free barcode generator asp.net c# Livingston: When you were writing the original business plan, did you have any in Font

Drawing ECC200 in Font Livingston: When you were writing the original business plan, did you have any

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.

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.

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.

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.