Founders at Work.pdf

Livingston: Do you remember any other interesting new turning points?
Tim Brady 137
Brady: I remember one day when Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, got shot.
It was the first time that we put new news on the front page. For us to think of
our site as a public service to some degree—to find things on the web and use
it to communicate news—was a big deal. “Rabin Assassinated” was our first
foray into news, and the reaction we got from everyone about using Yahoo for
that purpose was overwhelmingly good.
Livingston: Any proud moments?
Brady: The Gates memo was a pretty cool moment—scary and proud at the
same time. Going public was a proud moment. Being added to the NASDAQ
100 was an even prouder moment.
Livingston: Was it hard for Yahoo to turn down acquisition offers in the early
days?
Brady: I obviously never had equal weight in that decision. It was always Jerry
and Dave, and I don’t know the full list of suitors. I know AOL was a suitor, I
know the LA Times was a suitor, and I know they had gotten informal offers
from Microsoft—never anything concrete. A lot of them were very early on,
before they even took venture money. For Jerry and Dave—neither grew up
with a lot of money—to turn down a lot of money at that stage with no guarantee
of the company doing anything afterwards, was, in my estimation, a big deal.
They had a lot of confidence in what they were doing.
Livingston: What was one of the funniest moments early on?
Brady: The funniest thing I can remember was when there was a huge storm in
May of ’95, and the power grid went down for a few days. We had to go rent a
power generator and take turns filling it with diesel fuel for 4 days. 24/7. We
were laughing, “How many pages to the gallon today?” It was a crazy storm and
it also started leaking in our building. We had all these meetings scheduled and
couldn’t just shut it down. We had meetings by candlelight with a bunch of
prominent companies. They walk in; there are no lights; there are cords running
everywhere leading to the generator out back; water dripping from the
ceiling. We were trying to convince them, “Oh, yeah, we’re a real business,”
when you say, “Hold on, I gotta go fill up the tank.” So I remember that set of
days pretty vividly.
Livingston: Did you ever have to pull off any tricks to make yourselves seem
bigger than you actually were?
Brady: I don’t have a good story for this, but I remember clearly Jeff Mallett’s
coming on board. I’m working like a dog and he had just started. In addition to
everything else I’m doing, I’m also trying to do all the PR stuff. Even though I
had our PR kits professionally bound, they were a startup’s PR kits. He had just
come from Novell. He looks at me, and he’s just like, “This is C+ work.”
I hadn’t slept for a couple of days, and I felt like taking a swing at him. But
he was absolutely right. “If we’re going to appear big, we’d better act big, and
this is what we hand out? You can’t hand that out.” I remember that very clearly,