Founders at Work.pdf

Brewster Kahle 271
make sure that all the things that the (eventually) WAIS company needed were
actually based on the public domain of software that had been produced. It was
based on the open source software. So there weren’t actually any patents or
copyrights, but there was still a bond. And there was this question of, “Should
Thinking Machines own it? How should it work?” But there was so little to own.
It wasn’t like it was a VC-started company where you could value it. It was just
basically myself and one other, Harry Morris, that left to found the company.
I think there was some hand-wringing, but we couldn’t figure out any way to
really do a deal. The problems that slow things down the most are these things
around intellectual property—especially when there’s no money yet—and
these are the times that you could end up talking endlessly and you can’t figure
it out. It’s a lot easier if there’s money. Then you have a mechanism of knowing
how share it. But before it, it’s really, really tough.
I found it was very helpful to start a company out on the West Coast. Even
though I had moved out here, I made a partnership with a fellow named John
During—key for me, basically the cofounder of WAIS. He was a key player
because he’d been around for a long time, so he knew how to do all of this stuff.
How do you get an accounting company, the law firms, what do you spend
money on, how do you negotiate a lease—all the things that I had never learned
by being an engineer inside another company.
Livingston: How did you meet him?
Kahle: He was a consultant for Dow Jones. Also I found that there are people
that specialize in different parts of businesses. Some people just do startups
over and over again. Or they are actually in the idea stage. So a lot of people
that I saw in the late ’80s and early ’90s in this Internet world were the people
that had been involved in the PC revolution 10 years before. They had seen all
of that go through, and they were looking around for “what’s the next thing?”
and this Internet thing started to smell kind of like it. So John During had a lot
of experience in that.
Livingston: So you said, “Let’s do it”?
Kahle: Yes, and moved out to San Francisco, started the company in a Menlo
Park mansion, sort of on the Thinking Machines model. That was as far north as
I thought I could put the company and still be connected in with the Apples
and the Suns and the other technology companies.
In 1992, San Francisco wasn’t the place for companies. That happened in
the mid ’90s, with the whole South of Market rebuilding. That was another sort
of “learn the lesson of going someplace where people don’t call you crazy.” I
really needed the help of those that were in Silicon Valley, though I knew that
as this industry built up, it was going to work more with the creative people. So
it was going to transition more and more to San Francisco. When we moved
offices in 1994, we moved it into the city, so that we could work with the publishers—basically,
the people that were going to be out there on the Net, not
just building the technology, but using it for something.