The Origins of "B2B"
Just don't ask ChatGPT
It’s reassuring to find out that there’s at least one thing I know that ChatGPT doesn’t know. I asked it (I’m sorry, prompted it with) the question: “What was the first usage of B2B?”
The AI sputtered back, “It’s challenging to pinpoint the exact first usage, as it likely evolved organically.” It kept going with its reply, throwing a lot of nothing at me. Basically, ChatGPT was like an unprepared college student trying to bluster through an answer to a professor’s question in class.
Well, among the billion-trillion words ChatGPT has hoovered up and trained on, it had to have missed my old USA Today columns…because they’re not digitized. Big, big hole in ChatGPT’s knowledge bank.
In the fall of 1999, I wrote a piece headlined, “Venture capitalists eat up alphabet soup.” This appeared amid the craziest insanity of the dot-com bubble, when internet fever was at its highest just before the crash of 2000. Major FOMO was in the air, and venture capitalists were writing checks for just about any entrepreneur who could figure out how to buy a URL.
Terms like business-to-business had been around for ages, but, charmingly, people in the pre-internet era had the luxury of time, and used to actually say “business-to-business.”
VCs in 1999 didn’t have any seconds to waste, not even on actual words. As I wrote: “These days, when a VC talks, it’s never business-to-business. It’s b-to-b. When a VC writes, it’s b2b, saving three valuable keystrokes, which are probably worth $1,000 each.”
And yes, at the time, people tended to write it as b2b, in small letters. Apparently b2b hadn’t yet hit puberty and grown up into B2B.
I also explained the emergence of B2C (business to consumer), C2C (consumer to consumer – you know, like eBay in its early Pez dispenser incarnation) and B2G (business to government – which is hardly ever heard anymore even though one of the hottest sectors right now is defense tech, which is solidly in the B2G camp).
One reason we can know that B2B was first used around 1999 by VCs is that before 1999, VCs didn’t see a lot of business-to-business startup pitches. Christine Comaford, then of Artemis Ventures, sent an email to me that I quoted. She said: “I do believe that many of the b2c ideas have already been overexecuted (do we really need 30 sites to sell pet food/supplies?), but b2b is WIDE OPEN.”
Steve Jurvetson, then of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, told me in mid-1999: “B2b has just begun. I expect industry-level automation to follow.” Another VC, Howard Morgan, told me he first heard the shorthand “B2B” at a conference in January 1999.
And then, of course, this kind of categorizing stuck and has since become a common part of the tech ecosystem lingo. It’s one of the first things you find out about a company – whether it’s B2B or B2C. The gulf between the two is huge in the way a company operates, how it goes to market, what kind of valuation it gets.
Now these labels are evolving into more complex formulations, like B2B2C – which indicates a two-sided business that sells to businesses on one side and consumers on the other. Amazon is an example. It markets its online marketplace to manufacturers and retailers who want to sell there, and on the other side sells products directly to consumers.
So, there you have it – a no-doubt-incomplete history of the term B2B. But it’s better than what you’d get from clueless ChatGPT.
Anyway, I gave the AI another chance – a new assignment. I prompted: “Can you make a joke that includes the term B2B?” I was ready to get back something incredibly lame.
It responded: “Sure, here's a B2B joke for you: Why did the B2B company bring a ladder to the meeting? Because they wanted to take their business to the next level!”
Has ChatGPT been training on Henny Youngman?
This is the column as it appeared in USA Today in September 1999. It is not available online.
