Yahoo began in 1994 as a collection of links to research papers maintained by
two Stanford grad students, Jerry Yang and David Filo. They gradually added
links to new types of information, and the site grew rapidly in popularity. By
the end of 1994, Yang and Filo were considering turning the site into a startup,
and they asked Tim Brady to write a business plan for it.
Brady had been Yang's college roommate and was by this time getting his
MBA at Harvard Business School. Brady initially expected to be able to finish
the semester, but as Yahoo's potential grew, it became clear that he couldn't
wait. He turned in the company's business plan as his final assignment in the
courses he still needed to pass, and jumped on a plane west to become Yahoo's
first actual employee.
Brady's title during his 8 years at Yahoo was VP of Production. His responsibility,
as he puts it, was "product." He was effectively the editor of Yahoo's site.
Yahoo went public in April 1996, and for nearly all the period since has been
the most popular network of websites in the world. Ultimately, Yahoo won the
portal wars because it was a better site, and it was the site it was largely because
of Tim Brady
Livingston: You were the first employee the Yahoo founders brought on. How
did you get involved?
Brady: I met Jerry when we were undergraduates at Stanford and we studied
electrical engineering together. We were in the same freshman dorm and were
good friends throughout college and after. He continued on--he's much more
adept at EE than me--and I went to Japan and worked for Motorola doing
marketing and engineering.
Stanford has a program in Kyoto, and Jerry studied there for a quarter and
took a summer job just outside of Tokyo. I had been there for a couple years so
we hooked back up. Then I went back to business school, he went back to finish
up his PhD, and we kept in touch. We always talked about dream jobs even
when we were undergraduates and what we hoped to accomplish. "Wouldn't it
be great one day if..."
127
Tim Brady
First Non-Founding Employee,
Yahoo
9
CHAPTER
So Jerry gives me a call in the beginning of my second year of B-school and
says, "My trailer mate and I started this thing, and it's really starting to ramp up.
I'll have you take a look at it." He wasn't looking for advice; he was just telling
me what he was up to. I looked at it and was blown away--the whole Web
thing. I had been on AOL, I knew a bit about the Internet, but nothing about
the Web. It was still pretty early then.
I just looked at it and said, "Wow, that's really cool." And he said, "Well,
things are going great with us." I said, "What does that mean, great?" He said
something like, "This thing's growing and, if it keeps growing, maybe you'd be
interested in doing some moonlighting after school or something like that." I
thought, "Yeah, it seems interesting and I love small companies; I'd love to
work with Jerry, sounds great." That was at the end of '94. They had been doing
it for about 8 months before I had any idea it existed.
Livingston: They had just been doing it for themselves, to index cool things on
the Web, right?
Brady: The story I've heard from Jerry and Dave is that they were both doing
their PhD theses and all the technical papers that they would have to reference
were online, so they were trying to keep track of them all. They had this big list,
and then the EE graduate community--not just at Stanford but all the major
EE graduate programs--found out about it and sent them emails saying, "Can
you add this?"
In their spare time, Jerry and Dave would add categories they were interested
in. Jerry, having just come back from Japan, was very interested in sumo
wrestling, so he had this great sumo category. Everything on the Web related to
EE they had in their list and then these other interesting areas. It was early
enough that it was really the only thing out there--big lists, anyway. There were
small lists, but nothing big, and so people just kept sending emails asking them,
"Add this to the list. My friend told me about this list; I'd love to add this."
So Jerry and Dave did, and they kept adding categories and all of a sudden
both of them went from doing their graduate work to adding websites to their
list for 8 hours a day. As chance would have it, their thesis advisor was on sabbatical,
so there was really no one looking after them, so it all worked. Had their
advisor been there, it might not have happened. So they did it for 8 hours a day,
maybe even longer, every day for 8 months. They created this huge list, at the
right time, in the right place. So it just started taking off.
It had a ton of momentum when I first started talking to them. The tenor of
the conversation when I first got involved was, "Hey, maybe next summer when
you graduate, you can come and get a 9-to-5 in the Valley and moonlight with
us afterward. Then 3 months later, the conversation was more like, "This thing
is going crazy, get out here now." They had no idea how much momentum they
had behind them and between October '94 and January '95--I don't know the
stats off the top of my head, but traffic increased 10 times in just a handful of
months.
All of a sudden, the VC community recognized what they were doing. A
bunch of others--everyone who was thinking about new media at the time--
128 Founders at Work
recognized it as well. So they got a lot of calls--the LA Times, AOL, Microsoft--
wanting them to join their companies. Those conversations were, "Why don't
you come and bring your project. We'll host it and you can blow it out." It
started getting them to think about their project as a business, not just a hobby.
Then an article in Newsweek happened--I think it was November of '94 or
something like that. Those 3 to 4 months were the critical period from going
hobby to full-fledged business.
They were entertaining taking money and had decided, "We don't want to
sell ourselves. Let's go for it, why not?" Even though people were more than
happy to give them money, they thought, "We need a business plan to take
around on our VC visits. Even though we can talk to them about it and they
would probably give us money without it, it would be better if we had a business
plan." I said, "Well that's good, because I'm taking a couple classes where I
need to produce a business plan. Why don't you send me your thoughts, and I'll
put something together." They sent me their stuff, I wrote a business plan, they
took it around to a couple VCs, and I ended up turning it in for final grades for
a couple classes.
This was fortunate because, as it turns out, by February of '95, they were
saying, "We need you now; we don't need you in June when you graduate." My
reply was, "I'm in school, and my dad paid for it. Are you suggesting I tell my
dad that I'm not going to come away with a degree?" And Jerry was like, "I'm
not telling you to do anything. You don't have to do anything, but we need you
now." So I talked to some of my professors, and you can fail a certain number of
classes at HBS throughout your tenure--it's a pass/fail grading system. I hadn't
failed any yet, so I could fail three classes and technically graduate. I was taking
five classes, so I turned in my business plan as a final paper for two out of five,
and passed with those.
That was at the end of March '95, and there were four of us: Jerry; Dave;
Dave's friend, Donald Lobo; and me. There was a whole lot of enthusiasm, but
not a whole lot of knowledge about what to go do.
Livingston: When you wrote the business plan, the Internet was so new. Do
you remember what your strategy was when you wrote it?
Brady:No one had any idea how big the Internet was, but the model was advertising.
Advertising was well known, so it wasn't like we were making up advertising.
HotWired, which was the online version of Wired magazine, was online by
that time, and they were selling advertising. So there was a model out there, but
certainly there were no search engines or directories selling advertising. I just
used your basic business plan format, incorporated Jerry's and Dave's ideas, and
added a few of my own.
Livingston: So you leave business school early and move out to California. Did
you have an office? What did you first start doing?
Brady: There was a consumer electronics show down in San Jose in March '95,
so Yahoo's coming-out party was a booth at this show. The show was mostly
hardware and software companies. There were no other Internet companies
Tim Brady 129
there; it was just us. That was kind of everyone's first day of work. We were still
doing it mostly out of Jerry and Dave's trailer--their graduate desks were in this
temporary trailer at Stanford. And some out of Jerry's apartment. A couple
weeks after the show, we found space in Mountain View and moved in. We got
funding and that allowed us to go find office space.
Livingston: Sequoia was your VC?
Brady: Yes.
Livingston: How much money did you get?
Brady: $1 million.
Livingston: That was a lot of money back then, especially for a company doing
something so new.
Brady: Absolutely. Two graduate students who had never held a job, another
programmer, me, with no experience in the US in an industry that didn't exist
yet. Yeah, it was a lot of money.
Livingston: What were your main goals when you first started? Did you want to
get more people on the Internet?
Brady: We had enough traffic to go sell advertising. We knew if we sold ads on
all our pages as of then, at a $20 CPM, that would cover our costs. It's hard to
remember back what your mindset was, but I know it wasn't, "Let's get everyone
on the Internet." That was way beyond us. The mindset was more like,
"Let's not let this sink the company; let's keep it going." And part of that was just
making money, so we did a bunch of crazy things in addition to advertising to
try to bring in money. We made book deals and a bunch of little things that
really didn't add up to anything. But we did anything in the name of getting
money while we looked for proper management. Because we all knew it
wasn't us.
"If this thing is going to be as big as we want it to be, we're not the people to
run it,"--although we'd have loved to. So we had a CEO search for 6 months. It
was really 6 months of struggling between then and when we got Tim Koogle to
come.
Livingston: What were some of the important turning points during those
6 months?
Brady: Netscape was the only browser back then, well before Internet
Explorer. They had a directory button that was part of the browser, and they
linked to us from that button for free. Netscape's job actually was to grow the
Internet--the way they were going to make money was to get everyone on
the Internet and then sell servers. So anything with the purpose of getting
people on would help them. They thought Yahoo was the best thing out there,
so they gave us the link. It made sense for them at the time. That was big. It
sent our traffic through the roof.
We hired an outside sales firm to help us start advertising. We sold five
packages to five big companies; MasterCard was one. We got our first round of
advertising before Koogle came.
130 Founders at Work
We put up graphics, which was a big thing. That sounds really ridiculous
now, but at the time Yahoo was all text. The connection speeds were so poor
that any website that used a lot of graphics made the site unusably slow...
Most of the traditional media folks didn't get it because they didn't realize that
people were dialing in on slow modems. But we knew that if we were going to
have any sort of brand, it would have to be a graphic. So we made the graphic
switch at the same time we put up advertising.
We started to hire and build an organization without the CEO. We had temporary
management that Sequoia helped us find--a CEO and CFO. Because
we weren't having success finding a CEO, Sequoia insisted that we hire these
managers. That didn't go great. They weren't as vested in helping Yahoo longterm
as we were. There was a clear divide between someone who was interim
and someone, like myself, who was fully invested in making it work. I had
moved my whole life from the East Coast for it; my fortunes were tied to this
thing, whereas theirs weren't necessarily.
In my estimation, they neither hurt nor helped us. They helped steady the
ship for 6 months until we brought in Tim Koogle.
Livingston: Was it hard to convince people to join Yahoo, since it was so new?
Brady: Yeah, it was tough. We hired a lot of friends and friends of friends. You
always hear "Never go into business with friends." But with the first 20 hires,
everyone knew each other. Consequently there was a high level of trust.
Everyone was young. It was pretty much everyone's first job, with the exception
of the interim management. So people weren't worried where the Internet was
going; they were just looking for something interesting to do, and joining Yahoo
qualified.
The Internet really started to take off in July '95. Netscape went public, and
that set off a chain reaction of PR. Not only was the Internet cool, but, all of a
sudden, people could make money. The press was all over Jerry and Dave, so
we spent a lot of time handling the press. We hired a temp PR firm that didn't
work all that well. We didn't even need it because people were just calling in,
and Jerry was so naturally good with the press, so things just kind of happened.
Then when Tim came in, he hired Jeff Mallett within a month, and then Jeff
hired out his staff within 2 to 3 months.
Livingston: What were you personally focused on?
Brady: Product. I worked for Jeff Mallett, who was essentially COO under Tim
Koogle. I became part of Jeff's staff, running product. There was also business
development, and sales and marketing under Jeff.
Livingston: Did you ever worry about competitors?
Brady: There were a couple of seminal events where we thought we were going
to get crushed by competitors. The first one was the directory button on the
Netscape browser became a search button, and Netscape started selling the
right to be linked from that button. Architext (later called Excite), which was
funded by Kleiner Perkins, was a bunch of undergraduates from Stanford. They
bought the Netscape search button with their venture capital money. Netscape
was also funded by Kleiner Perkins.
Tim Brady 131
Livingston: Did you make a bid for the button?
Brady: We bid up to a certain point in which we felt comfortable that we could
make a return on money. After which point, we knew it became "investing in
the brand," and I don't think we felt comfortable investing in the brand at that
point. Because we didn't know how big the Internet was going to be at
that point. Even though the press was going crazy, the numbers were still pretty
small compared to any other media. I think it was $5 million that Excite paid for
that button.
We definitely worried about Excite, and we were worried about Microsoft.
In the summer of '95, Bill Gates sent out one of his famous memos on the
Internet. I think this was one of the first ones. It talked about Microsoft needing
to get in the game, and he ended the memo with: "My favorite site: Yahoo.
Cool. Cool. Cool."
At first our reaction was, "Yeah, cool, cool, cool," and then our next thought
was, "Oh no. Does that mean we're in Bill's crosshairs or does that mean we're
just cool?" Any time you talk to Microsoft, just the way they do business, they
have the potential to do whatever the hell they want, so when you go to them
their mindset is always, "We could partner with you, or we could do it
ourselves."
We were always very nervous about them doing anything. At the time, I
think IE had just come out, and it was a poor effort, their first crack at a
browser, but still, you knew that they were going to grow. There was always that
threat looming over us.
There was also a handful of other competitors: Lycos, WebCrawler. Also,
AOL was growing faster than the Internet for a period of time. Everyone heard
"Internet," but then they went and signed up for AOL because it was the easiest
way to get online. Although we thought it was crazy, AOL's walled garden was
bigger than the Internet for a handful of months there, which made our strategy
impossible. That was definitely a threat.
Livingston: Did you ever see anything on a competitor's site where you said,
"They just launched this feature; we have to do it now."
Brady: In the early days, not too much. Jerry and Dave were way ahead of the
curve. The ideas that they had really early on were right strategically and
creatively. So everything we did through the middle of '97, invariably we were
first and we did it very well.
The one thing we didn't do that all our competitors were spending a lot of
time doing was search. They were crawling the Web and doing full text search,
and our strategy was, "Look, that's a technology game. We're not a technology
company, we're a media company. Since there are so many of them out there,
we're always going to be able to rent it." That was the thought back then, and
until Google came along that strategy was perfect. Because, as things played
out, that's exactly what happened.
We had this searchable directory. It was big, and it had all the popular sites,
so you could search for anything on it. But it didn't have everything. If you
really wanted to search for that needle in the haystack, that wasn't us. But we
132 Founders at Work
had a lot of those people. They would read an article, then go to the Web and
think, "I can find anything on Yahoo." The expectation when they came to
Yahoo was that they could find anything, but we didn't necessarily deliver on
that needle in the haystack expectation.
So what we did was that we searched our directory first, we gave you those
results, and then, if we didn't find anything, we kicked you over to a full-text
search. So, when I say we "rented" that technology, we essentially partnered
with full-text search companies to be the falloff searches that we had.
Livingston: That's what you did with Google?
Brady: Yes. Strategically, it was spot-on until Google showed up. Because we
always thought it was going to be a leapfrogging game. No one is ever going to
be able to get so far ahead that we'd ever be in strategic risk of kingmaking a
full-text search engine, because you just can't do that. Google ended up doing
exactly that. At the time, until 2000/2001, we had Open Text first, then I think
we had AltaVista, then Inktomi. So we just switched off as better technologies
became available. We just switched out the old partners with the new ones and
always had the best-of-breed search as our falloff.
Livingston: Was this invisible to the users?
Brady: Yes, it was largely invisible to our users. Even though their brands were
there, you came to the front page of Yahoo; you searched; the search result had
a Yahoo brand on the upper-left and the technology provider had a smaller
brand. We tried to make it as seamless as possible.
Livingston: When you were writing the original business plan, did you have any
idea that you'd go public about a year after getting funding?
Brady: None. Neither did Jerry and Dave. They may have hoped, but I don't
know what their hopes were. At that time you had no idea how big the Internet
was going to be. It had less to do with us, and a lot more to do with just how
quickly the Internet grew and the fact that we were able to survive as the
Internet got as big as it did.
Livingston: Do you remember the rationale behind going public, or was it your
VCs who wanted you to?
Brady: No, it really wasn't driven by the VCs. There were a bunch of different
reasons--and I wasn't privy to all those conversations. However, there were a
couple of considerations. One, IPO windows don't last forever. Markets get hot
and then they don't. If you go out, you can only go IPO while the market's hot.
Netscape lit that market afire for us. The other consideration was that we saw
that one of the ways we were going to have to compete was to acquire companies.
The best way to do that was to have a currency other than the cash in the
bank--to have a stock to pay people for their companies. So, in order to get big
fast, which we thought we needed to do, we had to have a public stock. That
was probably the biggest reason. Then raising money was obviously a third very
important thing we needed to do.
Tim Brady 133
Livingston: Were you nervous that Stanford would claim to own Yahoo? Wasn't
it running on their servers?
Brady: It was. I was never part of those conversations. I was obviously nervous,
and I asked, and Jerry and Dave said, "No, it's taken care of. Don't worry about
it." And it was.
Stanford is very progressive in that. Yahoo is far from the first startup that
originated there and will be far from the last one. It was new enough, and
it wasn't a specific technology; it was a brand. It wasn't really an invention; it
wasn't a piece of technology. They were smart enough to know that anything
they would do to stifle it would kill it, so their best hope was to just let it go and
hope that Jerry and Dave gave money back later, which they did. They optimized
their outcome, trust me.
Livingston: Was Stanford concerned that Yahoo was going to crash their
servers?
Brady: Yes. That's why they told them to get off. That's what forced the issue. It
became so big that it was starting to bog down Stanford's pipes, so they said,
"You guys need to leave."
Livingston: I heard that you guys used Netscape's offices at one point.
Brady: We did. Mark Andreessen loved what Jerry and Dave were doing and
heard that Stanford was kicking us off at a certain point and offered to host it
for 30 or 60 days.
Livingston: Do you think your mixed background of business and engineering
helped you?
Brady: It's hard to know, since you don't know the alternative. Probably more
than anything, the business education gave me the confidence to know what I
knew and what I didn't know. I knew my zone of operation and things that I was
good at and things where I knew I should go ask because I didn't know what I
was doing.
Livingston: Were you better at some things than you thought?
Brady: I knew that I liked doing certain things, and, with most people, things
you like you tend to be better at anyways. I'm good at building things, products
specifically. Creative marketing, product marketing, which I had done earlier in
my first job in Tokyo, was what I ended up gravitating toward.
Livingston: Think back to the first year. What do you remember that surprised
you about life at a startup?
Brady: There wasn't a whole lot of time for reflection. It was moving so fast, so
I don't ever remember stopping and thinking, "This is different than the way I
thought it would be." It certainly was a surprise, because no one had any idea
what the Internet was going to do.
Looking back, I don't think I understood the time commitment or the emotional
commitment it takes to get something off the ground. Despite how
everything grew, it was a task just staying on the wave that was the Internet.
134 Founders at Work
Very, very long hours. The group of people that we had assembled was just
great, so the hours were never dreaded. You enjoyed being at work, even
though sometimes it was 16, 18 hours a day. That's the only thing really specifically
that I think back on a lot.
Livingston: I wonder if it was because it was on the early side of the Bubble
and there weren't as many people going through that?
Brady: It was definitely exciting for the right reasons. As the Internet got
bigger and bigger, we were saying to ourselves, "We're in the vortex of a pretty
big storm." And most people don't get the privilege to know that they are at the
center of something while it's happening. We were in the middle of everything.
But we knew we were going through it while it was happening, which added a
sense of enjoyment to it. And responsibility.
Livingston: Do you remember anything in the first year that you guys might
have done wrong?
Brady: Nothing major. Because any screw-up we recognized and were pretty
good at correcting it to the extent it could be corrected. There weren't a whole
lot of egos, so people wouldn't defend a dumb idea just because it was theirs.
But there were certainly companies that we missed. We missed Hotmail.
Jerry and I had dinner with Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and they were
explaining it to us and--I hate to admit it--we were saying, "I see it, but I don't
see how it can get big." We were on this rocket ship, and they were talking
about something that really hadn't caught on.
All we knew was that you got your email through work. They were like, "No.
There's a bunch of people that hate their work email because it gets screened."
The whole notion of the ubiquitous, dialing in from home, access everywhere
was still so far away that we just didn't think it was going to catch on as fast as it
did. We didn't pursue it as hard as we should have, clearly.
We screwed up. But, we went and found the #2, Rocketmail, made it work,
and now Yahoo's bigger than Hotmail. Mea culpa, but we fixed it.
Livingston: Was there anything you remember about Yahoo that mainstream
people just didn't get that was a big idea?
Brady: What was really central to our understanding of the Internet was that it
was this open system where you couldn't really put up walls. One of the things
that I think Filo did a great job of making happen was that, when someone did
a search and you didn't find what you were looking for on Yahoo, rather than
just saying, "It's not here," or "Go check out this other thing," he put links to our
competitors, then prefilled the query, so you'd just click on Excite and they
would do a search on Excite for the same thing.
Certainly they don't teach you in business school to go point to your competitors,
but it sent the right message to the users, which was, "It's all about you.
We're going to get you the data you want. If it exists on the Web, we're going to
find it for you, even if we don't make money off of it directly." But it keeps
people coming back because they know we have their best interest in mind.
I think that was a big idea. It was an acknowledgment that you, as a single
Tim Brady 135
company, can't be everything to everyone. We're not a walled garden like AOL.
We're this connection point, and it's our job to get you to where you want to go.
Livingston: What were the most popular link categories at first?
Brady: The sex category was probably a quarter of everything on the Web. Not
just Yahoo, but everything on the Web. Just like the VHS industry when it first
got going. The Internet was no different in that respect.
There was also a lot of product information. People quickly began to do
research before major purchases--about cars and reviews and things like that.
One of the big things we did in the first 6 months was that we brought
Reuters online. CNN was online at the time, I think, but done poorly--slow, a
ton of graphics, just didn't get it. And Reuters had this rich set of news that back
then they didn't get to display anywhere. They would just sell it to people in bits
and pieces, and no one would ever see it in its entirety, and that turned out to
be really huge.
Livingston: How did you handle pornography?
Brady: It's a tough issue. It was always talked about. It was never taken lightly.
But we were also in support of free speech. It was one of these things where we
were always struggling with "whose responsibility is it?" People come to us to
find information; we're not displaying the pictures, per se. Is it our responsibility
to find out what age users are before we pass it off, or should that wall be at
the site, etc., etc.
Ultimately we ended up removing all of our links to those sites, after probably
about a year and a half of just struggling with ways to do it appropriately and
responsibly and not really being able to find a good way. At the time the child
protection laws were coming out, but I believe we had pulled everything down
even before that.
Livingston: Do you remember the biggest debate that you got into?
Brady: There was always speed versus look-and-feel. In trying to grow a brand,
look-and-feel has a lot to do with it, as does speed, so there's always that balancing
act. Arguing the necessity of graphics with Filo was always a big argument.
I'll never forget our 8-year debate.
How to handle pornography was another one. There were just so many.
There's no one that just stands out as a watershed per se. There was a lot of
Internet-related legislation in the first couple of years, and Congress, in my
opinion, didn't have a clear idea what was going on. They were obviously influenced
by lobbyists from traditional media who had very specific agendas that
weren't necessarily in the best interest of the Internet's development. "Should
we say anything? How should we react?" There were certainly those. We
turned our site black a couple of times--the background black and the text in
white--in protest. I forget what the proposed legislation was.
Livingston: Was new legislation a big concern?
Brady: Absolutely. Just a few things here and there--copyrights, digital rights
written in a slightly different way--and we could have a different Internet.
136 Founders at Work
Livingston: Do you remember any other interesting new turning points?
Brady:I remember one day when Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, got shot.
It was the first time that we put new news on the front page. For us to think of
our site as a public service to some degree--to find things on the web and use
it to communicate news--was a big deal. "Rabin Assassinated" was our first
foray into news, and the reaction we got from everyone about using Yahoo for
that purpose was overwhelmingly good.
Livingston: Any proud moments?
Brady: The Gates memo was a pretty cool moment--scary and proud at the
same time. Going public was a proud moment. Being added to the NASDAQ
100 was an even prouder moment.
Livingston: Was it hard for Yahoo to turn down acquisition offers in the early
days?
Brady: I obviously never had equal weight in that decision. It was always Jerry
and Dave, and I don't know the full list of suitors. I know AOL was a suitor, I
know the LA Times was a suitor, and I know they had gotten informal offers
from Microsoft--never anything concrete. A lot of them were very early on,
before they even took venture money. For Jerry and Dave--neither grew up
with a lot of money--to turn down a lot of money at that stage with no guarantee
of the company doing anything afterwards, was, in my estimation, a big deal.
They had a lot of confidence in what they were doing.
Livingston: What was one of the funniest moments early on?
Brady: The funniest thing I can remember was when there was a huge storm in
May of '95, and the power grid went down for a few days. We had to go rent a
power generator and take turns filling it with diesel fuel for 4 days. 24/7. We
were laughing, "How many pages to the gallon today?" It was a crazy storm and
it also started leaking in our building. We had all these meetings scheduled and
couldn't just shut it down. We had meetings by candlelight with a bunch of
prominent companies. They walk in; there are no lights; there are cords running
everywhere leading to the generator out back; water dripping from the
ceiling. We were trying to convince them, "Oh, yeah, we're a real business,"
when you say, "Hold on, I gotta go fill up the tank." So I remember that set of
days pretty vividly.
Livingston: Did you ever have to pull off any tricks to make yourselves seem
bigger than you actually were?
Brady: I don't have a good story for this, but I remember clearly Jeff Mallett's
coming on board. I'm working like a dog and he had just started. In addition to
everything else I'm doing, I'm also trying to do all the PR stuff. Even though I
had our PR kits professionally bound, they were a startup's PR kits. He had just
come from Novell. He looks at me, and he's just like, "This is C+ work."
I hadn't slept for a couple of days, and I felt like taking a swing at him. But
he was absolutely right. "If we're going to appear big, we'd better act big, and
this is what we hand out? You can't hand that out." I remember that very clearly,
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and that was a really good lesson for me--"I know you're tired, I know you're
working hard, but it's not an excuse for putting out something that looks like a
startup."
When Jeff came in, I'd been working hard for 8 months, and I was already a
little bit tired, and I didn't think he would keep up. I didn't know him all that
well, but he had twice as much energy as anyone. We started doing two redeyes
a week to New York for business. "OK, we have to go meet MTV tomorrow.
Red-eye out. Meeting. Come back that same day." We did that for 3 to 4
months, and I just remember thinking when he walked in the door, that I
couldn't work any harder. But we worked harder, faster, smarter. That was definitely
a step up in both effort and professionalism.
Being everywhere all the time made us look bigger than we were; "Oh yeah,
we'll be in New York, we'll be there." I'd say, "Jeff, I have all these things on my
plate," and he always responded, "No, we're going." It was someone who had
come from a big company who knew how to act like a big company, even
though behind the scenes it was startup.
Livingston: Was there ever a time when you wanted to quit?
Brady: No. There were a few days where I was really upset, but never close to
the point where I wanted to quit. It was too much fun. After the first 4 to
5 months, you could see what was coming; you knew you were on the wave;
things were only going to grow.
In the first couple of months there were a few days where I felt, "I left
school for this?" Because when I left school, I didn't know that I was going to
graduate--I just left. I was 70 percent sure that I was going to get a degree, but
that 30 percent was still sitting out there. And my dad had paid for it, so the
thought of telling him I didn't get it and having this company go belly-up was
like, "That's a bad scenario."
Livingston: Was your dad supportive?
Brady: Very. He knew Jerry from undergraduate days.
Livingston: Any advice you'd give to someone who was starting a startup?
Brady: Part of it is "know yourself." Try to do as much thinking up front as to
what your breaking points are. One of the things I think I did well was that I
never spent any time thinking about quitting or any of these doomsday scenarios,
"Oh, God, what if this doesn't happen."
Before I joined, I knew where the line was, when I would quit, at what
point, and so when I was in the game, it never crossed my mind. I also knew
why I was involved, what motivated me, and I didn't spend a lot of time perseverating
on that stuff. At the end of the day, it wasn't going to get you anywhere.
It mattered, but only in an abstract way, compared to the day-to-day of getting
stuff done. Doing all that thinking all up front: why am I getting in, when do I
leave, if I leave then why am I doing it, what gets me up in the morning, what
could happen that could make me stop getting up in the morning? I've seen a
lot of people get so emotional because they start something on a whim; they are
doing this thinking while they are doing business, and, when things don't go
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well, you don't act rationally, to say the least. There's a lot to it; it can get really
emotional because you get tired and there's a lot of work and you're invested in
it. All those personally motivating things--think them through before you get
things started.
Jerry was one of my best friends before we started the company, and it's his
company, so doing business with friends--you always hear, "Don't do business
with friends, bad idea." So one of the things that really helped me was that he
and I had a conversation before I joined, "OK, here are the ground rules." And
this is really what made me think about it. "OK, if this happens, I walk away."
We had the conversation in order to preserve our friendship, having no idea
what was going to happen, but that conversation got me thinking about it and
why was I involved.
Livingston: Is there anything about Yahoo's early days that the world should
know?
Brady: I know it's a bit of a cliche, but the people that started it were awesome.
In every aspect of the word, not just in effort or handling the responsibility they
were given, but just good people, doing it for the right reasons. You could see it
in the product and the way we acted.