a lawyer to figure out how to quit without getting sued. I was on my way out the
front door when Fred Egan grabbed me and said, “Wait, let’s see if we can fix
this.” It was pouring with rain and I was not too psyched about having to go find
a cab in that, so I went back to work while he made some phone calls. I don’t
know what he said, but I guess he convinced the investors I wasn’t bluffing.
I wasn’t, either.
We had some leverage, because the investors already had over a million dollars
in the company. I don’t know if they realized how hard it would have been
to just hire a bunch of programmers and throw them in there and have them
figure out the code, but it would have been really hard.
Livingston: So a few months later after this horrible low period, you have a
great high period because you get bought by Yahoo. How did that happen?
Graham: We especially wanted to get bought by Yahoo. If you had asked us,
“Who do you want to get bought by?” we would have said, “Yahoo.” In fact, we
did say that; we kind of spread the word that we saw Yahoo as the ideal acquirer.
We’d tried to do an online demo for Yahoo about 6 months before. We
could do demos by phone where we’d talk people through editing a site and we
could see from the log files where they were clicking. I tried to do a phone
demo for Tim Koogle in the fall of ’97, but he couldn’t even get to our server. It
turned out some router was hosed halfway between us and them.
The way we really got onto their radar screen was through Ali Partovi. He’d
had Robert and Trevor as teaching assistants in CS classes at Harvard a few
years before. He had a startup called LinkExchange that was talking to Yahoo
at the time, and their VC was Mike Moritz, who was also Yahoo’s VC. In the
end they got bought by Microsoft instead, but not before they’d told Yahoo
about us.
Livingston: How did it go with Yahoo?
Graham: We liked them. They were like us. They had hacker values, basically.
They were from graduate programs in computer science too. They were our
tribe of people, not these weird business people we kept having to deal with.
Plus they weren’t jerks about the acquisition. So many companies play hardball
in acquisitions. It’s so stupid. Don’t they realize that the people they’re
trying to squeeze are going to have to work for them afterward? Yahoo was very
upstanding about the deal. They didn’t require any vesting, for example. We
could have quit the day after the deal closed. But because they’d been good
guys, we worked hard to make the acquisition work out well for them.

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