Founders at Work.pdf

Tim Brady 133
had a lot of those people. They would read an article, then go to the Web and
think, “I can find anything on Yahoo.” The expectation when they came to
Yahoo was that they could find anything, but we didn’t necessarily deliver on
that needle in the haystack expectation.
So what we did was that we searched our directory first, we gave you those
results, and then, if we didn’t find anything, we kicked you over to a full-text
search. So, when I say we “rented” that technology, we essentially partnered
with full-text search companies to be the falloff searches that we had.
Livingston: That’s what you did with Google?
Brady: Yes. Strategically, it was spot-on until Google showed up. Because we
always thought it was going to be a leapfrogging game. No one is ever going to
be able to get so far ahead that we’d ever be in strategic risk of kingmaking a
full-text search engine, because you just can’t do that. Google ended up doing
exactly that. At the time, until 2000/2001, we had Open Text first, then I think
we had AltaVista, then Inktomi. So we just switched off as better technologies
became available. We just switched out the old partners with the new ones and
always had the best-of-breed search as our falloff.
Livingston: Was this invisible to the users?
Brady: Yes, it was largely invisible to our users. Even though their brands were
there, you came to the front page of Yahoo; you searched; the search result had
a Yahoo brand on the upper-left and the technology provider had a smaller
brand. We tried to make it as seamless as possible.
Livingston: When you were writing the original business plan, did you have any
idea that you’d go public about a year after getting funding?
Brady: None. Neither did Jerry and Dave. They may have hoped, but I don’t
know what their hopes were. At that time you had no idea how big the Internet
was going to be. It had less to do with us, and a lot more to do with just how
quickly the Internet grew and the fact that we were able to survive as the
Internet got as big as it did.
Livingston: Do you remember the rationale behind going public, or was it your
VCs who wanted you to?
Brady: No, it really wasn’t driven by the VCs. There were a bunch of different
reasons—and I wasn’t privy to all those conversations. However, there were a
couple of considerations. One, IPO windows don’t last forever. Markets get hot
and then they don’t. If you go out, you can only go IPO while the market’s hot.
Netscape lit that market afire for us. The other consideration was that we saw
that one of the ways we were going to have to compete was to acquire companies.
The best way to do that was to have a currency other than the cash in the
bank—to have a stock to pay people for their companies. So, in order to get big
fast, which we thought we needed to do, we had to have a public stock. That
was probably the biggest reason. Then raising money was obviously a third very
important thing we needed to do.