Founders at Work.pdf

128 Founders at Work
So Jerry gives me a call in the beginning of my second year of B-school and
says, “My trailer mate and I started this thing, and it’s really starting to ramp up.
I’ll have you take a look at it.” He wasn’t looking for advice; he was just telling
me what he was up to. I looked at it and was blown away—the whole Web
thing. I had been on AOL, I knew a bit about the Internet, but nothing about
the Web. It was still pretty early then.
I just looked at it and said, “Wow, that’s really cool.” And he said, “Well,
things are going great with us.” I said, “What does that mean, great?” He said
something like, “This thing’s growing and, if it keeps growing, maybe you’d be
interested in doing some moonlighting after school or something like that.” I
thought, “Yeah, it seems interesting and I love small companies; I’d love to
work with Jerry, sounds great.” That was at the end of ’94. They had been doing
it for about 8 months before I had any idea it existed.
Livingston: They had just been doing it for themselves, to index cool things on
the Web, right?
Brady: The story I’ve heard from Jerry and Dave is that they were both doing
their PhD theses and all the technical papers that they would have to reference
were online, so they were trying to keep track of them all. They had this big list,
and then the EE graduate community—not just at Stanford but all the major
EE graduate programs—found out about it and sent them emails saying, “Can
you add this?”
In their spare time, Jerry and Dave would add categories they were interested
in. Jerry, having just come back from Japan, was very interested in sumo
wrestling, so he had this great sumo category. Everything on the Web related to
EE they had in their list and then these other interesting areas. It was early
enough that it was really the only thing out there—big lists, anyway. There were
small lists, but nothing big, and so people just kept sending emails asking them,
“Add this to the list. My friend told me about this list; I’d love to add this.”
So Jerry and Dave did, and they kept adding categories and all of a sudden
both of them went from doing their graduate work to adding websites to their
list for 8 hours a day. As chance would have it, their thesis advisor was on sabbatical,
so there was really no one looking after them, so it all worked. Had their
advisor been there, it might not have happened. So they did it for 8 hours a day,
maybe even longer, every day for 8 months. They created this huge list, at the
right time, in the right place. So it just started taking off.
It had a ton of momentum when I first started talking to them. The tenor of
the conversation when I first got involved was, “Hey, maybe next summer when
you graduate, you can come and get a 9-to-5 in the Valley and moonlight with
us afterward. Then 3 months later, the conversation was more like, “This thing
is going crazy, get out here now.” They had no idea how much momentum they
had behind them and between October ’94 and January ’95—I don’t know the
stats off the top of my head, but traffic increased 10 times in just a handful of
months.
All of a sudden, the VC community recognized what they were doing. A
bunch of others—everyone who was thinking about new media at the time—