David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…In 2001 with the technology available then, yes. I totally believe that Overture did try to implement it, had the same idea. Also that Overture had really good technology too. I think that is true. But again, back to Google’s infrastructure, the commodity hardware, the scaling out data centers, the distributed file system, and distributed computing, to really scale this, you needed special infrastructure that only they had. We’re talking about the pain of transitioning the Google ad model and ultimately the whole business over to this new beautiful AdWords model and how hard that was to put some numbers on it. In 2001, the year that the Yahoo deal saved the company, Google for the year ultimately did $86 million in revenue that year and $10 million in profit. So turned profitable in 2001. Great numbers by any metric for a startup and especially in the middle of the dot-com winter. But almost all of that revenue was the combination of these portal deals and the old ad system that was in place. Project Sunset and transitioning over to the new ad system put a large portion of that revenue at risk. Oh yeah.…

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