Founders at Work.pdf

Tim Brady 135
Very, very long hours. The group of people that we had assembled was just
great, so the hours were never dreaded. You enjoyed being at work, even
though sometimes it was 16, 18 hours a day. That’s the only thing really specifically
that I think back on a lot.
Livingston: I wonder if it was because it was on the early side of the Bubble
and there weren’t as many people going through that?
Brady: It was definitely exciting for the right reasons. As the Internet got
bigger and bigger, we were saying to ourselves, “We’re in the vortex of a pretty
big storm.” And most people don’t get the privilege to know that they are at the
center of something while it’s happening. We were in the middle of everything.
But we knew we were going through it while it was happening, which added a
sense of enjoyment to it. And responsibility.
Livingston: Do you remember anything in the first year that you guys might
have done wrong?
Brady: Nothing major. Because any screw-up we recognized and were pretty
good at correcting it to the extent it could be corrected. There weren’t a whole
lot of egos, so people wouldn’t defend a dumb idea just because it was theirs.
But there were certainly companies that we missed. We missed Hotmail.
Jerry and I had dinner with Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and they were
explaining it to us and—I hate to admit it—we were saying, “I see it, but I don’t
see how it can get big.” We were on this rocket ship, and they were talking
about something that really hadn’t caught on.
All we knew was that you got your email through work. They were like, “No.
There’s a bunch of people that hate their work email because it gets screened.”
The whole notion of the ubiquitous, dialing in from home, access everywhere
was still so far away that we just didn’t think it was going to catch on as fast as it
did. We didn’t pursue it as hard as we should have, clearly.
We screwed up. But, we went and found the #2, Rocketmail, made it work,
and now Yahoo’s bigger than Hotmail. Mea culpa, but we fixed it.
Livingston: Was there anything you remember about Yahoo that mainstream
people just didn’t get that was a big idea?
Brady: What was really central to our understanding of the Internet was that it
was this open system where you couldn’t really put up walls. One of the things
that I think Filo did a great job of making happen was that, when someone did
a search and you didn’t find what you were looking for on Yahoo, rather than
just saying, “It’s not here,” or “Go check out this other thing,” he put links to our
competitors, then prefilled the query, so you’d just click on Excite and they
would do a search on Excite for the same thing.
Certainly they don’t teach you in business school to go point to your competitors,
but it sent the right message to the users, which was, “It’s all about you.
We’re going to get you the data you want. If it exists on the Web, we’re going to
find it for you, even if we don’t make money off of it directly.” But it keeps
people coming back because they know we have their best interest in mind.
I think that was a big idea. It was an acknowledgment that you, as a single