Delivering Happiness

months ago.
We told Jerry that we would think about it and get back to him in a few
days. This whole situation felt like déjà vu, except this time the numbers
were bigger. Much, much bigger.
The next few days were filled with a lot of angst. We had told the rest of
our employees what had happened, and that Sanjay, Ali, and I would be
making the final decision. If we took the $20 million, I wouldn’t have to
work again for the rest of my life.
As a thought experiment, I made a list of all the things I would do with
the money if I had it:
I would buy a condo or loft in San Francisco so that I’d have a place to
live that I could call my own, instead of renting a place and living with
a roommate.
I would buy a big-screen TV and build a home theater.
I would want to be able to go on mini vacations (long weekends)
whenever I wanted to, to places like Las Vegas, New York, Miami, and
LA.
I would buy a new computer.
I would start another company, because I really enjoyed the idea of
building and growing something.
I was surprised that my list was so short, and that it was actually pretty
difficult for me to add anything else to it. With the savings I had from my
previous jobs, I actually already had the ability to buy the TV and computer,
and go on mini vacations. I just could never bring myself to do it.
I was already helping run a company that I was excited about. It seemed
kind of silly to sell a company that I was excited about in order to start
another company to be excited about. With the exception of actually
owning my own place instead of renting, I realized that I already had the
means to buy everything I wanted to buy.
Lenny’s words rang through my head over and over again:
“LinkExchange is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” I knew in my heart

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that, even if we failed, going after the opportunity was the right thing to do.
It was much more important than owning a condo or loft at the age of
twenty-three. Becoming a homeowner could wait until later in life.
I talked to Sanjay and Ali about my thought process, and they had
independently come up with the same conclusion. We were still young. We
could afford to be bold.
The next day we had a company meeting to announce our decision.
“As you all know, we received a term sheet from Yahoo! offering to buy
the company, and we’ve been spending the last few days thinking about
whether to accept their offer or not,” I began. You could feel the tension
building in the room.
“We’ve decided to turn down their offer.”
As I looked around the room, I was surprised that there seemed to be a
sense of relief in people’s faces. “We are living in a very special time,” I
said. “The Internet industry is exploding. Companies like Netscape, eBay,
Amazon, and Yahoo! are changing the course of human history. Never
before have so many companies become successes in such a short period of
time. We have the opportunity to be one of those companies while having
the time of our lives.”
I’m not sure why, but for some reason I started feeling more and more
emotional. My voice started shaking. I had to get my final words out and
end the meeting, or else I would start crying:
“There will never be another 1997.”
It was us against the world, and we were going to make sure we would
win.
T
he next few months were a blur. Somehow, everything seemed to fall into
place as if there was someone watching over us making sure that we could
do no wrong. Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital, the same venture-
capital firm that funded Yahoo!, became our board member and invested $3
million for a 20 percent stake in the company. More and more Web sites
started signing up for our service, and we started signing some big
advertisers to bring in revenue for the company. We hired a lot of smart,
passionate employees (many of whom were friends of existing employees),
and we had a lot of fun together. We were on top of the world.

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I’m not quite sure how it started, but we had a really fun tradition at
LinkExchange. Once a month, I’d send an e-mail out to the entire company
letting them know that we were having an important meeting, and that some
of our important investors and board members would be attending, so
everyone was required to wear a suit and tie on the day of the meeting.
Everyone except for the most recently hired employees knew that it
wasn’t a real business meeting, and that they didn’t actually need to wear a
suit and tie. The real reason for the meeting was so that we could initiate
and haze all the new employees who had joined LinkExchange in the past
month.
So once a month, all the newly hired employees would show up to the
office dressed up in suits and ties. There they would realize that they were
the target of the companywide practical joke. In the afternoon meeting, all
the new hires would be called up to the front of the room to complete some
sort of embarrassing task.
After the Sequoia investment, we asked Michael Moritz to attend our
initiation meeting, and we called him up to the front of the room along with
the other six employees who had been hired in the past month.
After each person introduced himself, we let them know that in honor of
Moritz’s presence, we decided that we wanted everyone to move together in
unison to the music that was about to be played.
If you’ve ever read anything in the media about Moritz, he’s generally
portrayed as an intelligent, introspective, and proper British journalist-
turned-venture-capitalist, so everyone was excited to see that he was willing
to stand in front of the room with the other new employees. Someone
brought out a boom box and turned on the power as everyone started
clapping and cheering. And then the music started playing. It was the
Macarena.
I don’t think words can ever truly describe what watching Moritz being
forced to do the Macarena was like. It ranks up there as one of the strangest
sights to behold. Everyone in the entire room was cheering and laughing,
and by the end of the song I had tears streaming down my face from
laughing so hard.
I remember looking around the room at all the happy faces and thinking
to myself, I can’t believe this is real. It wasn’t just about Moritz doing the

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Macarena or that everyone in the entire room was laughing. It was about
everything that had happened in the past year. It just didn’t seem real.
In the words of Pretty Woman, I was living the fairy tale.