Founders at Work.pdf

Tim Brady 131
We put up graphics, which was a big thing. That sounds really ridiculous
now, but at the time Yahoo was all text. The connection speeds were so poor
that any website that used a lot of graphics made the site unusably slow . . .
Most of the traditional media folks didn’t get it because they didn’t realize that
people were dialing in on slow modems. But we knew that if we were going to
have any sort of brand, it would have to be a graphic. So we made the graphic
switch at the same time we put up advertising.
We started to hire and build an organization without the CEO. We had temporary
management that Sequoia helped us find—a CEO and CFO. Because
we weren’t having success finding a CEO, Sequoia insisted that we hire these
managers. That didn’t go great. They weren’t as vested in helping Yahoo longterm
as we were. There was a clear divide between someone who was interim
and someone, like myself, who was fully invested in making it work. I had
moved my whole life from the East Coast for it; my fortunes were tied to this
thing, whereas theirs weren’t necessarily.
In my estimation, they neither hurt nor helped us. They helped steady the
ship for 6 months until we brought in Tim Koogle.
Livingston: Was it hard to convince people to join Yahoo, since it was so new?
Brady: Yeah, it was tough. We hired a lot of friends and friends of friends. You
always hear “Never go into business with friends.” But with the first 20 hires,
everyone knew each other. Consequently there was a high level of trust.
Everyone was young. It was pretty much everyone’s first job, with the exception
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 were just calling in,
and Jerry was so naturally good with the press, so things just kind of happened.
Then when Tim came in, he hired Jeff Mallett within a month, and then Jeff
hired out his staff within 2 to 3 months.
Livingston: What were you personally focused on?
Brady: Product. I worked for Jeff Mallett, who was essentially COO under Tim
Koogle. I became part of Jeff’s staff, running product. There was also business
development, and sales and marketing under Jeff.
Livingston: Did you ever worry about competitors?
Brady: There were a couple of seminal events where we thought we were going
to get crushed by competitors. The first one was the directory button on the
Netscape browser became a search button, and Netscape started selling the
right to be linked from that button. Architext (later called Excite), which was
funded by Kleiner Perkins, was a bunch of undergraduates from Stanford. They
bought the Netscape search button with their venture capital money. Netscape
was also funded by Kleiner Perkins.