Founders at Work.pdf

276 Founders at Work
and you might be able to discover editors,” based on this idea that became collaborative
filtering.
He went off to MIT, and they started a company called Firefly that was
based on his ideas. So anyway, this idea of doing a web-scale collaborative
filtering, people who liked this web page liked these web pages, was what we
did. We did the toolbar to do this and to offer information to people as they are
moving around the Net. In return, all of these people would be giving us information
as to where they went, what trails they took, which we’d then learn
from.
Livingston: What did you learn?
Kahle: We learned what was related to other things. But in the great scale, what
I loved was watching some of these users—though we didn’t know who was
who and we didn’t care. In fact, that was very important because it’s very private
information. Something I think we’re forgetting is that some of these other systems
are collecting this information, and they do care who’s who. Google’s toolbar,
for instance. Going and learning where people go, you learn a lot more
than you want to know. So you have to go and delete some of them; otherwise,
it gets scary.
Livingston: Alexa deleted them?
Kahle: Yes. Alexa deleted things. Others that sort of followed in those footsteps
aren’t deleting things. This is going to be a big problem. At Alexa, we started
with a code of ethics in the whole approach, because we knew that we were
gathering information that people often didn’t know that we were gathering, or
they weren’t really conscious of it. Throwing away a lot of information is key in
such a circumstance.
Livingston: What went wrong with Alexa?
Kahle: We couldn’t get the ad model to work worth a darn. Our idea was to give
very contextual ads. We knew what web page people are on, might as well
give them an ad that made sense. But we couldn’t find a way of selling ads in
such a way that it worked. We had an unbelievable number of page turns. We
had many opportunities to put ads in front of people, but we couldn’t turn that
into making money.
So our underlying business idea failed. We were very successful in terms of
getting lots of people to use it. People liked it. Netscape bundled it into their
browser. Once Netscape bundled it into their browsers, getting Microsoft to
bundle it into their browsers was easily done. (We found the best way to get
Microsoft to do something was to get the competitor to do something.)
So we got lots and lots of users—millions, tens of millions of users—but we
couldn’t figure out how to make the business work. At that point, when some
folks from Amazon were looking around for data mining technology, they came
and said, “Should we buy you for data mining technology?” And we said, “One,
you shouldn’t buy us, and the other is that we’re doing something quite different
from data mining. We have this toolbar we can get out there in front of
people and things like that.”