Cisco bought some remnant "technology" for a pittance. It failed about as completely as possible.

It was a failure, but I remember having dinner with Mark around that time and it made him more and more motivated to have a win.

He took the fire from that failure and the knowledge of social networks and went all in on social games.

i was actually with him the night he was thinking of hooking up with the poker guys and i was like "who is going to play poker for fake chips... that's so dumb!"

... on top of that I didn't invest in Zynga and he invested in Mahalo! :-)

"In 1995, Pincus launched his first startup, Freeloader, Inc., a web-based push technology service that was acquired seven months later by Individual, Inc. for $38 million" - Wikipedia.

If that wasn't a win, I don't know what is...