a search and you didn’t find what you were looking for on Yahoo, rather than
just saying, “It’s not here,” or “Go check out this other thing,” he put links to our
competitors, then prefilled the query, so you’d just click on Excite and they
would do a search on Excite for the same thing.
Certainly they don’t teach you in business school to go point to your competitors,
but it sent the right message to the users, which was, “It’s all about you.
We’re going to get you the data you want. If...

even before that.
Livingston: Do you remember the biggest debate that you got into?
Brady: There was always speed versus look-and-feel. In trying to grow a brand,
look-and-feel has a lot to do with it, as does speed, so there’s always that balancing
act. Arguing the necessity of graphics with Filo was always a big argument.
I’ll never forget our 8-year debate.
How to handle pornography was another one. There were just so many.
There’s no one that just stands out as a watershed per se. There was a lot of
Internet-related...

They had a lot of confidence in what they were doing.
Livingston: What was one of the funniest moments early on?
Brady: The funniest thing I can remember was when there was a huge storm in
May of ’95, and the power grid went down for a few days. We had to go rent a
power generator and take turns filling it with diesel fuel for 4 days. 24/7. We
were laughing, “How many pages to the gallon today?” It was a crazy storm and
it also started leaking in our building. We had...

plate,” and he always responded, “No, we’re going.” It was someone who had
come from a big company who knew how to act like a big company, even
though behind the scenes it was startup.
Livingston: Was there ever a time when you wanted to quit?
Brady: No. There were a few days where I was really upset, but never close to
the point where I wanted to quit. It was too much fun. After the first 4 to
5 months, you could see what was coming; you knew you were on the wave;...

with friends, bad idea.” So one of the things that really helped me was that he
and I had a conversation before I joined, “OK, here are the ground rules.” And
this is really what made me think about it. “OK, if this happens, I walk away.”
We had the conversation in order to preserve our friendship, having no idea
what was going to happen, but that conversation got me thinking about it and
why was I involved.
Livingston: Is there anything about Yahoo’s early days that the world should
know?
Brady:...