012. Print.

Roberts, Mary Lou. “Case Study: Geocities (A) and (B).” Journal of Interactive Marketing 14.1 (2000): 60–72. Print.