David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…And it seems like they didn’t think through it any more than that because I couldn’t find anything about, is that going to appear on the search results page, is that going to appear on google.com next to the search box? But it seems like it was never real enough to actually have a plan for it. And indeed, the Series A pitch deck and business plan was intentionally vague. I think part of the reason Larry and Sergey were like, okay, Sally, new guy, you go do this, is they didn’t actually want to tell VCs that much. That was number two. Then number three was that they were going to license Google organic search results to portals and directories as essentially OEM search to backfill results like we were talking about with Yahoo. Other search engines were doing this. Inktomi had gotten started at this point in time. Inktomi was the nextdoor neighbor at the data center exodus in Santa Clara. And they built a sizable business selling white labeled organic search results to other portals.…

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