It's not fun at all. I recommend it only for the incurably curious.
The only interesting part is how fast Viaweb was growing -- for all of 1997, they had $343K in revenue; for the first quarter of 1998, it was $290K. You don't have to extrapolate that too far to see a great deal for Yahoo.
The other interesting thing was their balance sheet vs. cash flow statement. For the first quarter 98, they had $106K in cash. In the same period, they burned $200K on operating activities, and only avoided bankruptcy ($14K at the beginning of the quarter!) with a $300K cash infusion from investors. They would've been dead in another month and a half.
I think PG has mentioned this in an essay (and in the Founders at Work interview). They were running out of cash during the Yahoo negotiations.
Edit:
"It was really close, too. When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper."
The only interesting part is how fast Viaweb was growing -- for all of 1997, they had $343K in revenue; for the first quarter of 1998, it was $290K. You don't have to extrapolate that too far to see a great deal for Yahoo.