> Firmage rose to fame after founding a software company from his bedroom in Salt Lake City when he was a teenager, later selling it for $24 million to Novell and founding the digital design company USWeb in 1995.
https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/02/29/joe-fi...
> USWeb's business model focused on acquisitions of small, independent web design firms and their client bases, with the company's public stock as payment; in all, it bought more than three dozen other companies
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USWeb
The article is paywalled, but the "pioneer" moniker seems to stem from this business model?