Founders at Work.pdf

134 Founders at Work
Livingston: Were you nervous that Stanford would claim to own Yahoo? Wasn’t
it running on their servers?
Brady: It was. I was never part of those conversations. I was obviously nervous,
and I asked, and Jerry and Dave said, “No, it’s taken care of. Don’t worry about
it.” And it was.
Stanford is very progressive in that. Yahoo is far from the first startup that
originated there and will be far from the last one. It was new enough, and
it wasn’t a specific technology; it was a brand. It wasn’t really an invention; it
wasn’t a piece of technology. They were smart enough to know that anything
they would do to stifle it would kill it, so their best hope was to just let it go and
hope that Jerry and Dave gave money back later, which they did. They optimized
their outcome, trust me.
Livingston: Was Stanford concerned that Yahoo was going to crash their
servers?
Brady: Yes. That’s why they told them to get off. That’s what forced the issue. It
became so big that it was starting to bog down Stanford’s pipes, so they said,
“You guys need to leave.”
Livingston: I heard that you guys used Netscape’s offices at one point.
Brady: We did. Mark Andreessen loved what Jerry and Dave were doing and
heard that Stanford was kicking us off at a certain point and offered to host it
for 30 or 60 days.
Livingston: Do you think your mixed background of business and engineering
helped you?
Brady: It’s hard to know, since you don’t know the alternative. Probably more
than anything, the business education gave me the confidence to know what I
knew and what I didn’t know. I knew my zone of operation and things that I was
good at and things where I knew I should go ask because I didn’t know what I
was doing.
Livingston: Were you better at some things than you thought?
Brady: I knew that I liked doing certain things, and, with most people, things
you like you tend to be better at anyways. I’m good at building things, products
specifically. Creative marketing, product marketing, which I had done earlier in
my first job in Tokyo, was what I ended up gravitating toward.
Livingston: Think back to the first year. What do you remember that surprised
you about life at a startup?
Brady: There wasn’t a whole lot of time for reflection. It was moving so fast, so
I don’t ever remember stopping and thinking, “This is different than the way I
thought it would be.” It certainly was a surprise, because no one had any idea
what the Internet was going to do.
Looking back, I don’t think I understood the time commitment or the emotional
commitment it takes to get something off the ground. Despite how
everything grew, it was a task just staying on the wave that was the Internet.