of the interim management. So people weren’t worried where the Internet was
going; they were just looking for something interesting to do, and joining Yahoo
qualified.
The Internet really started to take off in July ’95. Netscape went public, and
that set off a chain reaction of PR. Not only was the Internet cool, but, all of a
sudden, people could make money. The press was all over Jerry and Dave, so
we spent a lot of time handling the press. We hired a temp PR firm that didn’t
work all that well....

was, “Oh no. Does that mean we’re in Bill’s crosshairs or does that mean we’re
just cool?” Any time you talk to Microsoft, just the way they do business, they
have the potential to do whatever the hell they want, so when you go to them
their mindset is always, “We could partner with you, or we could do it
ourselves.”
We were always very nervous about them doing anything. At the time, I
think IE had just come out, and it was a poor effort, their first crack at a
browser, but...

search. So, when I say we “rented” that technology, we essentially partnered
with full-text search companies to be the falloff searches that we had.
Livingston: That’s what you did with Google?
Brady: Yes. Strategically, it was spot-on until Google showed up. Because we
always thought it was going to be a leapfrogging game. No one is ever going to
be able to get so far ahead that we’d ever be in strategic risk of kingmaking a
full-text search engine, because you just can’t do that. Google ended up doing
exactly that. At the...

Tim Brady 133
Livingston:Were you nervous that Stanford would claim to own Yahoo? Wasn’t
it running on their servers?
Brady: It was. I was never part of those conversations. I was obviously nervous,
and I asked, and Jerry and Dave said, “No, it’s taken care of. Don’t worry about
it.” And it was.
Stanford is very progressive in that. Yahoo is far from the first startup that
originated there and will be far from the last one. It was new enough, and
it wasn’t a specific technology; it was a brand. It...

commitment it takes to get something off the ground. Despite how
everything grew, it was a task just staying on the wave that was the Internet.
Very, very long hours. The group of people that we had assembled was just
great, so the hours were never dreaded. You enjoyed being at work, even
though sometimes it was 16, 18 hours a day. That’s the only thing really specifically
that I think back on a lot.
Livingston: I wonder if it was because it was on the early side of the Bubble
and there...