History of Famous Startups. WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet

Bezos did that

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:13:09 -0700

Bezos did that I thought was very smart was that he ran us through his organization
and others through ours. He used us, at least for the first few years, as a
think tank in some sense—a live and breathing example of how else they could
do things.
Alexa’s major value in the first year of its being acquired by Amazon was to
take some of the lessons that we had learned of how to do things much cheaper
than they had. They had gone through an explosive growth phase, and they
were spending $100 million a year on hardware....

new and different—something

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:13:09 -0700

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 can actually

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:13:09 -0700

you can actually point at and say, “OK, this year I’m going to do this.” This year
I’m working on digitizing books. Last year I was trying to get a storage computer
to work internationally, so that we’d have copies in Europe and the Arab
world, in Egypt. We made copies so that, in case we disappeared, the information
lived. Every year, try to do something that you can point at. Otherwise, a
couple years go by, and you say, “What really happened?”
Livingston: Who were your mentors?
Brewster Kahle 277
Kahle: I’ve had two. Most people don’t have mentors....

In talks with

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:13:09 -0700

In talks with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, I said, “I tried being
acquired, and it didn’t work. By AOL, a great company, but my company got
dispersed, and I don’t know how to run a division; I know how to run a company.”
He said, “If we’re going to buy you, why don’t you run it as a company?
What does that mean to you?” I said, “Well, it has a board, and I meet with the
board once a month and they give general direction and I run the place.” And
he said, “OK, let’s do it…

moving around the

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:13:09 -0700

moving around the Net. In return, all of these people would be giving us information
as to where they went, what trails they took, which we’d then learn
from.
Livingston: What did you learn?
Kahle:We learned what was related to other things. But in the great scale, what
I loved was watching some of these users—though we didn’t know who was
who and we didn’t care. In fact, that was very important because it’s very private
information. Something I think we’re forgetting is that some of these other systems
are collecting this information, and they do care who’s who. Google’s…

fantastically valuable thing

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:13:09 -0700

fantastically valuable thing to do. So the second startup, Alexa, I started with
a partner as a full cofounder and that worked out really well.
Livingston: Did you get funding?
Kahle: We got $1 million to get the first round going, and then we started talking
to venture capitalists. This is 1996; some of the companies started going
public, so there’s some money around. But again, everything that we were
talking about, we couldn’t communicate it in a way that made sense to them. So
we got private investment by a single individual. That was very helpful. We
grew that…

so then I

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:13:09 -0700

so then I could go and actually do something.
Livingston: Publishing was happening, you sold WAIS to AOL, then what?
Kahle: Then I tried to work within AOL, and that was very difficult. For an
entrepreneur, acquisitions are very difficult to manage. That’s a warning. I’ve
been through two acquisitions. One was WAIS; that was bought by AOL. The
next round I built two organizations at the same time. One was called Alexa
Internet (short for the Library of Alexandria), and the other was the Internet
Archive, to archive everything that was in the library. Alexa was a for-profit, and…

dreamed of in

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:13:09 -0700

dreamed of in the late ’70s as the goal—which was to build the great library—
could even start.
Livingston: That was always your goal?
Kahle: Yes, that was always the goal. We just had to do a couple things first. It
took a lot longer than I thought. We’re now in 2006, and it’s hard to believe how
pathetic things are. We don’t even have books online yet. I don’t know why the
world moves so slowly. Everybody says, “Oh, it’s moving so fast.” And it’s like,
“No, I don’t think so. It’s been forever.”
Livingston: Besides always running out…

we’d say, “Well,

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:13:09 -0700

we’d say, “Well, there are some alternatives out there.” In the early ’90s there
was AOL, there was Lexus Nexus from the ’80s, where they would lose the control
of the distribution of their work. We’d say, “Do you want that?” They’d say,
“No, we don’t want that. We want to control the distribution of our work.” So
we said, “Swing with us for a little while, while we build this Internet. Let’s
build this Internet together based on open systems.” So these business guys
were, in fact, wanting an open system.
We wanted to build this up before the…

Brewster Kahle 271

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:13:09 -0700

Brewster Kahle 271
Livingston: So you were getting a little bit of money from clients. Did you hire
anyone?
Kahle: Yes, there was Harry Morris, the key engineer that built much of the
technology. It grew into a company that was about 30 people, 35 people by
the time it was bought by AOL.
Livingston: Tell me about some of the most hair-raising moments.
Kahle: Going broke. When you just don’t have enough money to pay the bills.
We would usually live with the amount of money in the bank that would be
about 2 to 4 weeks worth of…