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exploratory meeting to discuss joint marketing with Yahoo! Inc. CEO Tim Koogle. Koogle said Yahoo! might be interested in making a counterbid, and Pincus may have implied to Amram that Koogle was even more interested than that.

The classic seat-of-pants hustling found a attentive audience in Amram. “Yosi’s style was frenetic,” Pincus said. “He was a man on a mission, never without a phone piece attached to his shirt. He was incredibly optimistic about the future, even talking about how we’d eventually go against Microsoft.” Amram described the acquisition talks as “kind of a mad rush.” He split the difference between his first suggested price and Pincus’s price, arriving at a bid of $38 million, mostly in Individual stock. The deal was struck in June 1996 and greeted with ridicule in Silicon Valley, where the satiric daily webzine Suck called it “era-definitely irresponsible.” Not everyone at Individual was quick to disagree. The board, which had overcome some initial reluctance in approving the deal, was surprised when just a few weeks later, Amram told directors that he was planning three more acquisitions. The deals would have cost in the neighborhood of $20 million in stock combined, Amram said. And some of them would have brought the company into entirely new areas. The directors felt that Individual should concentrate first on digesting Freeloader.

As Amram described some of his new acquisition targets for Individual, the directors “asked a few polite questions” about his views on integrating Freeloader first, one director said. Amram felt insulted, and he displayed a temper they hadn’t seen before. “He did exhibit some crazy behavior,” said Bob Lentz, the company’s chief financial officer. “I don’t think he was possessed by greed—I think he was possessed by dreams.” Amram’s version is different: He said the board had approved the term sheet for the acquisition of one new target, Beyond News. Then it backtracked and “tried to make me jump through a bunch of hurdles” before closing the deal. In retrospect, Amram said, he did some fundamental things wrong. “I became overly consumed with what the Internet meant, how it was going to change the world.” Amram said he should have slowed down to keep the board behind him. “When the whole thing blew up, it was a pretty traumatic experience for me, and I got depressed.”

In July, the company announced it had placed Amram on indefinite

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