Founders at Work.pdf

136 Founders at Work
company, can’t be everything to everyone. We’re not a walled garden like AOL.
We’re this connection point, and it’s our job to get you to where you want to go.
Livingston: What were the most popular link categories at first?
Brady: The sex category was probably a quarter of everything on the Web. Not
just Yahoo, but everything on the Web. Just like the VHS industry when it first
got going. The Internet was no different in that respect.
There was also a lot of product information. People quickly began to do
research before major purchases—about cars and reviews and things like that.
One of the big things we did in the first 6 months was that we brought
Reuters online. CNN was online at the time, I think, but done poorly—slow, a
ton of graphics, just didn’t get it. And Reuters had this rich set of news that back
then they didn’t get to display anywhere. They would just sell it to people in bits
and pieces, and no one would ever see it in its entirety, and that turned out to
be really huge.
Livingston: How did you handle pornography?
Brady: It’s a tough issue. It was always talked about. It was never taken lightly.
But we were also in support of free speech. It was one of these things where we
were always struggling with “whose responsibility is it?” People come to us to
find information; we’re not displaying the pictures, per se. Is it our responsibility
to find out what age users are before we pass it off, or should that wall be at
the site, etc., etc.
Ultimately we ended up removing all of our links to those sites, after probably
about a year and a half of just struggling with ways to do it appropriately and
responsibly and not really being able to find a good way. At the time the child
protection laws were coming out, but I believe we had pulled everything down
even before that.
Livingston: Do you remember the biggest debate that you got into?
Brady: There was always speed versus look-and-feel. In trying to grow a brand,
look-and-feel has a lot to do with it, as does speed, so there’s always that balancing
act. Arguing the necessity of graphics with Filo was always a big argument.
I’ll never forget our 8-year debate.
How to handle pornography was another one. There were just so many.
There’s no one that just stands out as a watershed per se. There was a lot of
Internet-related legislation in the first couple of years, and Congress, in my
opinion, didn’t have a clear idea what was going on. They were obviously influenced
by lobbyists from traditional media who had very specific agendas that
weren’t necessarily in the best interest of the Internet’s development. “Should
we say anything? How should we react?” There were certainly those. We
turned our site black a couple of times—the background black and the text in
white—in protest. I forget what the proposed legislation was.
Livingston: Was new legislation a big concern?
Brady: Absolutely. Just a few things here and there—copyrights, digital rights
written in a slightly different way—and we could have a different Internet.