Moritz of Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo! with two rounds of venture capital, raising approximately $3 million. On April 12, 1996, Yahoo! had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million by selling 2.6 million shares at the opening bid of $13 each. The word "Yahoo" had previously been trademarked for barbecue sauce, knives (by EBSCO Industries) and human propelled watercraft! (by Old Town Canoe Co.). Therefore, in order to get control of the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name. However, the exclamation mark is often incorrectly omitted when referring to Yahoo!. Srinija Srinivasan, an alumna of Stanford University, was hired as Yahoo!'s fifth employee as "Ontological Yahoo!" to assist Yang and Filo with organizing the content on the internet. Growth (1997–1999) In the late 1990s, Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos, Excite and other web portals were growing rapidly. Web portal providers rushed to acquire companies to expand their range of services, generally with the goal of increasing the time each user stays within the portal. On March 8, 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on October 12, 1998. In January 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! took over was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups in June 2000. Pager, an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo! Messenger a year later. When acquiring companies, Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. For example, they claimed intellectual property rights for content on their servers, unlike the previous policies of the companies they acquired. As a result, many of the acquisitions were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services. Dot-com bubble (2000–2001) Yahoo! stock doubled in price in the last month of 1999. On January 3, 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, Yahoo! stock closed at an all-time high of $118.75 a share. Sixteen days later, shares in Yahoo! Japan became the first stock in Japanese history to trade at over ¥100,000,000, reaching a price of 101.4 million yen ($962,140 at that time). On February 7, 2000, yahoo.com was brought to a halt for a few hours, as the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). On the next day, its shares rose about $16, or 4.5 percent as the failure was blamed