was really 6...
was really 6 months of struggling between then and when we got Tim Koogle to
come.
Livingston: What were some of the important turning points during those
6 months?
Brady: Netscape was the only browser back then, well before Internet
Explorer. They had a directory button that was part of the browser, and they
linked to us from that button for free. Netscape’s job actually was to grow the
Internet—the way they were going to make money was to get everyone on
the Internet and then sell servers. So anything with the purpose of getting
people on would help them. They thought Yahoo was the best thing out there,
so they gave us the link. It made sense for them at the time. That was big. It
sent our traffic through the roof.
We hired an outside sales firm to help us start advertising. We sold five
packages to five big companies; MasterCard was one. We got our first round of
advertising before Koogle came.
We put up graphics, which was a big thing. That sounds really ridiculous
now, but at the time Yahoo was all text. The connection speeds were so poor
that any website that used a lot of graphics made the site unusably slow . . .
Most of the traditional media folks didn’t get it because they didn’t realize that
people were dialing in on slow modems. But we knew that if we were going to
have any sort of brand, it would have to be a graphic. So we made the graphic
switch at the same time we put up advertising.
We started to hire and build an organization without the CEO. We had temporary
management that Sequoia helped us find—a CEO and CFO. Because
we weren’t having success finding a CEO, Sequoia insisted that we hire these
managers. That didn’t go great. They weren’t as vested in helping Yahoo longterm
as we were. There was a clear divide between someone who was interim
and someone, like myself, who was fully invested in making it work. I had
moved my whole life from the East Coast for it; my fortunes were tied to this
thing, whereas theirs weren’t necessarily.
In my estimation, they neither hurt nor helped us. They helped steady the
ship for 6 months until we brought in Tim Koogle.
Livingston: Was it hard to convince people to join Yahoo, since it was so new?
Brady: Yeah, it was tough. We hired a lot of friends and friends of friends. You
always hear “Never go into business with friends.” But with the first 20 hires,
everyone knew each other. Consequently there was a high level of trust.
Everyone was young. It was pretty much everyone’s first job, with the exception
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