October 2002 was when Google came knocking. We had a small office
downtown—more of a conference room than an office. It was Adaptive Path’s
first office, which we moved into after them. And we had brought on a tech
support guy and a sys admin. Then Google called us up. I forget how that
happened . . . I think that was O’Reilly again.
At this point I think it looked like Pyra came back from the dead. Blogging
in general had exploded all this time. We got a lot more competitors, but the
phenomenon just exploded. We were a less substantial part of blogging, but
blogging was a much bigger deal. So it drove our growth and it legitimized us as
being a major player in an increasingly big space.
So O’Reilly was talking and they said, “I guess Pyra’s still alive.” We had a
meeting up at O’Reilly around this time, and Tim [O’Reilly] and Mark
[Jacobsen] were trying to figure out how they could help us. One of the suggestions
was to introduce us to folks like Amazon and Google.
Soon after, according to the story I heard, Larry or Sergey were on a call
with Tim and Tim mentioned us, and Sergey had recently been at this conference
where everyone was talking about blogs, and was interested in blogs and
he said, “Yeah, we want to talk to them.”
We’re like, “Alright. Why?” It didn’t even occur to us that they might want
to buy us because Google hadn’t bought anybody at this point. And they were a
search company. So we brainstormed all these ideas maybe we could do with
Google and we went down there, and it turned out that we were meeting with
their corporate development people—meaning the people who buy companies.
We started talking about ideas and within the first 5 minutes they said, “Yeah,
there’re lots of ideas, but it’s hard for someone like us to really partner with
someone so small as you; why don’t you just come here and do all that stuff?” So
we were like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” (We tried to play it cool.)
I had had one or two other conversations with possible acquirers. One was
Lycos back in 2001, which would have been terrible—though it would have
made a lot of sense for us because they had Tripod and Angelfire (two of the
biggest publishing sites that there were). But they didn’t have any money for
that area, so that didn’t go anywhere.
What Google said was, “Would you consider being acquired?” And we said,
“Well, we’ve talked to people, but Google’s never asked before.” Like everyone
else, we thought very highly of Google, and we said, “Let’s talk about it.”

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