Founders at Work.pdf

Tim Brady
First Non-Founding Employee,
Yahoo
C H A P T E R
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Yahoo began in 1994 as a collection of links to research papers maintained by
two Stanford grad students, Jerry Yang and David Filo. They gradually added
links to new types of information, and the site grew rapidly in popularity. By
the end of 1994, Yang and Filo were considering turning the site into a startup,
and they asked Tim Brady to write a business plan for it.
Brady had been Yang’s college roommate and was by this time getting his
MBA at Harvard Business School. Brady initially expected to be able to finish
the semester, but as Yahoo’s potential grew, it became clear that he couldn’t
wait. He turned in the company’s business plan as his final assignment in the
courses he still needed to pass, and jumped on a plane west to become Yahoo’s
first actual employee.
Brady’s title during his 8 years at Yahoo was VP of Production. His responsibility,
as he puts it, was “product.” He was effectively the editor of Yahoo’s site.
Yahoo went public in April 1996, and for nearly all the period since has been
the most popular network of websites in the world. Ultimately, Yahoo won the
portal wars because it was a better site, and it was the site it was largely because
of Tim Brady.
Livingston: You were the first employee the Yahoo founders brought on. How
did you get involved?
Brady: I met Jerry when we were undergraduates at Stanford and we studied
electrical engineering together. We were in the same freshman dorm and were
good friends throughout college and after. He continued on—he’s much more
adept at EE than me—and I went to Japan and worked for Motorola doing
marketing and engineering.
Stanford has a program in Kyoto, and Jerry studied there for a quarter and
took a summer job just outside of Tokyo. I had been there for a couple years so
we hooked back up. Then I went back to business school, he went back to finish
up his PhD, and we kept in touch. We always talked about dream jobs even
when we were undergraduates and what we hoped to accomplish. “Wouldn’t it
be great one day if . . .”
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