It did, too. Yahoo made a lot of money from this software. When you tell
people you sold a startup to Yahoo in 1998, they get this knowing look, like you
sold someone a bag full of air for a hundred million dollars, but Viaweb was a
real money-making acquisition for them.
Livingston: What was the most surprising thing about being acquired?
Graham: For me the most surprising thing was the day the deal was going to be
announced. There was a point where I had to change our front page to read
Yahoo instead of Viaweb and then it really hit me. Viaweb is gone. Viaweb
doesn’t exist anymore. That was so weird. And I told myself, “Look Paul, don’t
get sentimental. You built this thing to sell it. That was the whole point, and
now you’ve sold it, so stop whining.” But boy, it was strange to think that when
I clicked on “publish” and replaced the Viaweb front page with the Yahoo front
page, Viaweb would never be seen again.
It was also kind of weird that when the deal closed, we all became Yahoo
employees. It was like one of those dreams where you have to go back to high
school. Up till that point we’d been independent, and then suddenly we were
employees, with bosses. And the weirdest thing was, we, or I at least, actually
started to think of them as bosses. Now whatever I did was either submitting or
rebelling, whereas before it had been just doing.
Paul Graham 217
I think Yahoo is smarter now about dealing with startups than they were
then. We were one of the first companies they bought, and I think the idea was,
back then, that what you should do with an acquisition is “integrate” it, in the
same way that a sugar cube becomes integrated with your tea. We basically got
dissolved within Yahoo, and all the people working on Viaweb—or Yahoo Store
as it then became—got dispersed to all the corresponding bits of Yahoo. The
engineers got put with the engineers and the people working on customer support
got put with the support people and the sales guys got put with the Yahoo
sales guys.
It seemed to Yahoo that this was the most efficient, organized way of doing
things, but actually it was terrible for us. We had been this little tight-knit group
that worked really well together and suddenly we were spread out all over
Yahoo.
Livingston: Any general thought you have on the acquisition process, since you
had several offers?
Graham: Never believe it’s a deal till the money’s in the bank. Even at the point
where you walk in that room to sign the final papers, there’s still a 10 percent