Founders at Work.pdf

132 Founders at Work
Livingston: Did you make a bid for the button?
Brady: We bid up to a certain point in which we felt comfortable that we could
make a return on money. After which point, we knew it became “investing in
the brand,” and I don’t think we felt comfortable investing in the brand at that
point. Because we didn’t know how big the Internet was going to be at
that point. Even though the press was going crazy, the numbers were still pretty
small compared to any other media. I think it was $5 million that Excite paid for
that button.
We definitely worried about Excite, and we were worried about Microsoft.
In the summer of ’95, Bill Gates sent out one of his famous memos on the
Internet. I think this was one of the first ones. It talked about Microsoft needing
to get in the game, and he ended the memo with: “My favorite site: Yahoo.
Cool. Cool. Cool.”
At first our reaction was, “Yeah, cool, cool, cool,” and then our next thought
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 to grow. There was always that
threat looming over us.
There was also a handful of other competitors: Lycos, WebCrawler. Also,
AOL was growing faster than the Internet for a period of time. Everyone heard
“Internet,” but then they went and signed up for AOL because it was the easiest
way to get online. Although we thought it was crazy, AOL’s walled garden was
bigger than the Internet for a handful of months there, which made our strategy
impossible. That was definitely a threat.
Livingston: Did you ever see anything on a competitor’s site where you said,
“They just launched this feature; we have to do it now.”
Brady: In the early days, not too much. Jerry and Dave were way ahead of the
curve. The ideas that they had really early on were right strategically and
creatively. So everything we did through the middle of ’97, invariably we were
first and we did it very well.
The one thing we didn’t do that all our competitors were spending a lot of
time doing was search. They were crawling the Web and doing full text search,
and our strategy was, “Look, that’s a technology game. We’re not a technology
company, we’re a media company. Since there are so many of them out there,
we’re always going to be able to rent it.” That was the thought back then, and
until Google came along that strategy was perfect. Because, as things played
out, that’s exactly what happened.
We had this searchable directory. It was big, and it had all the popular sites,
so you could search for anything on it. But it didn’t have everything. If you
really wanted to search for that needle in the haystack, that wasn’t us. But we