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 legislation in the first couple of years, and Congress, in my
opinion, didn’t have a clear idea what was going on. They were obviously influenced
by lobbyists from traditional media who had very specific agendas that
weren’t necessarily in the best interest of the Internet’s development. “Should
we say anything? How should we react?” There were certainly those. We
turned our site black a couple of times—the background black and the text in
white—in protest. I forget what the proposed legislation was.
Livingston:Was new legislation a big concern?
Brady: Absolutely. Just a few things here and there—copyrights, digital rights
written in a slightly different way—and we could have a different Internet.
Livingston: Do you remember any other interesting new turning points?
Brady: I remember one day when Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, got shot.
It was the first time that we put new news on the front page. For us to think of
our site as a public service to some degree—to find things on the web and use
it to communicate news—was a big deal. “Rabin Assassinated” was our first
foray into news, and the reaction we got from everyone about using Yahoo for
that purpose was overwhelmingly good.
Livingston: Any proud moments?
Brady: The Gates memo was a pretty cool moment—scary and proud at the
same time. Going public was a proud moment. Being added to the NASDAQ
100 was an even prouder moment.
Livingston: Was it hard for Yahoo to turn down acquisition offers in the early
days?
Brady: I obviously never had equal weight in that decision. It was always Jerry
and Dave, and I don’t know the full list of suitors. I know AOL was a suitor, I
know the LA Times was a suitor, and I know they had gotten informal offers
from Microsoft—never anything concrete. A lot of them were very early on,
before they even took venture money. For Jerry and Dave—neither grew up
with a lot of money—to turn down a lot of money at that stage with no guarantee
of the company doing anything afterwards, was, in my estimation, a big deal.

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• even before that.