you can actually point at and say, “OK, this year I’m going to do this.” This year
I’m working on digitizing books. Last year I was trying to get a storage computer
to work internationally, so that we’d have copies in Europe and the Arab
world, in Egypt. We made copies so that, in case we disappeared, the information
lived. Every year, try to do something that you can point at. Otherwise, a
couple years go by, and you say, “What really happened?”
Livingston: Who were your mentors?
Brewster Kahle 277
Kahle:...

new and different—something that hasn’t been done before, something that’s
going to affect a lot of people. There’s an idea that you can pull something off
here. That sort of uplifting nature to San Francisco and the Bay Area in general
really lives on. This is a city of dreamers, and that’s what makes it just a
wonderful place to live and to work.
Livingston: Looking back on all of your experiences, what surprised you most?
Kahle: How long things take. To start a company and to get to a point where
one...

Bezos did that I thought was very smart was that he ran us through his organization
and others through ours. He used us, at least for the first few years, as a
think tank in some sense—a live and breathing example of how else they could
do things.
Alexa’s major value in the first year of its being acquired by Amazon was to
take some of the lessons that we had learned of how to do things much cheaper
than they had. They had gone through an explosive growth phase, and they
were...