Founders at Work.pdf

Brewster Kahle 275
very specifically designed to think through what happens after the commercial
company is gone.
Livingston: When you first started with Alexa, did you get funding?
Kahle: I funded the first part of it with Bill Dunn. And I cofounded it with a
business-oriented fellow, Bruce Gilliat, because I’m more on the visionary side.
Building in a businessperson has been a good idea. Finding a good partner is
extremely difficult. It’s as difficult as finding somebody that you want to get
married to and you’ll stay married to forever. A business partner is very difficult,
and if you can find a good business partner, stick with that person.
Livingston: What makes a good business partner?
Kahle: Compatibility. Mutual respect through hard times. Maybe it’s clear lines
of differentiation for who does what. But finding a good business partner is a
fantastically valuable thing to do. So the second startup, Alexa, I started with
a partner as a full cofounder and that worked out really well.
Livingston: Did you get funding?
Kahle: We got $1 million to get the first round going, and then we started talking
to venture capitalists. This is 1996; some of the companies started going
public, so there’s some money around. But again, everything that we were
talking about, we couldn’t communicate it in a way that made sense to them. So
we got private investment by a single individual. That was very helpful. We
grew that company to around 45 or 50 people and then sold it to Amazon.com.
Livingston: The toolbar was a brand new idea. How did you entice users to
download it?
Kahle: The idea of Alexa was to help guide you around the Net. We thought
that search engines were going to give up steam. We just didn’t think that they
were going to be able to scale. I was wrong, just wrong. But the thing that we
wanted to do was help people navigate around the Net. We wanted to catalog
the Web: make it so that you knew where you were and where you might want
to go next. The concept of the company was to show you related links to every
page that you were on.
So if you’re on a web page and you are looking at some car, some book, or a
website about some new computer, then you’d be able to see, “Oh, if you’re on
this page, you might want to go to this page, this page, and this page.” It may
not be what the owner of that website wants you to see.
Livingston: Was that what became known as collaborative filtering?
Kahle: It came to be called collaborative filtering. The way that it worked was
we collected user trails of “Where did they go?” You know, the Amazon recommendations,
“people who bought this book, bought that book.” This was, “people
who went to this web page, went to these web pages.” And we did it years
before those other systems. It was based on some work by Carl Feynman, when
we were talking about this at Thinking Machines. We were talking about,
“Where could this whole thing go?” and he said, “Well, there might be editors,