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Kevin Hartz introduced me to those guys in it really early days and I came to visit them and to sort of listen to them talking by the end of us or like and I want to throw in my ideas too and bring with you guys and I walked out it's like I would be weird if I didn't want to invest in this thing right I could just spend another day or two brace or I mean them so that was a what a great test do i am i super motivated to join this team and solve their you know complete the mission with them yeah e
nathan gettings who was my head of risk mitigation went on to co-found be CTO Palantir a lot of Palantir DNA came like literally from that table
the problem with any one such question is it it's an experiment you can only run once but you don't get to do an a/b test of max runs Yahoo versus not Max and you know let's see it right it just doesn't work that way you see you commit and you go and I you have to you have to own it whatever decision is having said that I you know after 30 years of doing this stuff I think myself a little bit of a product guy and my recurrent mantra was yahoo mail it's the one thing that I use and my mom uses an
if the mission was to return shareholder value after the horrific not selling Yahoo for forty five billion to Microsoft she really did complete the mission of returning a massive amount of shareholder value she landed the plane she certainly landed the plane
when I joined actually I I was in for it a lot of really interesting lessons some of which are not at all what I bargained for things like activist shareholders and hedging international currency exposure but I learned more than I could possibly bargain for so I enjoyed that one too
to me Yahoo represents kind of the very first generation or the 0th generation of the web
Yahoo was already a thing yeah I was kind of the the dinosaur slash predecessor to almost everything yeah the directory it is the directory was before the search was a thing before anything really was you know what's hot what's new the new knowledge was the greatest part of Yahoo
Yahoo was an interesting case I thought so I'm old enough to remember when internet went to being the web or be to containing the weapon so I was at the U of I when Andreessen launched mosaic so I was on the very campus where the web went from being no images to basically being all about porn yeah and that sort of blew my mind
Visa and MasterCard both caught on to the fact that we were processing cards online and we're losing way more than 1% which is the most you're allowed to lose in charge because they came to us and said hey you guys have about six months to live and then we're gonna shut you down
we fix things up enough for a year later we had and then reluctant an amazing job actually it sounds it's hard to describe how important it is to have great forecasting
we had just enough success to say oh no hang on a second look three months ago we're losing like 10% like this is nothing now
we had an amazing team of really truly great people
we're gonna probably wind up by the killing each other
we're basically just neck-and-neck competing