Founders at Work.pdf

274 Founders at Work
Another, I thought, was expressed really well by Don Yannias of Encyclopedia
Britannica. He said, “Now that I’m running Encyclopedia Britannica, I have to
be Mr. Sunshine every day.” Because people are looking to you, not just for the
ideas, but for the general attitude toward how to make the whole thing work.
Carrying a company is a lot of weight. You have to make sure that you keep on
the uptick—not just financially, but also make it so that it’s a fun environment
and people want to work there.
Livingston: Did you have any competitors back in the WAIS days?
Kahle: There were other systems around, but one thing I tend to do is do something
that is far enough out there that nobody in their right mind would possibly
want to do it. In general, I usually take things from the “you gotta be crazy”
period to the “of course.” And once it gets to “of course,” then there will be
competitors, and I’m done. Because usually what I want to do is just get other
people to do it. The best way to do that is to show that it’s possible.
So WAIS was all about trying to get other people to copy us. And they did,
and it worked great. And they did better at it, and flourished. Better web studios
than we were, server manufacturers and the people that made web
servers—they did much better than we did. But the idea on WAIS was to try to
guide the building of it, because WAIS wasn’t the goal. Building that company
wasn’t the goal. I wanted to get it so that publishing would happen on the Net,
so then I could go and actually do something.
Livingston: Publishing was happening, you sold WAIS to AOL, then what?
Kahle: Then I tried to work within AOL, and that was very difficult. For an
entrepreneur, acquisitions are very difficult to manage. That’s a warning. I’ve
been through two acquisitions. One was WAIS; that was bought by AOL. The
next round I built two organizations at the same time. One was called Alexa
Internet (short for the Library of Alexandria), and the other was the Internet
Archive, to archive everything that was in the library. Alexa was a for-profit, and
the Internet Archive was nonprofit. I didn’t make enough money to go and make
a nonprofit and fund it myself, and I didn’t know how to ask for money in a nonprofit,
but I knew how to build products.
Alexa Internet was a navigation system for the Internet. Bruce Gilliat and I
started it out here in San Francisco, in a house in the middle of a park—in the
Presidio. We’re in a 1500-acre park in the middle of San Francisco. We’re
the second lease-holder here.
Livingston: You started both companies simultaneously? Did you have different
people running each one?
Kahle: Everybody worked at Alexa. The idea was that everything that Alexa
ever collected would be donated to the Internet Archive. Over the long term,
companies come and go. They usually don’t last that long. But the great thing
that was going on with the Internet wasn’t the technology. That gets replaced.
It’s the information, and it’s all the people. So we started collecting the World
Wide Web and making services in a commercial company, but donating all of
the materials collected to a nonprofit that was designed to last the ages. It was