This story gets it backward. Jack Smith came up with that idea. Sabeer Bhatia makes this explicitly clear in Founders At Work.
I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned it yet.
Livingston: You had a tagline in the body of the email encouraging email recipients to set up their own free Hotmail accounts. How did you come up with
this?
Bhatia: It was actually Jack’s idea to do that. We ran it by our VCs just to make sure it was OK. When you alter somebody’s email, you’ve got to be very careful.
You’re sending an email to a friend of yours, and we are kind of violating the sanctity of that email by putting in a tagline at the end of it that says “This message has been sent from Hotmail. Get your free email at hotmail.com.”
So we asked Tim if it was OK that we did this. We said, “We don’t want to be perceived as the evil company by altering their email.” And he said, “Absolutely, you should do it.”
And the next thing we know, he claims that this idea was his. He’s given a number of interviews literally claiming that he was the father of web-based email — without him it would not have happened. I can’t believe he’s just taken
credit for everything — including the tagline (which later became known as the classic example of viral marketing). He blatantly claims this at conferences, which I don’t think is right.
Livingston: He claimed that web-based email was his idea?
Bhatia: That it was our idea, but without them, it would not have happened and that we would have done JavaSoft. Their version is that “we told them to do web-based email at that [first] meeting.” Why would they tell us to do web-
based email?
Without any more information, there's no reason to believe that the unspecified evidence was more reliable than Sabeer.
A) Who was the source of the evidence? How many people were even there in the room? What does Jack Smith say?
B) As for the disparaging, unless the evidence was all the other VCs that Sabeer talked to, it sounds like the source of both these claims was DFJ saying "nuh-uh!" What else would you expect Tim Draper to say, "yeah, I badmouthed them and stole credit"? Based on their other behavior, which scenario seems more plausible?
"An anonymous source denies Bhatia's claims" is not very solid evidence.
I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned it yet.
Livingston: You had a tagline in the body of the email encouraging email recipients to set up their own free Hotmail accounts. How did you come up with this?
Bhatia: It was actually Jack’s idea to do that. We ran it by our VCs just to make sure it was OK. When you alter somebody’s email, you’ve got to be very careful. You’re sending an email to a friend of yours, and we are kind of violating the sanctity of that email by putting in a tagline at the end of it that says “This message has been sent from Hotmail. Get your free email at hotmail.com.” So we asked Tim if it was OK that we did this. We said, “We don’t want to be perceived as the evil company by altering their email.” And he said, “Absolutely, you should do it.” And the next thing we know, he claims that this idea was his. He’s given a number of interviews literally claiming that he was the father of web-based email — without him it would not have happened. I can’t believe he’s just taken credit for everything — including the tagline (which later became known as the classic example of viral marketing). He blatantly claims this at conferences, which I don’t think is right.
Livingston: He claimed that web-based email was his idea?
Bhatia: That it was our idea, but without them, it would not have happened and that we would have done JavaSoft. Their version is that “we told them to do web-based email at that [first] meeting.” Why would they tell us to do web- based email?