For us to build, it would have taken four to six months, and by then, so many users would have taken an email account. Yahoo! chose acquisition rather than internal platform development, because, as Healy said, 'Hotmail was growing at thousands and thousands users per week. Yahoo! announced the acquisition on October 8, 1997, close to the time that Yahoo! Mail was launched. The purpose behind acquiring Four11 was the company's RocketMail webmail service, which launched in 1997. We had a great cultural fit – it made a lot of sense.' In the end, Yahoo! acquired Four11 for $96 million. They were more entrepreneurial than Microsoft. Marvin Gavin, who worked at Four11 as the director of international business development, said 'We always had a bias about being acquired by Yahoo. Yahoo! made a deal with the online communications company Four11 for co-branded white pages. Yahoo! webmail interface as it appeared in 2001
