History of Famous Startups. Yahoo

with friends, bad

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with friends, bad idea.” So one of the things that really helped me was that he
and I had a conversation before I joined, “OK, here are the ground rules.” And
this is really what made me think about it. “OK, if this happens, I walk away.”
We had the conversation in order to preserve our friendship, having no idea
what was going to happen, but that conversation got me thinking about it and
why was I involved.
Livingston: Is there anything about Yahoo’s early days that the world should
know?
Brady: I know it’s a bit of a clich?,...

plate,” and he

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plate,” and he always responded, “No, we’re going.” It was someone who had
come from a big company who knew how to act like a big company, even
though behind the scenes it was startup.
Livingston: Was there ever a time when you wanted to quit?
Brady: No. There were a few days where I was really upset, but never close to
the point where I wanted to quit. It was too much fun. After the first 4 to
5 months, you could see what was coming; you knew you were on the wave;
things were only going to grow....

They had a

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They had a lot of confidence in what they were doing.
Livingston: What was one of the funniest moments early on?
Brady: The funniest thing I can remember was when there was a huge storm in
May of ’95, and the power grid went down for a few days. We had to go rent a
power generator and take turns filling it with diesel fuel for 4 days. 24/7. We
were laughing, “How many pages to the gallon today?” It was a crazy storm and
it also started leaking in our building. We had all these meetings scheduled and
couldn’t…

even before that.

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even before that.
Livingston: Do you remember the biggest debate that you got into?
Brady: There was always speed versus look-and-feel. In trying to grow a brand,
look-and-feel has a lot to do with it, as does speed, so there’s always that balancing
act. Arguing the necessity of graphics with Filo was always a big argument.
I’ll never forget our 8-year debate.
How to handle pornography was another one. There were just so many.
There’s no one that just stands out as a watershed per se. There was a lot of
Internet-related legislation in the first couple of years, and…

a search and

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a search and you didn’t find what you were looking for on Yahoo, rather than
just saying, “It’s not here,” or “Go check out this other thing,” he put links to our
competitors, then prefilled the query, so you’d just click on Excite and they
would do a search on Excite for the same thing.
Certainly they don’t teach you in business school to go point to your competitors,
but it sent the right message to the users, which was, “It’s all about you.
We’re going to get you the data you want. If it exists on the Web, we’re…

commitment it takes

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commitment it takes to get something off the ground. Despite how
everything grew, it was a task just staying on the wave that was the Internet.
Very, very long hours. The group of people that we had assembled was just
great, so the hours were never dreaded. You enjoyed being at work, even
though sometimes it was 16, 18 hours a day. That’s the only thing really specifically
that I think back on a lot.
Livingston: I wonder if it was because it was on the early side of the Bubble
and there weren’t as many people going through that?...

Tim Brady 133

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Tim Brady 133
Livingston:Were you nervous that Stanford would claim to own Yahoo? Wasn’t
it running on their servers?
Brady: It was. I was never part of those conversations. I was obviously nervous,
and I asked, and Jerry and Dave said, “No, it’s taken care of. Don’t worry about
it.” And it was.
Stanford is very progressive in that. Yahoo is far from the first startup that
originated there and will be far from the last one. It was new enough, and
it wasn’t a specific technology; it was a brand. It wasn’t really an invention; it
wasn’t a piece…

search. So, when

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search. So, when I say we “rented” that technology, we essentially partnered
with full-text search companies to be the falloff searches that we had.
Livingston: That’s what you did with Google?
Brady: Yes. Strategically, it was spot-on until Google showed up. Because we
always thought it was going to be a leapfrogging game. No one is ever going to
be able to get so far ahead that we’d ever be in strategic risk of kingmaking a
full-text search engine, because you just can’t do that. Google ended up doing
exactly that. At the time, until 2000/2001, we had Open Text…

was, “Oh no.

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was, “Oh no. Does that mean we’re in Bill’s crosshairs or does that mean we’re
just cool?” Any time you talk to Microsoft, just the way they do business, they
have the potential to do whatever the hell they want, so when you go to them
their mindset is always, “We could partner with you, or we could do it
ourselves.”
We were always very nervous about them doing anything. At the time, I
think IE had just come out, and it was a poor effort, their first crack at a
browser, but still, you knew that they were going…

of the interim

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of the interim management. So people weren’t worried where the Internet was
going; they were just looking for something interesting to do, and joining Yahoo
qualified.
The Internet really started to take off in July ’95. Netscape went public, and
that set off a chain reaction of PR. Not only was the Internet cool, but, all of a
sudden, people could make money. The press was all over Jerry and Dave, so
we spent a lot of time handling the press. We hired a temp PR firm that didn’t
work all that well. We didn’t even need it because people…