Yahoo began in 1994 as a collection of links to research papers maintained by
two Stanford grad students, Jerry Yang and David Filo. They gradually added
links to new types of information, and the site grew rapidly in popularity. By
the end of 1994, Yang and Filo were considering turning the site into a startup,
and they asked Tim Brady to write a business plan for it.
Brady had been Yang’s college roommate and was by this time getting his
MBA at Harvard Business School. Brady initially expected to be able to...

things are going great with us.” I said, “What does that mean, great?” He said
something like, “This thing’s growing and, if it keeps growing, maybe you’d be
interested in doing some moonlighting after school or something like that.” I
thought, “Yeah, it seems interesting and I love small companies; I’d love to
work with Jerry, sounds great.” That was at the end of ’94. They had been doing
it for about 8 months before I had any idea it existed.
Livingston: They had just been doing it for themselves, to index cool things...

months.
All of a sudden, the VC community recognized what they were doing. A
bunch of others—everyone who was thinking about new media at the time—
recognized it as well. So they got a lot of calls—the LA Times, AOL, Microsoft—
wanting them to join their companies. Those conversations were, “Why don’t
you come and bring your project. We’ll host it and you can blow it out.” It
started getting them to think about their project as a business, not just a hobby.
Then an article in Newsweek happened—I think it was November...

Advertising was well known, so it wasn’t like we were making up advertising.
HotWired, which was the online version of Wired magazine, was online by
that time, and they were selling advertising. So there was a model out there, but
certainly there were no search engines or directories selling advertising. I just
used your basic business plan format, incorporated Jerry’s and Dave’s ideas, and
added a few of my own.
Livingston: So you leave business school early and move out to California. Did
you have an office? What did you first start doing?...

was really 6 months of struggling between then and when we got Tim Koogle to
come.
Livingston: What were some of the important turning points during those
6 months?
Brady: Netscape was the only browser back then, well before Internet
Explorer. They had a directory button that was part of the browser, and they
linked to us from that button for free. Netscape’s job actually was to grow the
Internet—the way they were going to make money was to get everyone on
the Internet and then sell servers. So anything with the...