It's actually not unlike Google at that stage of development. They had an up-and-running site. It wasn't losing very much money, it wasn't making very much money, but it was growing.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
To me, the biggest surprise is that Google still functions despite the explosion in the number of sites.
Google started out when the dot-com boom was happening. It grew under the radar of big companies that were competing in but basically ignoring search. Then they were able to really invest during the bust for a long time.
The reason that Google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web. It's in ecological sustainability. It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy.
The story of Google is just when everyone concluded that a search engine would never make any money, everyone backed out of it, and Google walked into that vacuum and dominated.
I think Google is a great company, and they're doing really cool things. But they're not doing things that are going to put us, I think, into the next generation of technology.
Google has been doing well. As much as possible we're trying to share back with the employees. They will continue to create a lot of value.
Even though Google may do very well, there will always be an alternative to what Google is doing, and people will always have the free choice... because there's no way for us to prevent them from exercising that choice. That is one of the key aspects of why the Internet has been so successful. No technologies can dominate.
Back in the late 1990s, venture capitalists got very excited about the Internet. A whole lot of money was poured into some companies that failed rather spectacularly, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.
Yahoo is still in many ways the definitive brand of the consumer Internet, but I don't think they can or should compete with Google any longer. That game is over.
Google was a venture-funded company. Being part of that brings an energy to the company.
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