Employee #3: Craig Donato Tells Us About the Early Days of Internet Pioneer Excite
A series of conversations with early employees of iconic tech companies. If you have recommendations for future interviews, tweet them to me via @hunterwalk.
If you're an Internet user over the age of 30 you can recall Lycos, WebCrawler, Snap, HotBot and others, but in Silicon Valley, Excite brings a particular smile to people's faces. Early employee Craig Donato gives us his view of the Search 1.0 days.
Craig Donato, Excite Employee #12 (@craigoodle, now: Oodle)
Q: How many people were at Excite when you started and how did you get connected with the early team?
I joined Excite -- then called Architext -- in 1995 as the 12th employee.
I discovered the company in article in the Red Herring. Prior to getting my MBA, I worked on search technology for the Pentagon. Excite had built some very cool search technology in area that I had researched. I got really excited about what they were doing and contacted Joe Kraus, one of the founders. There was an immediate spark when I met the team – young kids straight of Stanford who were super smart, fun-loving, and ready to conquer the world.
Q: At what point did you realize Excite was going to be successful?
As soon as we launched Excite, it took off like a rocket. We were fortunate to be in a nascent market that was growing very, very quickly. As everyone rushed to start using the web, they needed a search engine to experience it. The most impactful thing we could to increase usage was to simply add more hardware. As soon as we popped in more servers, we would see an immediate jump in page views. We were also getting great user feedback on the product. We quickly went from one of the last major search engines to enter the market (after Infoseek and Lycos) to the number two spot behind Yahoo.
Q: What was your initial role at Excite and how'd this change over time?
During Excite's first five years, we reorganized the company on almost annual basis to align around our strategic initiatives. We made sure that someone was on point for every major initiative (and that no owned more than one).
My first role was to manage and market their search engine product for web masters. Shortly after launching Excite, our search engine, we had a big initiative to expand our product portfolio and become a “portal.” I lead the product effort to build out Excite's content and personalization products. The following year, I overhauled our advertising and reporting infrastructure. At that time, we were hitting huge scaling problem due to growth. Our daily logs were about to take more than 24 hours to process and our ad serving infrastructure was about to fall over. As the company got to a few hundred people, we organized functionally and I oversaw product management. With so many new employees, we developed a training program to teach them our best practices -- things that are now common place such as small teams, rapid release cycles, iterative metric driven decision making, etc. As the company got really big, we organized more formally into business units. Until I left, I oversaw the search and community business units.
Q: What was your most meaningful contribution(s) to Excite's success?
Scott Kister (my Oodle co-founder), myself and Joe Kraus moved a team of people onto a new floor to build out our content platform and products. Our big focus on was on personalization.
We recognized that we were having a real-time conversation with all of our users. And to truly stand up to our end of that conversation, we need to personalize what we gave back to them based on who they were and how they had previously interacted with us. It was an ambitious goal given the technology constraints of the day but we made it work. Personalization quickly became one of the company’s core differentiators and was woven into our home page, all our content products, and later into search.
Q: Did you have any traditions or rituals that helped define Excite's culture?
One Excite ritual we adopted at Oodle was the weekly all company lunch meeting. These meetings exemplified our fun, open and collaborative culture. In addition to always being very transparent about how were doing, I vividly remember George Bell our CEO throwing tennis balls to employees throughout the meetings. As we moved into a bigger office, we designed a huge open area into the floor plan so that we could continue to bring everyone together in one space.
When hiring folks, we did a good job weeding out people that would want to walk in and use their old playbook. This was really important in the early days of the consumer internet because we needed to mash together different backgrounds: technology, media, advertising, gaming, etc. To succeed at Excite, you needed to have the curiosity to first absorb what we were doing and then re-assimilate all your prior experiences.
Our free Odwalla juice dispensers also exemplified everything good, bad and crazy about those early boom times. I think they even got written up in Wired…
Q: When you look at how search/portals have evolved, what's consistent with your original thinking and what surprises you?
We always believed that owning and excelling at search was the anchor to the portal experience. Even though our home page had tons of links and tabs, users always go right to the search box. We invested heavily into something we called “channeling search” where search would automatically integrate and personalize all of our structured content (TV listings, weather, stock quotes, sport scores) into our search results. This is something that Google has mastered to keep its front-end clean and lean.
What most surprises me is the dearth of local content. We always believed that “some day soon” users would easily access all the local content they needed in their daily life – things like the school lunch menu, the little league schedule. And shockingly, it’s still surprisingly hard to get this information.
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Post 2: Michael Dearing/eBay
Fellow - Energy Efficiency
11y"And shockingly, it’s still surprisingly hard to get this information." One thing that I've come to realize is just how wide the gulf is between people who are computer/internet savvy and, basically, everyone else. When you are surrounded by people who are extremely computer literate you start to lose touch with the rest of the world where most people just aren't. They can consume content but they don't contribute to it. Even something that seems as simple as putting up a school lunch menu is complex and terrifying to an average person who has no familiarity with it. Chip & Dan Heath refer to this as the "curse of knowledge" and we techie inclined all take it for granted that blogging/creating content is a veritable piece of cake that anyone should be able to do. To the rest of the world, putting up a school lunch menu every day is a black art done in a secretive room somewhere by a scary techie geek.