new and different—something that hasn’t been done before, something that’s
going to affect a lot of people. There’s an idea that you can pull something off
here. That sort of uplifting nature to San Francisco and the Bay Area in general
really lives on. This is a city of dreamers, and that’s what makes it just a
wonderful place to live and to work.
Livingston: Looking back on all of your experiences, what surprised you most?
Kahle: How long things take. To start a company and to get to a point where
one has a critical mass—you have an office, you’ve got your CFO, you’ve got all
of the infrastructure to become a viable entity. I think about 20 to 40 people is
a golden size, because you’re not spending all of your time doing things that
you’re not that good at. There are other people in the organization with more
specialization in different areas. It takes a couple years to really get that
debugged.
You can grow it instantly. You can hire 40 people in an afternoon, but they
won’t necessarily work together well; they won’t understand what’s going on. It
takes a while. So 6 months, 9 months goes by often just putting together all the
pieces of infrastructure. With Alexa, it took a year to build the company to
the extent where we could do our first real product release. WAIS was the same
way. The first product release came a year after the start. It always seems like it
should be much quicker than that.
Livingston: What can big corporations do to preserve the startuppyness of the
companies they acquire?
Kahle: My first company was bought by AOL, and what AOL wanted to do was
inject the Internet into its veins. So they went around and bought a bunch of
companies. And I’d say what they’d bought the company for, if I had been more
worldly, they actually achieved. It just wasn’t what I was looking for. I had built
a little company. It made something like $3 million a year, which I thought was
pretty great. I wanted it to get to $10 million or $20 million, but that was a
rounding error for AOL—it was noise. They needed us to help on the big
issues. So I worked on strategy for the company for 12 months—to get the company
going in the Internet direction. And that’s really what they wanted. It just
wasn’t something that I knew how to do. I really liked running something that I
knew how to run.
When I did the startup that was bought by Amazon, I said, “Leave us on our
own. We’re smart and independent enough to be able to do good work that will
inject things from the side into your other organization.” The thing that Jeff

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• new and different—something