Brewster Kahle startedWAIS (Wide Area Information
Servers) in the late ’80s while an employee of Thinking
Machines. He left in 1993 to found WAIS, Inc. WAIS
was one of the earliest forms of Internet search software.
Developed before the Web, it was in some
ways a predecessor to web search engines. Kahle sold
WAIS to AOL in 1995.
The next year, Kahle founded Alexa Internet with
Bruce Gilliat. The Alexa toolbar tracked user browsing
behavior and suggested related links using collaborative
filtering. Once captured, pages visited by
users would then be “donated” to the related nonprofit Internet Archive, to help
build a history of the Web.
Alexa was acquired by Amazon in 1999. Kahle continues to run the Internet
Archive.
Livingston: You were one of the first members of the Thinking Machines team.
What number employee were you?
Kahle: I was not one of the two founders—they were Danny Hillis and Sheryl
Handler. I was on the project team at MIT, so when we started the company,
anybody from that team that wanted to come came. There were three or four of
us. We had been working on it for a couple years before there was a company.
Livingston: Tell me about some big things back in the Thinking Machines days
that helped pave the way for WAIS.
Kahle: Thinking Machines was not my doing, but I was on the project team
beforehand and then helped start the company. What I learned out of that was:
do your homework before you are spending your own money. We did a full
couple rounds of the Connection Machine at MIT before we started a company.
It was very helpful to get your lessons learned basically on somebody
else’s nickel, in a research phase.
Another lesson that I learned out of Thinking Machines was, if you’re trying
to get your company to think differently—to do something interesting—pick
your setting carefully. Thinking Machines was set in an 1800s Victorian mansion
on 100 acres of forest just outside of Boston. It was a park, basically. Working in
an environment where, if you got stuck, you’d go for a long walk is very different
than trying to do a startup and think differently if you’re in Suite 201 in some
major office complex. That was a lesson that I’ve used every startup since.
Thinking Machines had the great fortune of starting with $8 million in the
bank, because some very rich individuals really believed in it. It was not
venture-funded, and it was founded with the idea that it was going to take years
and years and years to actually get something real done. That allowed Thinking

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