After guiding the group through a tour of the garage, John Leighton led everyone into the small conference room adjoining it.
With John Leighton’s team of five and the investor representatives all seated, the room was exactly full.
Compact was a generous description.
“Sitting here genuinely brings back memories.
We all started this way.” Andy Grove, President of Intel, said it with a smile once everyone had settled.
Grove’s story at Intel was well known in the industry.
The company’s first two presidents had been its founders.
Grove had been Intel’s first hire, and his reputation for rigorous, demanding leadership had defined the company’s culture for decades.
“I worked under you for a while back then, as I recall.” John Doerr, founder of Kleiner Perkins, said from across the table.
Before establishing KPCB, Doerr had spent time at Intel as one of its earliest employees.
The connection between him and Grove ran deep, the kind of shared history that built lasting professional bonds.
The two were genuinely familiar, as were most of the people in the room.
In the upper levels of American business, the circles overlapped considerably.
What appeared from the outside to be entirely separate companies often shared investors, board members, or both.
The relationships were old and layered.
…
“We’re not here to reminisce.
Everyone in this room is busy, and this kind of gathering is rare.
Let’s hear from Jerry and his team.” Patrick McGovern of IDG cut through the pleasantries with the ease of someone who had earned the right to do so.
Among those present, only McGovern and Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital carried the seniority to redirect the conversation without causing offence.
The others, Steve Case of America Online, Michael Moritz, and Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, listened.
“Fair enough.
Seeing this garage does take me back.
But yes, let’s hear about Yahoo first.” Andy Grove smiled and settled into his chair, turning his attention to Jerry Yang.
The room followed.
…
“Thank you all for coming.
We understand your time is valuable, and we don’t take it lightly.” Jerry Yang opened on behalf of the team.
It had to be acknowledged that Jerry Yang had a natural instinct for this kind of room.
He had been visibly nervous earlier in the day.
By the time the tour had finished and everyone was seated, no trace of it remained.
He was composed, direct, and warm without being ingratiating.
The business acumen was real.
We believe what you’ll find there will speak for itself.”
What followed was a thorough and carefully constructed presentation of Yahoo’s current position and its vision for the future.
John Leighton had spent the preceding days working extensively with Jerry Yang and the others on this.
As someone who had lived through the arc of the internet’s development, no one in the room understood where things were going better than he did.
That knowledge had been woven into every section of what Jerry Yang was now presenting.
…
The presentation covered Yahoo’s current metrics in detail, laid out the financing plan, and then turned to what Yahoo intended to do with the capital it raised.
The global expansion strategy was outlined step by step.
Canada, Australia, and Europe first, to establish a foundation in English-speaking and developed markets, followed by Asia, and then a gradual rollout into Latin America and other regions.
Plans for dedicated offices in each market, localised language versions, and country-specific sub-sites were all presented.
In a later era these would be standard practice for any international internet company.
In early 1995 they were forward-thinking to the point of sounding visionary.
New product plans for the Yahoo platform were introduced as well.
Free email, premium paid email tiers, expanded content channels.
These were John Leighton’s suggestions, drawn from his memory of what the internet would become.
Then came the conceptual framing.
The idea of the portal as a category, Yahoo’s role as the defining entry point to the internet for ordinary users, and the argument for online media as something genuinely distinct from traditional print and broadcast.
These ideas made the most impact in the room.
The eyes of the people across the table sharpened visibly when these topics came up.
…
“Gentlemen, Yahoo is today the most developed portal website in the world.
That is not a modest claim.
It is simply accurate.
And the window we are in right now, before the competition has had time to respond and adapt, is the window that determines the next decade.
Hundreds of millions of internet users exist today, and that number will grow.
If Yahoo can become the default first stop for every person who goes online, we are not talking about a successful internet company.
We are talking about something that has never existed before.
I will go further.
As the internet grows, traditional print media will face serious structural decline.
The internet is not a trend that can be resisted.
It is the direction everything is moving, and Yahoo is positioned at the front of that movement.”
The more Jerry Yang spoke, the more alive the faces across the table became.
These were people who had been watching the internet develop and knew as well as anyone that it was not going to stop.
The question had always been who would define it.
Yahoo, as the company that had first proposed and proved a working internet profit model, was the most credible answer anyone had put forward.
…
“This is why we are seeking outside capital even from a position of profitability.
Growth of this scale requires resources that internal revenue alone cannot provide in the timeframe that matters.
Speed is everything in this market.
Our proposal is as follows.
We are offering twenty percent of Yahoo in exchange for one hundred million dollars.
With that capital, we complete the Canadian, Australian, and European strategic rollout within 1995, with preparatory groundwork for the Asia-Pacific region.
In 1996, we begin the Asia-Pacific expansion and continue outward from there.
If development proceeds as planned, Yahoo lists on Nasdaq in the second half of 1996.”
…
Jerry Yang had laid everything out.
For a room full of people accustomed to reading between the lines of corporate presentations, there was nothing between these lines to find.
It was direct, complete, and grounded in numbers that were already real.
The only question remaining was the one these investors would need to work out among themselves.
…
“How about this.
Why don’t we give you a moment outside, and we’ll discuss things in here.” Andy Grove made the suggestion with quiet authority.
Jerry Yang led the Yahoo team out of the conference room.
The room they had vacated was walled in glass.
From outside, the Yahoo staff could watch what was happening inside without hearing a word of it.
What they saw was a group of some of the most powerful figures in American business leaning toward each other across a small table, gesturing, pointing at documents, and by the look of things, arguing.
The Yahoo team circulated among the investors’ staff, reassuring their own people, keeping the atmosphere calm, and watching the glass room out of the corners of their eyes.
The scene inside was getting livelier by the minute.
…
“Do you think they’re in there arguing about who gets more of the twenty percent?” John Leighton looked at the animated figures behind the glass and said it with a completely straight face.
“That is entirely possible.” Jerry Yang replied, smiling.
The five of them looked at each other and burst out laughing at the same moment, loud enough to turn heads across the garage floor.