Lycos was started in 1995 when CMGI’s investment
group, @Ventures, bought a search engine developed
by Michael Mauldin at Carnegie Mellon University
and Bob Davis signed on as CEO. The company
grew rapidly over the next several years as Internet
usage exploded.
By the peak of the Internet Bubble, it was the
fourth most popular site on the Web. In 2000, Lycos
was acquired for $5.4 billion by Terra Networks,
a subsidiary of the Spanish telephone company,
Telefonica.
Davis is currently a managing general partner at venture capital firm...

’95, I was the CEO of Lycos, but Lycos didn’t exist. We had no other employees,
no customers, no products.
Livingston: But you had the technology.
Davis:We had the technology. But Lycos was little about the technology and all
about consumer brand.
Livingston: What were you focused on doing in the first month?
Davis: Job number one for the first month was about building a team, getting
some core people in place. And trying to understand what we were doing for a
living and how we were going to go about doing...

early on?
Davis: What weren’t they? Hiring people, firing people, understanding our
business model, getting customers, servicing the customers, finding office
space, scaling the company, staring down competitors, going public, raising
money, satisfying shareholders. That’s all in the first 9 months.
Livingston: Did you know from the beginning that your goal was to go public?
Davis: No. When we started, I felt we could make a big business, but I didn’t
think it would be quite to the extent that it became. The week after we had started
the company, Dan Nova...

sure, and Lycos was unheard of when we started the business.
Bob Davis 421
Livingston: What did you find people misunderstood?
Davis: I think it was more of a lack of a clear vision as to what the Internet
would become. There was very little appreciation that it would ever become a
household tool. But bear in mind, at this point in ’95, even computers in the
home were somewhat unusual. We had them on our office desktop, not at
home with our kids using them. We look back retrospectively at the Internet...

more in common than they had apart. But where we differentiated ourselves
was less so with technology and more so with the consumer, and that’s brand.
And we worked very hard on our positioning and our branding of the company
in terms of what we wanted it to be. We tried to be this safe, comfortable
environment for folks that were just trying to figure out the Internet. We
thought of ourselves as the Internet on training wheels. A good way to find your
way around was using Lycos, and we worked really hard...