“Celebrating the Best Worst Decisions”

“It could have been me.” (The Struts)

I spent more than a decade as an investment banker. 100-hour weeks. 100,000-mile domestic flier every year. Full staff working the weekends with lunch and dinner provided. All day meetings from breakfast to bed. Mergers, acquisitions, sales, IPOs, secondaries, restructurings. I worked on things that were in the WSJ the next day. Exhilarating and Exhausting.

So, this June 1999 day was no different than any other day. I had a meeting someplace in Mountain View or Palo Alto with another small aspiring search engine company. At the time, we were the kings of “categorization and search” and worked with virtually all the players at the time, InfoSeek, Excite, Altavista, Inktomi, AllTheWeb, Bing, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo (f/k/a, “yet another hierarchical officious oracle”).

I rolled into the meeting with a couple of associates and an analyst. The company said that they were close on a funding round with Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, with whom we worked closely. The round wasn’t large by any standard at that time, and I remember the company had something like 25 employees. While I was young, many of these founders looked like they were still in junior high.

We sat through a short presentation about Backrubs or whatever names they had originally come up with for the search optimization tool. They had recently hired someone out of Stanford who they viewed as a superstar, Marissa Mayer, and she joined our meeting halfway through.

When you hear one company talk about the next game changing algorithm, sometimes you think you’ve heard them all. These guys had something called a Page Rank Algorithm. Even that wasn’t a new concept for us, as we knew IDD Information Services and Rank Dex was something we already sort of knew about, and others were seemingly already moving in that direction. The difference, they told us, is that they had patented it.

Anyway, at some point in the meeting I said, “look guys, haven’t you heard of Yahoo? They are quickly becoming the 800lb gorilla here. There’s going to be a lot of consolidation and I think search is over.”

As we drove back in San Francisco, one of my associates blurted out from the backseat, “Haven’t you heard of Yahoo??!”

Google never called to ask for our help on the funding round. And they never returned our call for help on their next funding round, nor the next. In fact, that was a one and done. Epic fail.

I think about what if my brain had told my mouth what it should say. “Then again… maybe I won’t” say “have you heard of Yahoo?” to Larry Page and Sergey Brin.