Founders at Work.pdf

130 Founders at Work
there; it was just us. That was kind of everyone’s first day of work. We were still
doing it mostly out of Jerry and Dave’s trailer—their graduate desks were in this
temporary trailer at Stanford. And some out of Jerry’s apartment. A couple
weeks after the show, we found space in Mountain View and moved in. We got
funding and that allowed us to go find office space.
Livingston: Sequoia was your VC?
Brady: Yes.
Livingston: How much money did you get?
Brady: $1 million.
Livingston: That was a lot of money back then, especially for a company doing
something so new.
Brady: Absolutely. Two graduate students who had never held a job, another
programmer, me, with no experience in the US in an industry that didn’t exist
yet. Yeah, it was a lot of money.
Livingston: What were your main goals when you first started? Did you want to
get more people on the Internet?
Brady: We had enough traffic to go sell advertising. We knew if we sold ads on
all our pages as of then, at a $20 CPM, that would cover our costs. It’s hard to
remember back what your mindset was, but I know it wasn’t, “Let’s get everyone
on the Internet.” That was way beyond us. The mindset was more like,
“Let’s not let this sink the company; let’s keep it going.” And part of that was just
making money, so we did a bunch of crazy things in addition to advertising to
try to bring in money. We made book deals and a bunch of little things that
really didn’t add up to anything. But we did anything in the name of getting
money while we looked for proper management. Because we all knew it
wasn’t us.
“If this thing is going to be as big as we want it to be, we’re not the people to
run it,”—although we’d have loved to. So we had a CEO search for 6 months. It
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.