It was in 1997 that Lee Lorenzen found his mailbox bulging with more than two dozen catalogs, all delivered in a single day. Being both an entrepreneur and a technologist, it occurred to him that there must certainly be a more efficient way for merchants to place their offers in front of customers, and he was barely back to his front door before he’d figured out how. Instead of "pushing" offers to customers and hoping the products and timing matched their needs, why not invent a way for customers to "pull" offers for the exact products they wanted precisely when they wanted them? For centuries, buyers and sellers have come together in marketplaces of one type or another, because marketplaces are more convenient for customers and more efficient for merchants. Perhaps this emerging technology called the Internet could make it possible to build a virtual marketplace? From that question a company was born.
