Founders at Work.pdf

272 Founders at Work
Livingston: So you were getting a little bit of money from clients. Did you hire
anyone?
Kahle: Yes, there was Harry Morris, the key engineer that built much of the
technology. It grew into a company that was about 30 people, 35 people by
the time it was bought by AOL.
Livingston: Tell me about some of the most hair-raising moments.
Kahle: Going broke. When you just don’t have enough money to pay the bills.
We would usually live with the amount of money in the bank that would be
about 2 to 4 weeks worth of the bills. We’d never have more than that. If we got
up to 2 or 3 months, we would think of ourselves as being flush. Living a bootstrap
in a non-market—we’re trying to make a market go based on making
servers in a client/server publishing environment based on the Internet, that
people didn’t understand. So it was very difficult, but it was a good disciplining
time.
Times that were really interesting? I think working with really great customers.
It sort of sounds like a cliche, but to go and learn from Encyclopedia
Britannica, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and try to learn how
do they view their businesses and their lives was the most fun out of the whole
experience.
Livingston: What did you learn from your customers that surprised you?
Kahle: I love working with businesspeople because they are really straightforward.
Now we have lots of lawsuits around copyrights in the music industry,
blah, blah, blah. But if you work with the actual businesspeople—not the
lawyers that work for the businesspeople, but the businesspeople—they are
very straightforward. They just want to make money. And they just want to
make more money than they are making today. They understand there are
going to be transitions and technology changes. So if you lay out a path of how
they can make more money, potentially, at the end of this than before, then they
are on board.
We got the newspapers on the Internet during that time. You take it for
granted, but all the newspapers are pretty much online now. They control their
own distribution. They have their own websites. It doesn’t all funnel in through
an iTunes. The music guys, I’m not sure why they did this, but they sold their
souls. Somebody else controls not only the distribution of their product, but
they control the pricing. What do you have if somebody else controls the distribution
and the pricing of your product?
So the newspaper guys and publishers were great because we’d say, “You
want to control the distribution of your work.” And they’d nod their heads, and
we’d say, “Well, there are some alternatives out there.” In the early ’90s there
was AOL, there was Lexus Nexus from the ’80s, where they would lose the control
of the distribution of their work. We’d say, “Do you want that?” They’d say,
“No, we don’t want that. We want to control the distribution of our work.” So
we said, “Swing with us for a little while, while we build this Internet. Let’s
build this Internet together based on open systems.” So these business guys
were, in fact, wanting an open system.