Brewster Kahle startedWAIS (Wide Area Information
Servers) in the late ’80s while an employee of Thinking
Machines. He left in 1993 to found WAIS, Inc. WAIS
was one of the earliest forms of Internet search software.
Developed before the Web, it was in some
ways a predecessor to web search engines. Kahle sold
WAIS to AOL in 1995.
The next year, Kahle founded Alexa Internet with
Bruce Gilliat. The Alexa toolbar tracked user browsing
behavior and suggested related links using collaborative
filtering. Once captured, pages visited by
users would...

Machines to attract a very interesting set of people. Richard Feynman worked
there, Stephen Wolfram, Marvin Minsky. I found that I had better access to
professors in a company than I did when I was in school. So that was an interesting
way of trying to figure out, “What should the company do?”
They took a good summer to try to figure that out and, actually, through a
bunch of the first year, which is a luxury that most startups don’t have. Usually
you have to work really hard to try to get your...

major startup that way—should start a business that is having to make people
happy with them day one, through contracts, through small scale sales, whatever
it is. How low can you go? How can you build something really inexpensively?
How can you not spend money on furniture and matching carpet and
those sorts of things? The biggest thing that I probably didn’t do the second
time around was have any money.
Livingston: Tell me about how you got the idea for WAIS.
Kahle: The idea of WAIS was to make network services—stuff that...

information and as a user base. So it was a test project. It ran about a year
and a half and was successful. Everybody loved it. Each one of the organizations
went forward to figure out how to make this all go. This was in 1989/90. So
we were all looking into the future.
Livingston: WAIS seems to have ideas that anticipated the Web.
Kahle: All these ideas were in the air. The Web came a bit later, but, as I understand,
Tim Berners-Lee was working on some of the same things, but doing...

and I don’t know if it’s any different now, but at that time you had to actually
keep pushing all up and down the whole chain or it just wouldn’t move. You’d
push, and you’d think you were making headway, but the beanbag chair didn’t
move.
KPMG Peat Marwick was a democracy. It’s a partnership. Each partner
thought of themselves as in control of their piece of turf. And they were very
much so. They controlled their own revenue; they spent it; it was a democracy.
In fact, every so often they would...