5 Years Ago Today: A New Beginning

Five years ago today I left Overture. It had been Overture for all of a week. I had spent two a half years at GoTo.com and GoTo. I guess I really didn’t like the name Overture or took a hint from the ticker symbol OVER. When I left, there were 4 million listings in the database. That was it and it seemed like a lot. It was more ads than anyone else had ever had. Today, many search marketers have more than 4 million ads in their own campaigns. eBay has more than 10 million listings with Yahoo Search alone.

Those two and half years were amazing. We set out to change the world and we did. When I started at GoTo.com and for most of my time there we heard that paid search was just wrong. In the end, everyone adoped paid search from both an advertising and monetization perspective. When banner advertising fell apart, paid search was there to save the day.

We set out to build a destination site… and failed. An upstart search engine came along and people loved it. It had a funny name…Google. With no marketing, it managed to get people to the site. We couldn’t pay people to come to our site. So we tried getting our results on to other sites. Very few portals wanted to take all of our results. We had deals with Netscape (a big player back then) and MSN for when people hit the search button and deals with smaller sites and a few portals (Earthlink was the biggest).

What changed?

We had a great business development team. Talmadge O’Neill started up the team and signed the initial deals. Jason Fairchild built the product that went after the mid-market landing Earthlink and numerous others (and later took over the BD team). Susan Bridgers built the now-forgotten affiliate program on BeFree. John Gentry came in to professionalize the effort. Johannes Larcher launched GoTo International. Talmadge brought me in to go after the ungettable deals, the browsers and portals.

Talmadge had signed a deal with MSN that wasn’t great but all that was available at time. I was amazed he managed to get it in the first place. My first challenges were to sign Netscape (which wouldn’t talk to the start-up GoTo a year earlier) and renew Mcrosoft.

As we signed the Netscape deal to take 25% of its search traffic, we weren’t sure if we had the money in the bank if the deal didn’t work but Jeffrey Brewer, our charasmatic CEO, said to sign it and let him worry about raising money if we need it. Days before the deal was signed the company went public and received a huge bump in stock price with the announcement of the deal. (I was on my way to Canada on July 1st when it was announced but Al Duncan, our stellar PR guy, kept me informed all day.)

The Big Deals

Two deals changed the face of search. No it wasn’t Google. We pitched Google and were told flat out that Google would never allow paid search on its SERPs. That’s right, NEVER! Times changed and Google launched AdWords a year later and its entire market cap is based on that. I guess we were good salesmen… too good.

At the same time, our efforts with the portals began to pay off. John Gentry landed a deal with AOL and I got us Lycos (then a big player). Instead of pitching to take 100% of our results with backfill from Inktomi, we sold both of them on placing 5 of our results above theirs.

The rest is history.

A Footnote on Battelle’s Book

If you read John Battelle’s account of this in his book “The Search”, it is pure fiction. I was shocked that John didn’t check his facts with a second source. I talked to a few senior execs from GoTo to make sure that I hadn’t forgotten or not been privy to what was going on. They laughed about what was in the book.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

The folks I mentioned above made it happen. Others who help build the company include Jeffrey Brewer (I have to mention him again as he led us like no one else could have), Todd Tappin (our CFO through whom every BD deal went), Jay Gallinati (our SVP of Sales who single-handedly built the sales, editorial and customer support organizations), Dean Stackel handled our legal efforts organizing us with his lists (oh those lists!) and colorful charts showing us how what we negotiated with Lycos really worked), Richard Chino who created stats like no one else, Derek Idemoto who wrote the S-1 while still a full-time MBA at UCLA, Tim Cadogan who was stolen by Yahoo only to head up search once Overture was bought and I’m sure a few other people I am fogetting to name. It was a pleasure and honor to have worked with all of them. Thank you all!