Founders at Work.pdf

Brewster Kahle 273
We wanted to build this up before the monopolists got to town and said,
“Oh, you don’t want an open system. You want a closed system that belongs to
us, and we’ll do it really well.” So we worked very hard to get it to go in the early
’90s, to get an open system anchored. And it worked. By the time AOL
announced in ’94 they were going to support basically the Internet protocols
and when Microsoft said in August of 1995 that they were going to support the
World Wide Web, that meant that we won. We had gotten publishing on the
Net, and at that point I could graduate and do the thing that I wanted to do.
Livingston: Do you remember things that your clients totally misunderstood
about what you were trying to do?
Kahle: I learned to try not to make too many leaps at once. Most people have a
very difficult time imagining something they can’t see at least a demonstration
of. If you can get a demonstration—or, worst case, a video—it communicates an
idea better than hand-waving for hours. So get to a demo quickly.
This was difficult when the Internet hadn’t been deployed. Often the executives
didn’t have computers on their desks. They had secretaries that typed for
them. Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that these things weren’t everywhere.
And they weren’t hooked up to anything. Maybe they had a modem, but that
was it. We had to demonstrate these things over modems. Trying to get clearance
so that they could dial out from a computer to the Internet to demonstrate
this system inside the CIA headquarters was actually a several-day process. So
it was difficult to go and explain very many jumps forward.
Whenever I went and said, “Really what I want to do—after we get this
publishing up and running, is build the library . . .” Because that’s always what I
wanted to do. I just thought I had to build these supercomputers first, then
I had to get the publishing going, and, once we got that, then we could build a
library. So it was not until ’96 that I got to the place where what we had
dreamed of in the late ’70s as the goal—which was to build the great library—
could even start.
Livingston: That was always your goal?
Kahle: Yes, that was always the goal. We just had to do a couple things first. It
took a lot longer than I thought. We’re now in 2006, and it’s hard to believe how
pathetic things are. We don’t even have books online yet. I don’t know why the
world moves so slowly. Everybody says, “Oh, it’s moving so fast.” And it’s like,
“No, I don’t think so. It’s been forever.”
Livingston: Besides always running out of money, how did you find having your
own company different from Thinking Machines?
Kahle: Having your own company means that it’s much harder to blame somebody
else. If you are working inside a big company, you can always blame management,
marketing, engineering, or something. But, when you are running it,
you can’t, because it’s all your responsibility. I found that to be quite cathartic.
The East Coast also has a little more of an aesthetic of complaining, and so I got
a little bit over that, I guess.