dreamed of in the late ’70s as the goal—which was to build the great library—
could even start.
Livingston: That was always your goal?
Kahle: Yes, that was always the goal. We just had to do a couple things first. It
took a lot longer than I thought. We’re now in 2006, and it’s hard to believe how
pathetic things are. We don’t even have books online yet. I don’t know why the
world moves so slowly. Everybody says, “Oh, it’s moving so fast.” And it’s like,
“No, I don’t think so. It’s...

so then I could go and actually do something.
Livingston: Publishing was happening, you sold WAIS to AOL, then what?
Kahle: Then I tried to work within AOL, and that was very difficult. For an
entrepreneur, acquisitions are very difficult to manage. That’s a warning. I’ve
been through two acquisitions. One was WAIS; that was bought by AOL. The
next round I built two organizations at the same time. One was called Alexa
Internet (short for the Library of Alexandria), and the other was the Internet
Archive, to archive everything that was in...

fantastically valuable thing to do. So the second startup, Alexa, I started with
a partner as a full cofounder and that worked out really well.
Livingston: Did you get funding?
Kahle: We got $1 million to get the first round going, and then we started talking
to venture capitalists. This is 1996; some of the companies started going
public, so there’s some money around. But again, everything that we were
talking about, we couldn’t communicate it in a way that made sense to them. So
we got private investment by a single individual....

moving around the Net. In return, all of these people would be giving us information
as to where they went, what trails they took, which we’d then learn
from.
Livingston: What did you learn?
Kahle:We learned what was related to other things. But in the great scale, what
I loved was watching some of these users—though we didn’t know who was
who and we didn’t care. In fact, that was very important because it’s very private
information. Something I think we’re forgetting is that some of these other systems
are collecting this...

In talks with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, I said, “I tried being
acquired, and it didn’t work. By AOL, a great company, but my company got
dispersed, and I don’t know how to run a division; I know how to run a company.”
He said, “If we’re going to buy you, why don’t you run it as a company?
What does that mean to you?” I said, “Well, it has a board, and I meet with the
board once a month and they give general direction and I run the place.” And
...