Activity

Douglas Edwards: And it wasn’t just advertising for lobsters. Ryan quickly understood the opportunity for arbitrage. Amazon had an affiliate program where if you sent someone to Amazon and they bought a book, Amazon would pay you. So Ryan began taking ads out on Google not just for lobsters, but fo…

Guy Bar-Nahum: We took all these code bases, and we just very hackily kind of threw them together with bubble gum and masking tape. We put them together in a very haphazard way, because if you have a finite amount of time, right, a finite amount of resources, you really lower the bar on the softwar…

Tiffany Shlain: There was so much talk about IPOs that we had an Initial Pumpkin Offering for Halloween. Everyone came out to South Park. I still have all the schwag from that; it was very funny. It was a ridiculous time.

Po Bronson: There was always this high-low tension that was always trying to make you feel like you hadn’t totally sold out—like you add some funk and you get rid of the guilt. Like everybody would wear a tuxedo with sneakers, or serve Kobe beef on a cheap ol’ napkin. It was some form of apology or…

Ev Williams: Every night there was a party to go to, where you could drink for free and eat for free and there would be lots of young people—half of whom were brand-new to town.

Patty Beron: The more extravagant the event was, the more publicity they’d get: the more write-ups, the more people ta…