Annaliza E. Nebres

OOC

Case Study 9

Tim Brady

(First Non-Founding Employee, Yahoo)

Yahoo was a collection of links to research papers maintained by two Stanford grad students which id Jerry Yang and David Filo that began in 1994. The site grows rapidly in popularity because they gradually added links to new types of information. In 1994 they decided to turn the site into a startup that’s why they asked Tim Brady to write a business plan for it. 

Brady was Yang’s college roommate. Brady initially expected that he will be able to finish his semester at Harvard business school but Yahoo’s potential grew that he couldn’t wait. They made the company’s business plan to pass in his courses and jumped on a plane west to become Yahoo’s first actual employee.

He has been the VP of Production for 8 years. His responsibility was about the “product”. Yahoo went to public in April 1996 and he was effectively the editor of Yahoo’s site. Yahoo became the most popular website in the world and it ultimately won the portal wars because it was a better site and the site was largely because of Tim Brady.

Tim Brady was the first employee the Yahoo founders brought on. He and Jerry Yang both studied Electrical Engineering together. Brady worked for Motorola in Marketing and Engineering. They’re one of the closest friends. Yang told Brady about the web. Jerry and Dave told Brady the story that they both doing the PhD thesis and their references was online. They had big lists that some EE graduates sending an email saying “can you add this?” In their spare time they add the list or category that they were interested in. AOL wants them to join their company. They started to think of their projects as a business and not just a hobby.

There were Electric shows down in San Jose in March 1995; Yahoo’s coming out party was a booth on that window. The show was about the hardware and software companies only. Netscape was the only browser back then. The job on netscapw was to grow internet. Their way to get money was to get everyone on the internet and sell servers. They hired an outside sales firm to help their start advertising. They sold five big packages to five big companies. They came first before Koogle. They had a graphic switch at the same time put up advertising.

They find hard time to make people join Yahoo. They hired friends and friends of friends. Tim was personally focused on product. He worked for Jeff Mallet, who was under Kim Koogle. They meet competitors, first the directory button on the Netscape browser became a search button and Netscape started selling the right to linked from the button. Architext or also known Excite was a bunch of under grad from Stanford. They bought the Netscape search button with their venture capital money. They never thought that Yahoo will come out of the market.

Yahoo was kicked off out of the Stanford because they think that their server will crash. And they meet Mark Andreesen and offered to host for 30 or 60 days. They have an issue about pornography. Many people came to them and find information that’s why they end up removing all of their links to those sites. But there was no time that he wanted to quit but there were times that he was really upset.

Three things I’ve learn are, first even though you are an under grad and not part of the founders of the company, you can do something for the company to became illustrious and nurture. Second is to know yourself, to know what you’re doing. Third is never quit, you will not succeed if you wont continue what you’re doing and find someone or something that will ,motivate you.