The Motley Fool is a private financial and investing advice company based in Alexandria, Virginia. It was founded in July 1993 by co-chairmen and brothers David Gardner and Tom Gardner, and Erik Rydholm, who has since left the company. The company employs over 300 people worldwide. Company name The name “Motley Fool” is taken from Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It. It references the one characterthe court jesterwho could speak the truth to the Duke without having his head lopped off. History Early years In 1994, The Motley Fool published a series of statements online promoting a nonexistent sewage-disposal company. The messages, which were an April Fool's joke designed to teach a lesson about penny stock investing, garnered widespread attention, including an article in The Wall Street Journal. In August that year, the Gardners parlayed their one-year-old investment newsletter into a content partnership with America Online (AOL). In December, they were profiled in the "Talk of the Town" section of the New Yorker. In 1996, David and Tom Gardner published The Motley Fool Investment Guide, which ranked on bestseller lists for The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek. The book was controversial; Bloomberg wrote about The Motley Fool's "Fanatical following", while a PBS Frontline episode described the company as made up of "20-somethings" giving "so-called advice". In 1997, the Motley Fool's online presence moved from AOL to its own domain, Fool.com, where it continued to provide investment advice under an advertising-based revenue model. "Foolish Four" and dot-com bust In the late 1990s, the Motley Fool publicized their "Foolish Four" method of Systematic trading, adapted from the Dogs of the Dow method for selecting stocks from the Dow Jones Industrial Average based on high dividend yield. They published a book on the topic in 1999. Journalist Jason Zweig criticized the Foolish Four method in 1999. Zweig describes selecting high-dividend yield stocks as a "sensible" strategy, at least on a preliminary level, as such stocks tend to be relatively inexpensive compared to other stocks using various valuation methods. However, Zweig said the Motley Fool staff made outlandish claims such as the ability to "crush mutual funds [in] only 15 minutes a year", used needlessly complicated mathematical formulas and he questioned the method's effectiveness. In 2000, Motley Fool writer Ann Coleman admitted that the Foolish Four method "turned out to be not nearly as wonderful a strategy as we thought". During the dot-com