Yahoo

“33%.”

“5.7 billion in stock.”

“And so we sold, you know, one percent chunks for 30,000 dollars to our friends. When we sold the company, those 30,000 dollar chunks were worth twenty two million dollars.”

“It was around twenty million bucks.”

“Now when we wanted to get more servers, we had to go to the hardware review committee, and you had to make an appointment, and you couldn't get an appointment for like five weeks.”

“Well, at the time we were required, it was nine people. So Nine people being acquired by what at the time I think was like an 11 or 12,000 person company.”

“That is the beauty of the Stanford network. You know, these are the things that, that you can't discount when you think about privilege that people have. It's like, you reach out to, you know, an executive at Excite and their executive at Yahoo, and you say, I…”

“And this is one of the great facts about our industry is that you cannot turn Money into great products as a kind of mechanical operation. If it were possible, there would be many more great iPhone competitors. Facebook would have been long since eclipsed by M…”

“What was amazing is within about a week of when we sent them this, it was already functional. You know, live. It was live.”

“No, no, no, no, no money was, no money exchanged hands.”

“Yeah, I mean, with my PhD advisor, it was, it became a research subject. And yeah, we did not tell Yahoo.”

“It had been shared as the main kind of, you know, clickable thing on Yahoo's homepage, and about two hours it had gotten about two million views.”

“So to this day, whenever I get nervous about something, what I do is I imagine the faces of the people that I'm representing on my team, and I It makes me feel so much better. Like I have a gang on my side.”

“That I had, my contract was coming up the beginning of oh seven and Yahoo was trying to get me to jump over, which I didn't want to do.”

“No money was, no money exchanged hands here.”

“What was amazing is within about a week of when we sent them this, it was already functional. You know, live. It was live.”

“And my perception of Yahoo at the time was it was a place where great companies go to die.”

“What happened was we had an all hands meeting at this church down the street from the office and, you know, they're the 500 or a thousand Groupon employees were in this church. And I came up to the stage. I said, hey, I have a special announcement... I said, h…”

“We had the first Wi-Fi TV, and we had the first TV with a little keyboard, right? So you can browse the web. And back then with T-Lab was Yahoo, and they built the first operating system for TV for us.”

“And he looked at me right in the eyes, and he said, you're a lot less intelligent than I thought you were. Do you have any idea how hard it is to build something like Yahoo? Well, you're about to find out.”