Technology is getting worse.
Did it change? Or did I?
I once loved new technology. I lived in the heart of Silicon Valley for 25 years, and was bursting with enthusiasm for its free-wheeling mission to transform the world—and have some fun along the way.
When the Worldwide Web made its debut, I thought I’d found Nirvana. It was like tech was turning everything into a game.
This is a story about the birth of the search engine.
I once loved new technology. I lived in the heart of Silicon Valley for 25 years, and was bursting with enthusiasm for its free-wheeling mission to transform the world—and have some fun along the way.
When the Worldwide Web made its debut, I thought I’d found Nirvana. It was like tech was turning everything into a game.
This is a story about the birth of the search engine.
There were no commercial search engines back in 1993. But a Stanford student named David Filo compiled a list of his 200 favorite websites.
His buddy Jerry Yang helped turn this into an online list. They called it “Jerry’s Guide to the Worldwide Web.” Filo and Yang added new websites every day to their list—and classified them according to categories.
This turned into Yahoo.
Here’s my favorite part of the story: These two students didn’t even know they were running a business.
They did it for fun. They did it out of love. They did it because it was cool. “We wanted to avoid doing our dissertations,” Yang later explained.
But a venture capitalist named Mike Moritz heard about Filo and Yang, and tracked them down. The founders of Yahoo were living in total squalor in a trailer littered with stale food and pizza boxes, strewed alongside sleeping bags and overheating computers. A phone rang constantly—but nobody bothered to pick it up.
Moritz was dismayed by this dorm-room-gone-wild ambiance, but he was impressed with the students’ web searching technology. So he asked them the obvious question: How much did they plan to charge users?
Filo and Yang had no answer for this. They wanted to give their tech away for free.
Yahoo wasn’t even selling ads back then. It wasn’t tracking users and selling their private information. It didn’t even have a bank account.
But it was a community and had millions of users.
That was a word you heard frequently in Silicon Valley in the early days. People didn’t build web platforms—they formed online communities.
It was a FUN community. People enjoyed being a member. Even the absurd name Yahoo was part of the game—although early investors hated it.
Yang’s job title was “Chief Yahoo.” Filo’s position was “Cheap Yahoo.”
Investors always hate those kinds of things.
Moritz wanted to turn Yahoo into a business. And the founders realized that their fun community was growing faster than they could handle in their down-and-out trailer. So they sold out 25% of Yahoo for $1 million.
That was the origin of web culture.
It was free and fun, benevolent and empowering. The goal wasn’t profit maximization. People really wanted to make the world a better place. And they created technology that could do it.
Even when Google launched a few months later (which I witnessed firsthand, as described here), they imitated the goofy name of their leading competitor. Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” sounded like a superhero’s vow.
Even at that point, Yahoo might have prevailed. But it turned into a case study in stupidity. Maybe it just wasn’t evil enough.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: gaut/Twitter/X
