Heh, flashbacks to Adero - a y2k-ish startup to do "the Akamai thing" but with XSLT running on our edge nodes, so you could have sophisticated personalization while the upstream site had hugely cacheable snippets. (One of our reference examples was a sports news site where you specified your interests and got a custom "newspaper" - assembled in our edge servers, not your browser.)

(I suspect if you had a catalog of "ways your startup can choose badly" for that era, we hit a lot of them. My top 3 were "attempt to do server balancing with a day's worth of latency data, using a perl script that took more than 24 hours to run and sometimes failed entirely", "Having a 20 person IT department to manage an outlook server for a 100 person company", and "Offering a senior engineer a VP position with firing authority to fix the outlook problem" :-)