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?
Brady: There was a consumer electronics show down in San Jose in March ’95,
so Yahoo’s coming-out party was a booth at this show. The show was mostly
hardware and software companies. There were no other Internet companies
Tim Brady 129
there; it was just us. That was kind of everyone’s first day of work. We were still
doing it mostly out of Jerry and Dave’s trailer—their graduate desks were in this
temporary trailer at Stanford. And some out of Jerry’s apartment. A couple
weeks after the show, we found space in Mountain View and moved in. We got
funding and that allowed us to go find office space.
Livingston: Sequoia was your VC?
Brady: Yes.
Livingston: How much money did you get?
Brady: $1 million.
Livingston: That was a lot of money back then, especially for a company doing
something so new.
Brady: Absolutely. Two graduate students who had never held a job, another
programmer, me, with no experience in the US in an industry that didn’t exist
yet. Yeah, it was a lot of money.
Livingston: What were your main goals when you first started? Did you want to
get more people on the Internet?
Brady:We had enough traffic to go sell advertising. We knew if we sold ads on
all our pages as of then, at a $20 CPM, that would cover our costs. It’s hard to
remember back what your mindset was, but I know it wasn’t, “Let’s get everyone
on the Internet.” That was way beyond us. The mindset was more like,
“Let’s not let this sink the company; let’s keep it going.” And part of that was just
making money, so we did a bunch of crazy things in addition to advertising to
try to bring in money. We made book deals and a bunch of little things that
really didn’t add up to anything. But we did anything in the name of getting
money while we looked for proper management. Because we all knew it
wasn’t us.
“If this thing is going to be as big as we want it to be, we’re not the people to
run it,”—although we’d have loved to. So we had a CEO search for 6 months. It

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