Founders at Work.pdf

270 Founders at Work
Livingston: You were the first company to do that?
Kahle: Well, I think we may have been the first to think of the Internet as a distribution
system of software: to give something away and to sell it. I don’t know
of any examples before.
Livingston: That is so many companies’ business model these days; it’s interesting
to think it was the first.
Kahle: I don’t know if it was the first, but it was certainly early. We also found
that people—even if we sold them the software—often didn’t know what to do
with it. They wanted consulting services. We started what I think became the
first web studio, or web services business. We worked with big players, whether
they were newspapers or magazines, that wanted to publish on the Net. This
allowed us to work with the big boys very early on.
We tried very hard to work with the best of class. They were always more
difficult to deal with, but they were great to work with once you got working
with them: the Wall Street Journal, Encyclopedia Britannica, Government
Printing Office. We worked with both the House of Representatives and the
Senate. So we were working with people who had insights into what it is they
really wanted. It’s harder to get those customers at first, but they were terrific
because they weren’t just trying to catch up. They weren’t trying to be number 2.
They were number 1 in their fields, and we could learn from them.
As the Web came along and was a better underlying system, we became a
web services company, basically. We set up, I believe, the first publisher on the
Net, which was Scholastic. That was done during the Gopher era. And we put
the first advertising-based service up, which was for CMP. We put the first
subscription-based service up, which was the Wall Street Journal. So we were
trying to get publishers online, and that was what the WAIS system was.
I would stand up in conferences in 1990/91 and say, “I’m the token dot-com
in the room. I’m here to help people make money by publishing on the Net.”
The idea was to try to get the Net to go commercial enough to support publishing.
Livingston: Did these big publishers at first think this was crazy?
Kahle: Usually it would take 9 to 12 months with lots of meetings before anything
would turn concrete. Eventually they wanted to do some sort of project,
and they’d throw $100,000 into a project. Since we were so inexpensive—we
were living based on furniture that didn’t match; we had learned our lessons of
how to live very inexpensively—we could do things as production that they
would normally pay an Ernst & Young just to do a study.
We could deliver something that they could really learn from, and we’d
learn from as well. That kind of partnership worked well for us. But, boy, was it
tough running with so little money.
Livingston: When you broke off from Thinking Machines, were they OK with
this?
Kahle: There was a lot of consternation. There were a lot of questions of
whether Thinking Machines owned the idea or whatever. I was very careful to