to California?” I looked at Robert and said “California?” And it turned out
he was going to leave in a week for the whole summer.
So now I had to explain to our investors why one of the founders of the company
they had just invested in had gone and taken a summer job working for
another company. That required all my spin abilities.
Livingston: What did you tell them?
Graham: I said that this was part of his graduate student career and that it was
a common thing for people in graduate school to take jobs working in research
labs during the summer and, yes, this was another company, but it was really
more of a research lab than a company. That part was certainly true. When they
tried to turn AltaVista into a company, it was disaster.
Livingston: What was the next turning point after Robert left for his summer
job?
Graham: Our main angel investor, the metals trader, was encouraged that the
big company had wanted to buy us, so that spring he’d put more money in—still
angel-scale money. We weren’t desperately running out of money, but we were
going to run out sometime in the fall. The angel investor decided that we
needed to have a business guy as CEO and that he wasn’t going to give us any
more money unless we got someone. So that summer, as well as trying to deal
with Rtm being in California, we spent our time talking to various business
guys.
The problem with all of them was that they had delusions of grandeur. This
was the beginning of the Internet Bubble, remember, and I think all of these
guys saw themselves as some kind of grand CEO, while we programmers
labored in the kitchen cooking the food and washing the dishes. If the deal
were simply that the business guy would be the public face of the company, but
we would be allowed to do what we wanted and make sure everything worked
right, that would have been OK. But we were worried about what might happen
if one of these guys wanted to actually be the chief executive officer and tell
us what our strategy should be. We’d be hosed, because they didn’t know anything
about computer stuff.
Livingston: So what did you do?
Graham: We lucked out. At practically the last moment, we found Fred
Egan—or rather, he found us. Fred Egan saved us. That was a great turning
point, when we got Fred. The lowest point, well, maybe tied for the lowest
point in the company’s history, was that summer when Robert was away and the
investors were pressuring us to take some business guy as our boss. When we
finally got Fred, that ended that summer of horror.

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