On November 19, 1999, CacheFlow's stock rose about 426 percent in a single day. It was one of the biggest first-day jumps of the dot-com era. The Sunnyvale company sold caching appliances, boxes that kept copies of popular web pages close to users so they loaded faster and saved bandwidth. The founder behind it, Michael Malcolm, had already started Network Appliance. Wall Street wanted anything that promised to make the crowded web less slow.

A Copy Closer to Home

Michael Malcolm enlisted Joe Pruskowski and Doug Crow, and CacheFlow was incorporated in March 1996. The idea was simple. Each time someone fetched a popular page from across the world, the trip cost time and money. A CacheFlow box sat in a company or internet provider's network, kept a nearby copy and served it to the next person who asked. Internet providers bought them to cut bandwidth bills. Companies bought them to speed up the web for their staff.

From Cache to Blue Coat

CacheFlow priced its IPO at $24 a share and listed on Nasdaq as CFLO. The stock closed its first day near $126. When the bubble burst, demand for caching boxes fell hard. The company turned its boxes into security gateways that watched and filtered web traffic, and on August 21, 2002, it renamed itself Blue Coat Systems. Thoma Bravo took Blue Coat private in 2012. Bain Capital bought it in 2015, and Symantec acquired it in 2016 for $4.65 billion.

Cover: Portrait of a Gentleman in Blue Coat, Sebastian Gratise. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a gentleman in a blue coat (Blue Coat).