Livingston: You went...
Livingston: You went public in what was the fastest IPO in the NASDAQ ever.
Davis: It still is.
Livingston: How did you manage that? How did you manage creating a business
plan and vision for the company, growing the company, doing all the PR,
and preparing?
Davis: We developed a business plan, but I’d be lying to say that we referred to
it every day. We spent a lot of time on the plan trying to identify what business
we were in and where we’d go, but so much of our life was reactionary. But we
focused on increasing users. We focused on expanding the advertising base. We
focused on partnerships; getting others to promote Lycos was very effective for
us. We had a wide number of customers, like AT&T, CompuServe, and Prodigy,
that licensed Lycos technology and put their own search engine online with
Bob Davis 423
“Powered by Lycos” underneath it. Interestingly enough, all three of those
companies are gone today.
They were our early licensees. We also did some joint ventures overseas.
Probably less than a year into it, we struck a joint venture with Bertelsmann,
which was the largest media company in Europe. We put in our technology and
they put in about $10 million, and we created Lycos Europe, which was Lycos
in native languages for a dozen countries in Europe, initially.
Livingston: So these partnerships and licensing helped drive a lot of new users?
Davis: They were incredibly important for us early on. We had a number of
license agreements with companies that would pay us several hundred thousand
to millions of dollars to use our technology. So we got a lot of cash from
that and then we had a lot more visibility as well.
Livingston: So Lycos was focused on building visibility in many different ways.
Davis: Yes. We were PR evangelists of the highest order and were constantly
self-promoting. PR is the cheapest form of advertising and it was always pretty
powerful for us. It was the most effective way we had to get the word out to
customers.
We eventually became a large national advertiser: there were Lycos commercials,
a Lycos race car, Lycos parachutes jumping out of the sky.
I think the life of an entrepreneur is a life of setbacks, challenges, disappointments,
and failures. It’s not how you celebrate the successes, it’s how you
overcome the adversity and the hardship that determines how the business succeeds.
And I think that’s what we were able to do well.
We had a saying at Lycos called, “Let up, you lose.” It was all about perseverance
and hunkering down and overcoming the tough times and saying,
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