Founders at Work.pdf

Joe Kraus 63
scared of. Actually, every one of us was in the same freshman dorm. This was a
company started out of essentially freshman dorm relationships.
So we get together at our favorite taqueria. We each had brought ideas to
the table and they all sucked. There were things like applications for the Apple
Newton—that was my brilliant idea. My other brilliant idea was automatic
translation software, which to this day doesn’t work. Everybody had ideas and
they were all terrible, and by the end we were all very depressed.
And then Graham started talking. It’s hard to remember exactly what he
said, but it was something like this: “Look, between CD-ROMs and command
line stuff, more and more information’s being made available electronically.”
(We’d all been using command line email systems at Stanford since ’89, and
there were tools like Veronica, Archie, and Gopher. And WAIS had just come
out, which was kind of a big thing at the time.) “But, as far as I know, the tools
for searching through all that stuff were built in the ’50s. There’s got to be an
opportunity to do something there.”
So we thought, “Well, that’s the best idea we’ve heard, so that’s what we’re
doing.” We came up with our slogan, which was “We are unencumbered by
reality.” We were so naïve we didn’t know we could fail, and therefore we
almost had to succeed.
We set off trying to research what was happening in R&D in search technology.
We had no idea how we were going to make any money. But we started
spending a lot of time in the math and science library, trying to figure out what
had happened over the last 30 years in search.
Livingston: Was it search for the Web?
Kraus: No, it was just search. We didn’t know what the application was going to
be. Was it going to be a search engine that you’d include on CD-ROM when
they distributed online encyclopedias? Was it going to be for law firms who had
a lot of text documents to be searched through? In 1993 we weren’t thinking
Internet search because the Internet was very nerdy. There wasn’t anything
there. Those weren’t people who would pay for stuff.
We all tried to get $3,000 from each of our parents, and five of the six parents
put up, so we had $15,000. After graduating, three of us lived in one house
in Palo Alto and three of us lived in another. We set up shop in the garage of the
house that I was living in. It was the classic setup. My parents came up and they
saw the garage and wound up buying us some nasty carpet. The tables were all
Formica. I won a fax machine at Office Depot. We stole our chairs from Oracle
Corp.
One of the founders was working a part-time job at Oracle, and back in
those days, you could take home VT100 terminals to work from home. The way
you got them to your car was by going to the supply closet: you took a VT100
and you put it on this $1,000 Herman Miller chair, and you rolled the chair out
to your car, put the terminal in your car, and brought the chair back into work.
So we thought, “That’s a good idea. We could get some VT100s and some chairs
all at once.” We rolled up a U-Haul and brought down six chairs and six terminals
and rolled away.