Had a day of talking to folks about the book, including lunch with Marc (I’ve been meaning to talk to him about the book for months, as Netscape pretty much fired the search-driven starting gun, and Marc generally has a lot of really interesting things to say). I then went over to Friendster’s new offices for a good chat with Jonathan Abrams and a few of his colleagues. Good crew, a lot of level-headed enthusiasm (interesting concept, eh?) evident there. Then I spent some time on the phone with the CEO of Dipsea (remember them? I pinged them back here). Then my site went down. All in all a busy afternoon.
Marc had great stories to tell about the early days of Netscape, and lessons to be drawn from managing extraordinary growth. Folks forget that they sold Netscape – a company with something on the order of $600-800 million in revenues – for $10 billion to AOL. Marc drew an interesting set of graphs showing how browser revenue imploded when MSFT came in, but how portal revenue – OEM’ing traffic, essentially – grew to nearly the same size, about $200 million. We also spent some time on the future of search as it relates to media models. Good stuff.
Jonathan was busy hiring folks when I stopped in, as were many others I met at Friendster. A good sign, overall, for the Valley, that smaller and younger companies are hiring, as well as folks like Google. F’ster had none of the bling bling associated with fresh VC money adorning the office, which was refreshing. All I can say about our conversation (remember, I have to keep some stuff for the book) is that they are quite serious about expanding the offerings there, and it ain’t just dating…
Dipsie, well, watch this space. I hope to have real news soon.
I probably missed you by one day. I was at Friendster earlier this week. 🙂