Tim Koogle

BW: You've been surprising people the last couple of quarters by actually making money.

KOOGLE: Yeah, what a concept!

BW: It seems to be saying that there may be something sustainable here.

KOOGLE: Yes, in a word. We try to be conservative in our guidance. We try to be because I think that from one standpoint, it's really good for people to internalize that this is an emerging industry. It's emerging quite rapidly. But in all emerging industries you can't predict really how it needs to morph and evolve and everything else. And so you just kind of execute your way into it, hopefully manage around the fundamentals and grow it.

We do take really seriously real operating management and running things to the numbers, thank you very much, establishing a culture around making money and paying real good attention to managing the business as opposed to just sort of willy-nilly kind of throwing money and stuff and never really kind of paying attention to that.

BW: You didn't take any corporate money at Yahoo!, right?

KOOGLE: We did, actually. In a Series B round that we did I think the day before Thanksgiving in '95, we did a $5 million round that had a step-up by Sequoia. But I think Sequoia put a little less into that round. The others were a number of corporate partners -- Reuters was one. At that time, Open Text -- full-text search engine partner of ours, technology partner of ours. Capital Group put some money in, which is not really corporate money, but it was a strategic round and it had some corporate partners in it.

We never touched that $5 million it turns out. Just put it on the balance sheet. Because we started revenue in August of that year and took it profitable in September and ran it that way, all the way through the first quarter.

BW: I'd really like to hear about the interaction between Yahoo! as it was developing and Sequoia, in terms of how involved were they in key decisions and to what level of detail? Was it ever a nuisance?

KOOGLE: It's been a really good one. Mike Moritz gets a lot of the credit for this. He was the sponsoring partner, if you will, in Sequoia that put the first investment in the company, and Mike's a little bit unique in that he had a journalist background actually before he became a venture capitalist.

But Mike operates. I think has been of great benefit to Mike that he had the journalist background because he's really good. He kind of soaks up lots and lots and lots of data and kind of integrates it and then boils it all down to the simple story, right?

Which if you think about it, if you're making investments, especially in emerging areas, is really key. And the fact that he had a journalist background, he had a strong intuition about it because for him it smelled like an information-delivery play real early on. He was willing to take the plunge and ride with it from that perspective.

It's really been, I mean quite honestly, a really good relationship. Mike, during the first year, dropped by a fair amount and just kind of put his feet up on a table with us and did whiteboard sessions with us, brainstorming and stuff. But he always pinned me before he would do that and said "Do you mind if I join you?" He has always been there to give support if we wanted it but hasn't meddled. So it's kind of like, sort of a nose in the door, but hands and arms are outside the door kind of a thing.

And from the standpoint of enlisting his Rolodex from time to time for contacts or finding new folks to bring into the company or whatever, sort of on an on-call kind of a basis, for whatever.

BW: Were there things in those brainstorming sessions, things that you were able to take from that?

KOOGLE: Keep it simple, follow your intuition, and stuff like that. Keep it simple is something that I think Mike always follows, and I do, too. So there's actually great chemistry from that standpoint, and the founders do, too. Jerry Yang is one of these very interesting guys who has the ability also to sort of integrate a whole lot of stuff, but look at the overall picture, and he can keep it simple.

It's pretty general, I know. But when we were making calls on how to take the company, how to think about it, and how to position it from an information-delivery standpoint, I think more than anything else, he was supportive of that concept. Maybe that's the best way to put it. In our guts, we felt really strongly in what we did and that it wasn't a software company. It wasn't a technology company. It was an information-delivery company--and that smells like media, and Mike also felt the same way, totally consistent and was very supportive, if you will, or reinforcing of our intuition about it.

You have to understand in '95, there wasn't any written plan when I arrived. We had a director, and we had the young brand, and we had what at that time seemed like a pretty large following. It's the kind of thing where we were wishing we had a crystal ball we could plop down on a table. What we had was a kind of conviction and our sense for this being an information-delivery and media business.

But until we performed and built a business around it and everything else, we didn't know. So Mike was really supportive of that.

BW: How involved was the going-public process, the picking of the bankers and that sort of stuff?

KOOGLE: Only somewhat.

BW: And the timing?

KOOGLE: It sort of came together in our collective intuitions that there was a good time opening up, and I'd say probably around January of last year we all started to feel like maybe this would be the right thing to do. As an operating guy I questioned it. I think in a really healthy way because I wanted to make sure that if we did that, it carries along a lot of responsibility. Because you don't want to take the company public before you're ready to perform consistently, and that's always a risk at whatever stage you decide to take the company public. It's a little bit of a subjective call, and there's a little bit of an objective call to it.

But collectively we all thought it kind of felt like the time, and Mike was also feeling that way. So it came together. We had a lot of discussion on it. I think probably around February we decided to do it, and Mike had some good contacts with some good blue-room bankers. It turned out that that wasn't too big a deal because we were getting approached by a lot of them anyway.

I brought a CFO on board, Gary Valenzuela. I think he joined in March right as we were having what I would call the beauty pageant of bankers catching us right, to take us out.

Gary had taken a couple of companies forward and had been a CFO in a couple, two or three public companies before, and that's actually one of the things I wanted to get in a CFO and get it on board, somebody who had managed the process before and managed the Street before and did all that, plus had some good financial disciplines, running operations, keeping track of numbers.

So with Gary on board, with Mike's contacts in the banking community, my own experience, it clicked.

BW: Would you say that the venture capital relationship here, the value-added as it were, has played a big role in Yahoo!'s success? Or is it mostly the operation or the product or what?

KOOGLE: It played a role. There's an interesting one. It always comes down to brand. A lot of things do.

Sequoia has a good brand and at an early stage, I think that helps, and then of course it proceeds as you get the company kind of rolling in a true operating sense and you take on a few corporate partners and you take the company public. Increasingly, you're dealing with banks and the rest of the stuff.

BW: But also there was a certain popularity to Yahoo!, right? I mean there was an audience already, which nobody ever had.

KOOGLE: Absolutely. It's a big deal. You're right in that Sequoia obviously shouldn't get the top billing here for all that kind of stuff. That's for sure. And all those corporate partners knew that. Knew the traffic, knew the brand, knew the strength. They also kind of understood the story right away. That was true for Ziff and that was true for Softback and Reuters, big time. They knew it, they understood it.

The fact is that we cast a plan in '95, and we really haven't deviated from it. And it really was about sort of envisioning taking this thing called navigational guide, creating a platform of use that can be very big and very wide and then kind of using that to allow users of Yahoo! to tell us what subjects, which themes, etc., were most heavily popular, and then guide us to do more targeted aggregation of content.

BW: You talked about how you had the same plan for '95 and you're creating all these vertical properties. But you're not just on the Net, you have some print stuff, too. So I wonder how you decided to go into those as opposed to so many other things that you could do?

KOOGLE: Well, in terms of doing the online properties, our short list of things was to look at verticals that would serve focus needs of our demographic groups or cultural/geographic groups that have specific content needs, or in some cases globally popular subject areas. The nature of Yahoo! in that last category is it starts with a directory approach to aggregating, and that's around a subject basis.

It's kind of ironic -- well, it's not ironic but it's part and parcel of the whole Valley -- that there are new buzz words created over the whole concept to some extent. This whole "channels" thing is really about aggregating around subjects. It's kind of interesting that there's 14 of them when some of our competitors talk about this breakthrough idea of aggregating around channels, and there are 14 of them and they're subject-based.

If you look at the top page of Yahoo!, it's like 14 subject categories from the beginning. That whole thing has helped us guide globally popular subject areas, because you can see what emerges. So that's what we've actually used there, plus a little bit of anticipating on the popular subject areas and [looking at] demographics.

Women as a percentage have been growing in their use of the Web, and it's been clear to us from our numbers on the surveys, the increase in women coming onto the Web and using Yahoo!. Those two are the first ones. There are others. There's a kind of baby-boom aging population thing that has specific information needs that I think are pretty obvious.

On the geographic/cultural front, what we've done was concluded really early on is that this thing called the Internet is global. So people get on the Internet from anyplace in the world. They can access anything. So there's nothing special about physical location, the server cluster. But not everybody in the world speaks English, and there are lots and lots of cultural needs and certainly there is a language barrier that stands in the way of a lot of people, even though the whole thing is interconnected on a global basis -- it stands in the way of people consuming useful content.

But for us it seemed really important to go early into large connected population centers in which English might not be the native language and create a local branded presence, remove the language barrier, start simple -- like we did here -- with the language barrier removed, invite end-users to create an adoption base and then use that to create local-content partnerships and local advertising client partnerships and the rest.

In the States, in the metropolitan versions we've done, that was guided around the realization that people have global content desires and needs that are pretty broad. But also, most people in the world are not like us. I live on airplanes a lot of the time, but most of the population in the world doesn't. They spend almost all of their time in and around their neighborhoods, and they have information needs associated with that.

And [it was important to] support that with metropolitan versions early in the market's cycle and also do it in a leveragable way [so you can] learn by watching what users consume and what they would probably benefit the company.

We have a lot of thoughts about what people want, even now having seen what they consume and everything else on a metropolitan basis, that are a little bit different from the main side. Hopefully, you see that in metropolitan versions. They're a little bit different.

They're a lot the same but a little bit different.

BW: I'm not sure how.

KOOGLE: Well, the approach we take, which has been different than the rest of the folks out there -- whether it's [Microsoft's] Sidewalk or Citysearch or what have you -- is that what was not done is very consistent with Yahoo!: We've not gotten into the business of creating original editorial content through our own employees. That falls from a core philosophy we've got that there is real and sustainable value for end-users in aggregating as broad an array of content as possible, and doing that in an open and inclusive way.

And that's most powerful when you don't get in competition with original editorial creators. And for the users then they know kind of instinctively, inside Yahoo!, that we're not grinding our ax. That we're giving them free access to everything out there. And that is a unique position to be had. We created Yahoo! around that whole thing. No. 1.

No. 2, that the local information needs of people is stuff that changes with time on pretty rapid cycles. Examples are events and local news and local weather and local sports events and all that kind of stuff. So stuff with low shelf life, and high time-sensitivity, if you will. And if you do that, it's always fresh and it's always coming back, and it's probably way more relevant to somebody on a local basis then some static content that's heavy in editorial, really deep, and all that sort of stuff.

That stuff is important too. But people will look to a local site, in conjunction with the global signs we provide to give them local medicine and all that, plus some information about local commerce, whether it's classifieds or Yellow Pages or whatever.

BW: Where are you in terms of that? How many areas are you in?

KOOGLE: Twelve, including Japan, Canada, UK, Germany, Ireland, France.

BW: There's gotta be some impact from Sidewalk and Citysearch and all those in terms of competing for ad revenues, right?

KOOGLE: Sure, sure. But the ad [base] is really huge, and for the local, the truly local advertising dollars I don't think anyone, including Sidewalk, has really started to penetrate that. And that's really local stuff which is your local good guys or the pizza shop down the street.

BW: That takes a lot of investment, though, in terms of ads. It's like a local newspaper, or several local newspapers, right?

KOOGLE: It does. I think it takes a channel strategy, a sales channel strategy, whatever the company does to kind of reach those in a cost-efficient way. I think that's something which is a really interesting upside that should emerge a little bit later, a little bit down the road. There's a ton of hay to be made on the multinational to national to more regional advertisers that aren't granular on a local basis, a whole lot.

BW: You were talking about branding before, and I think one of the big questions about Yahoo! and a lot of the online-oriented media companies is: What happens when the big guys start jumping in, as they are now? Can you maintain that brand? Can you sustain it, starting from zero a couple of years ago when these guys have decades behind them?

KOOGLE: Yes. We've been expecting that since '95, actually, and it's kind of interesting. I guess there's two or three relevant dimensions to that whole thing. One of them is large media companies that are more focused with original editorial or focused content areas, definitely have a vital place on the Web. And if they have existing strong brands, that should logically translate to their ability to get sustained decent levels of traffic. They create a presence.

But that presence is real different from the functionality or the value, if you will, that we provide to users by giving them a single place to come to have access to -- define and have access to -- a broad array of those destination contents.

BW: Is there something about accessing information on the Net that makes aggregation more appealing somehow?

A: Because people's information needs change all the time, and the content on the Web changes all the time. And those changes overlapped are pretty amazing, and it's pretty daunting for the individual information consumer, if you don't have a single place to come back to.

BW: But you don't have that in the real world, and yet these media companies dominate in their various areas.

KOOGLE: Yes, I know, and I've thought more about that, though I think a lot of it comes down to distribution and availability. I was in a discussion with some folks really late last night about how the Web both "timeshifts" and "spaceshifts" access to content.

BW: Not just time, that's interesting. So the fact that you do have access to all of these in one place there, makes a difference?

KOOGLE: Big difference, big difference.

BW: It's like CNET. Their new service [Snap! Online] has the same things. They say the exact same thing, the one-stop shopping. What do you think about CNET now?

KOOGLE: A lot of things. [Laughter] I'll say the positive thing.... I think anything all of us do to help the users understand that they have a number of choices of ways to make it easy to get on the Web and use its contents, is good, is real good. Helps grow the market actually.

[But] they're entering in late in the broad aggregation play. It's expensive to do at this stage.

BW: How expensive?

KOOGLE: It depends on execution. I'm constantly amazed at the ability of some of these companies -- and this is general, it's not necessarily CNET-specific -- to burn large amounts of money, sort of nonintuitive levels of money to some extent, in a beginning launch. And some of our direct competitors -- I think Excite is one of those -- if you look at last year, it just amazes me.

BW: Some of the analysts have said it will cost something like $40 million by the end of '98, when this really takes off for CNET.

KOOGLE: Yes, and part of that is that it is a late stage to be entering. It's gotten very expensive. It's way more expensive now to create a brand around broad aggregation than it was two years ago, by a couple orders of magnitude, probably. It only gets worse, every month that goes by, which accentuates the September release [of Snap! Online], because the cost of entering probably is growing nonlinearly.

So there's that. Spreading their focus is also a risk for them.

BW: Does that mean you're not particularly worried about it?

KOOGLE: No, I take everything seriously. We know what our focus is, and I know the value that we add for our users and for our advertisers. We're very focused on this aggregation business. We've been in it for a long time. We take anything that's competitive very seriously. And so I wouldn't say I'm not concerned about it.

BW: One of the things I wanted to ask, since you have had experience over a long time period, 15 years or so, is how has Silicon Valley changed to you?

KOOGLE: It's gotten way more congested, it's way more crowded, way more expensive, and everything else. I've had the benefit of keeping a home here over the past 10 years. But also living part-time or full-time in other cities. I've been experiencing those and coming back to the Valley, and the shift has been marked here, in terms of the congestion and the cost.

I mean it's unique also. Despite of all the downsizing, being congested, etc., it's a really fertile place. There's a lot happening here. It's a good climate. Good general market.

So -- but I've lived in Seattle for four years.... which is interesting also because there's a lot of the arts there, and there's a lot of really smart people there. It's a really intellectually stimulating place, but it's really beautiful. Way less congested than here.

BW: Is that a problem here? The lack of cultural amenities? It can get pretty boring if you don't like movies.

KOOGLE: Yeah, actually there's a lot to do around here. But I think -- you know what? I think a lot of people get the sense that they're overwhelmed. I mean the pace here is incredibly fast, especially if you're in certain industries like this one. I know I experience this a lot. If I happen to get half a day off, I usually go to my apartment and read. [Laughs]

BW: Is that what you get in a given week, is half a day?

KOOGLE: Probably.

BW: You work 6-1/2 days, week in, week out?

KOOGLE: Uhm-hum. I'm pretty guarded about my private time, and when I get private time I really pay attention to it and make the most of it, and so in some ways I've got a sense that actually when I get personal time, I get a lot of fulfillment from it because I am pretty careful with it, pretty intensive about it as well.

BW: But does this whole environment make it difficult to get people to come here or to hire people? In what way? What kind of impact does it have?

KOOGLE: Depending on where you're bringing them from, it could be anywhere from a mild to extreme sticker shock. Some people actually can't afford and rents are really high. It's just all ratcheted up.

BW: Does it make a difference in terms of people you wanted to hire and couldn't come or wouldn't?

KOOGLE: Not so much for us because this is a really interesting space, and Yahoo! is a really interesting company in this regard. Our average age is actually quite low. We're hiring really smart people who are pretty early in their careers, and we try to hire because of our people mix. Yahoo! is not a high head-count business. It's very leveraged, which is good because then if you manage correctly, you can actually grow your business from a revenue perspective at a higher rate than you need to grow your head-count.

The other thing is, we've looked at hiring people from existing media companies, other industries that seem to map out on this. What we found is that hiring really smart people who have a breadth of knowledge or breadth of interest has been way more beneficial than hiring people with a whole lot of more mainstream media experience, and that means hiring really smart people straight out of school who are broader in their knowledge base and their interest level. And they're more out of the box than anything else.

BW: Do you ever get anything for some of these people, do you help them with buying a house? Do you make up any of the financial difference?

KOOGLE: We haven't. We give people options, obviously. And we've not done a signing bonus and real estate assistance and all that sort of stuff. We've kind of stayed away from that because this is an early-stage company, and it's important, I think, not to do all those big-company kinds of things.

BW: Is there a problem actually finding people? Managers or employees?

KOOGLE: Yeah. It depends on the area of expertise certainly, and it's been weird to watch, actually. It tends to run in waves. For folks that are doing editorial kind of work we've not had any problems finding people. It's a really cool place to work. It's unique. It leverages people, if you get in really smart people with real broad interest areas, it's paradise, and so we've not had much problem, ever I don't think, on that front.

On the sales, growing up the sales people, the sales support as well as sales, we haven't had a problem. Two things really. Since we started doing the direct sales, hiring just ends up being dispersed around the country. So it's less of a Valley kind of issue. And in sales support, we haven't needed to hire that many heads. Again, it's really leverageable, what we do, and it's a great place to come work.

On the technical staff, it kind of goes up and down. We compete for engineers and technical developers and there's a huge overdemand, mismatch, in the Valley for those. And this business of Web development is so new, also, that the people who have a little bit of ability to do that but also come from packaged software or whatever, [they're in] huge demand. You've seen the salaries get bid way up for these folks.

BW: How much difference?

KOOGLE: It's incredible. To some extent, it runs in waves, but on salaries, on some of the developers, sometimes these days you'll see people with either a BS in computer science or a Master's, and one or two years out, they think they should making a million.

I think -- it's a little too early to tell -- but I think we're going into a phase now. We're starting to get another wave of resumes in the door where there's some consolidation occurring where startups were so hungry for people, they bid up these salaries.

People went to work there and some of the startups aren't working so well, and so people are getting nervous coming out of them to look for jobs elsewhere, and they're being a little more flexible in their salaries.

BW: Some of the companies are already starting to flush out?

KOOGLE: In a number of industries. It's not just Internet. And I've been around the Valley a long time. It goes through these cycles all the time. A lot of companies get funded by a lot of venture capital and then they consolidate and people shift left. So things, I think, are looking up for next half year. But still there's a real mismatch between supply and demand in the technical workforce.

And good managers are always hard to find.

BW: Is your management team built to what it needs to be?

KOOGLE: Uhm-hum. As we grow, we'll be putting in other managers. We've kind of avoided it. We've kept a real flat organization. And worked real hard too.

BW: That raises another question: At 6-1/2 days a week, how long can you keep that up, and what kind of impact does it have on your personal life? It seems like there is a real downside to the upside here.

KOOGLE: Sure there is. And as we've grown.... It's something all of us take really seriously, paying attention to doing what it takes. We've paid a lot of attention, though, in the ranks of folks at Yahoo! to making sure that we've fleshed out the organization and we got good process established so that they've got more time off.... to get balance in their personal lives with the work schedule. And you can see that. People working there now spend good long days, and some of them work six days a week. But people aren't working seven days a week anymore, which is what we all did for the first year-and-a-half of its life.

And so it's scaling back nicely and naturally to where people have more balance to kind of work and life schedules, in ranks. But among us, me and the folks who directly report to me, we're still on real heavy schedules. And I think it's the right thing to do.

Again, it's one of those things we could go on forever. I've learned a lot in the past five years or so about this sort of thing, not necessarily about balance. I haven't really done a good job of that one in my life. But in terms of playing the balance between letting go and delegating and pushing decisions down to people but also staying very intensely involved in the company, to get it going and get it growing, at various stages, it pays off for the organization.

It pays off for the employees, it pays off for the customers, to pay attention to it and make sure it's on and stays on good footing. It means putting in a lot of good intense time.

Personal balance? Yeah, it leaves little time to build some other personal things.

BW: When was your last vacation?

KOOGLE: Over two years ago.

BW: I think there's a bit of difference when you're having fun because it doesn't always feel like you're working.

KOOGLE: It's a funny thing, you know, it's different for everybody.... I mean quite literally since I joined Yahoo! two years ago, I have this whole new set of two Rolodexes, actually, of hundreds of people that I know that are all involved in work, but they really cover a pretty broad array of people doing a broad array of things.

Media folks and advertising folks and investors. A lot of really smart people in investor space. People in the media, whom we have these kind of sessions with, to employees who have really cool lives, and all that kind of stuff. And so it's really interesting, and for me real fulfilling. It's always been that way.

BW: Are you saying that mindset that you have here at Yahoo! is the same mindset you had when you were at your company in Seattle?

KOOGLE: Yes. The scope and the pace was similar there but for different reasons. I was running a company that was already a very large business.

BW: In terms of the general cultural environment, though, do you find it's unique in that way?

KOOGLE: Yes. It's been a blast.

BW: Why is it a blast? What about it is a blast?

KOOGLE: The part about it, the most fun for me, is that it's -- there's so much bubble here, bubble and boil here. There's new stuff all the time. There are people who are taking chances, launching a new space, new intellectual space, a new business space all the time, and it's very Darwinian. It's like there's a lot of that here, and there are successes and there are failures, but it all runs on a pretty short cycle.

That's really intellectually stimulating and can be -- it can be a bummer also for the people who are mounting failed experiments, and so you see that. You see that personal toll, but in general, overall, that vibrancy, in experimentation and intellectual creativity and all that sort of stuff is really great. It's amenable to me because that's the way I've always been.

I soak up a lot of stuff and I really kind of thrive on change and lack of boundaries.

BW: Is it more so than Seattle?

KOOGLE: Yes, yeah, yeah.

BW: Even with Microsoft up there and those folks?

KOOGLE: Yes, it is. There are some good universities there. There are some good businesses that are spawning other new businesses, but not on a scale of here. It's a little bit more human scale here, which is actually quite appealing also.

BW: You say it's Darwinian. In a sense I guess it attracts people who like this kind of environment, right?

KOOGLE: Well there's a whole range of things. It does attract people who are drawn to this sort of thing. There are other people who are in it because they're making a living here, they were born here, or they ended up here for whatever reason.

They deal with it as best they can. It isn't necessarily something they chose explicitly, but they're making the best at it. I'm sure there are people that say, "I'm stuck, but I feel the pressure because there are all these people succeeding so well and I'm not."

There are probably people who say, "I'm doing this thing, and I really like it. I'm a designer, or I'm a reception person or whatever. That's what I like doing. It's okay. I only feel pressure because it's expensive here." At any one time it's kind of in balance, and it represents a whole range of stuff.

Nothing's perfect.

BW: So in your mind who do you think are the most influential, real influence-makers?

KOOGLE: Wow! It's an interesting question. The answer is a little bit of obviousness. Clearly the people that control the flow of capital. If you really back away from it and look at the things that stimulate the growth or lack of it, it's capital, it's people who control the flow of intellectual talent.... So the folks that control [the capital] -- in the top-tier firms -- Sequoia and Mayfield and Kleiner Perkins -- are firms that have large funds. A number of 'em have big names. They typically probably get a shot at the best deals quicker than everybody else and all that good stuff.

BW: Now let's level down to actual people. Who'd be on the list?

KOOGLE: Well at Sequoia, I have to name Mike Moritz because he's on the board. I really feel -- Mike actually has a lot of influence. He gets around a lot.

Don Valentine and Pierre Lamond are still very active, and they are unique in that they are of that earlier generation of venture capitalists, real operating guys too. Came into venture capital from operating careers, and have stayed very active in the funds, and they are very admirable people. And they help a lot in their investments and have a tremendously fertile set of contacts, as you might imagine. Contacts that they can bring to bear and go from the banking community all the way down to technical talent, across the range, and extend well beyond the Valley.

BW: Is Don that involved these days? Is he still like he was? He used to be everywhere. You don't see him quite as much.

KOOGLE: A little less. I think he's been backing away a little bit and balancing his life. Yes, yes, he has. But it's pretty cool to watch when Don gets involved. He can get a lot done in a short amount of time. It's really neat.

BW: What about other power brokers? Other people you think set the agenda here or set the tone or make things happen? The glue behind the scenes?

KOOGLE: It's really funny in this space, because the Internet is so new, actually. This almost sounds like a cop-out, but there's sort of general infrastructure power brokers, and ... apart from that, when you get down to granular, this industry-specific kind of power brokers, they're few and far between.

I was thinking about that a second ago. I think it's partly because it is so new and so different. All of us in the Internet-related stuff have been drawn to looking for people in other industries that tend to naturally or logically kind of lap over into ours for help, if you will, for leverage. But it's not been clear.

I mean those haven't emerged very much. Part of it is that this is about information delivery, media, and everything else, and the Valley -- because of convergence, convergence is real -- is emerging in that area. The folks that have played in media traditionally have not been here in the Valley. They've been in New York or L.A., or mostly those two places.

And my impression is that large people who have a lot of power to wield from existing media businesses have not really gotten involved in a real way and helped to build our industry yet.

So all of us have kind of leveraged off of getting in touch with really, really smart people, and just breaking the ground ourselves and setting the rules, which is great. It's the American way. It's a great opportunity.

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