Founders at Work.pdf

In talks with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, I said, “I tried being
acquired, and it didn’t work. By AOL, a great company, but my company got
dispersed, and I don’t know how to run a division; I know how to run a company.”
He said, “If we’re going to buy you, why don’t you run it as a company?
What does that mean to you?” I said, “Well, it has a board, and I meet with the
board once a month and they give general direction and I run the place.” And
he said, “OK, let’s do it that way.”
So we got acquired, and we ran as a separate company. The company is still
running. It’s about 200 yards away from the Internet Archive, which is where I
am now. I stayed for 3 years and then moved over to build the Internet
Archive—which had nobody working here—into a real organization. Because
once we had enough materials, then we could build the library. So Alexa was
about the cataloging of the library, and the Internet Archive is trying to build
the stuff.
Livingston: This was your dream?
Kahle: Yes. One thing I learned from Marvin Minsky (one of the founders of
AI) was, “Pick a big enough project, something that’s really hard, something
that over the years you can work on.” I’ve found that that has been a great guiding
piece of wisdom. If you just set out to go and make a lot of money, then the
problem is, what happens when you make a lot of money? You’re out of ideas.
So the idea of going and putting everything online is something really big
and hard. How do you make a library such that everybody has access to everything?
I remember talking to Richard Feynman, and we were looking at the
Encyclopedia Britannica in one of these 1800s rooms at Thinking Machines.
We had an Encyclopedia Britannica, and it had an index that was one volume,
then a micropedia, which was about 10 volumes, and then the next level was the
macropedia, which was about 30 volumes. We just imagined: how many more
layers of this before we have everything ever published? It turned out there
were like 5 more layers, and I said, “That couldn’t be that hard. How much
information is there? It’s not that much.” So even in the era of Thinking
Machines, we knew what it was we were trying to build. It just takes longer than
one thinks. That was 20 some odd years ago.
Livingston: Do you think it’s a good idea for those who have a big dream like
that to section it off a bit? To try to create a successful startup to get the money
to give them the freedom to pursue their dream?
Kahle: Yes. I try to make sure that every year there’s some accomplishment that
you can actually point at and say, “OK, this year I’m going to do this.” This year
I’m working on digitizing books. Last year I was trying to get a storage computer
to work internationally, so that we’d have copies in Europe and the Arab
world, in Egypt. We made copies so that, in case we disappeared, the information
lived. Every year, try to do something that you can point at. Otherwise, a
couple years go by, and you say, “What really happened?”
Livingston: Who were your mentors?
Brewster Kahle 277