FAW #20: Brewster Kahle of Alexa and Internet Archive
The birth of Alexa and the Internet Archive
Brewster Kahle had founded the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) search engine out of his company Thinking Machines an sold WAIS to AOL in 1995. Alexa and the Internet Archive were his next endeavors on a path to his dream of creating the world’s largest library of published information. Alexa provides the equivalent of the “Nielsen ratings” through tracking a sample of all Internet surfers’ bahavior via a toolbar installed in their browser. Alexa takes a snapshot of each web site it indexes and donates it to the non-profit Internet Archive to create a giant scrapbook of every web as it evolves over time. I’ve been using the Internet Archive’s “wayback machine” throughout this series to display what the founders’ web sites looked like at the time they were created.
Choose a setting that inspires you
Kahle’s advice to startup founders: pick a location for your office which will inspire you every day. Kahle says, “If you’re trying to get your company to think differently - to do something interesting - pick your setting carefully. Thinking Machines was set in an 1800’s Victorian mansion on 100 acres of forest just outside of Boston. It was a park, basically. Working in an environment where, if you got stuck, you’d go for a long walk is very different than trying to do a startup and think differently if you’re in Suite 201 in some major office complex. That was a lesson I’ve used every startup since.”
I completely agree with Kahle on this- the location and design of our office is non-traditional and we love it. We’re in the heart of Tempe a few blocks off famous Mill Ave on the bottom floor of what’s called a “live-work space,” basically a residential condo that’s been re-zoned for commercial use. The vibe of being close to ASU campus and within walking distance of so many great restaurants is key. We’re also in this odd junction of various transportation being next to a railroad, the new light rail, in the flight path of Sky Harbor airport and on the Tempe Flash bus route so there’s this constant feeling of motion, development and progress. It’s no substitute for being in an environment like Palo Alto or Mountain View but for Arizona we lucked out in being in about the best spot you could pick to do a startup.
The importance of controlling your own distribution and pricing
Kahle talks about how his company put a bunch of newspapers online and the lessons he learned through that experience. “You take it for granted, but all the newspapers are pretty much online now. They control their own distribution. They have their own websites. It doesn’t all funnel in through an iTunes. The music guys, I’m not sure why they did this, but they sold their souls. Somebody else controls not only the distribution of their product, but they control the pricing. What do you have if somebody else controls the distribution and pricing of your product?”
Loud and clear on this one. With JumpBox we’ve been heavily dependent on traffic coming from VMware’s VMTN marketplace for virtual appliances. Until recently they supplied the majority of our traffic. We’re a VMware partner and thankful for their existence but as Kahle says it’s dangerous to have an external entity become your exclusive means for distribution. We now have presence in the Parallels equivalent of VMTN and are starting to see traffic from other sources, which is a healthy thing. Ideally when our library of applications becomes large enough, it will become a destination itself and we’ll control our own fate as far as distribution. Until that point we continue to rely upon other vendors for our traffic.
The Amazon acquisition
Amazon acquired Alexa in ‘99 for $250 million in Amazon stock. Like Paul Graham and the Viaweb team, Kahle told Jeff Bezos of Amazon that he didn’t do well assimilating into a bigger corporate culture in his last acquisition experience. Bezos gave him the latitude to keep Alexa running as an independent company and they went they went forward under that plan. Having the freedom to run things his way kept Kahle with Alexa for three years after the acquisition. He eventually left and moved across the street to work at the sister non-profit company Internet Archive where he works today pursuing his goal of creating a free public library of everything ever published.
May 28th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
[…] Tickle was acquired by Monster.com in 2004 for $100MM. Just like Amazon did with Alexa, Monster recognized that assimilating the Tickle employees would kill the company’s magic and so they allowed Tickle to run independently. Currier says, “If Yahoo had acquired us, they would have made us move to Mountain View , and would have made us a widget on a feature on a division of a department, and everyone would have left, and the whole thing would have died. And Wall Street would have applauded roundly.” They managed to preserve the startup feel and keep doing their thing. Tickle is alive and well today providing matchmaking data to jobseekers and employers. […]