1: “Should Yahoo bring back Koogle?”
Felicia Horowitz smiled at her husband, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz.
“Huh?”
It was 2012, and Yahoo had just fired its CEO, Scott Thompson.
“Tim Koogle? How do you even know who Tim Koogle is?” he writes in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Felicia then recalled a conversation they had shared eleven years earlier, back in 2001.
At the time, Ben was CEO of Loudcloud, a tech start-up focused on network security, scaling, and disaster recovery.
It was the middle of the dot-com implosion. The NASDAQ Index fell from 5,049 to 1,105 in eighteen months—an 80 percent drop.
On this particular night, Ben was preparing for the Loudcloud IPO, which was happening the next day.
Which BusinessWeek had labeled “the IPO from hell.”
Making matters worse, while Ben had been on a road show to generate interest in the IPO, Felicia had stopped breathing after an allergic reaction to some medicine and had to be rushed to the hospital.
She had recovered, but Ben was distraught.
“Then,” he writes, “the day before the offering, Yahoo, the lighthouse company of the Internet boom, announced Tim Koogle, its CEO, was stepping down.
“We had hit the nadir of the dot-com crash,” Ben notes.
Yahoo was not just another dot‑com; it was the closest thing the Internet had to a sure thing, proof that the new technology companies could become durable businesses.
That is what made Tim Koogle’s resignation felt so ominous on the eve of Loudcloud’s IPO. If even Yahoo’s chief executive could not survive the slowdown, it sent a message that the entire sector was on the verge of true collapse.
2: The conversation between Felicia and Ben went something like this:
Ben: “We’re f***ed.”
Felicia: “What do you mean? What happened?”
Ben: “Yahoo fired Koogle. It’s over. The whole thing is over.”
Felicia: “Who is Koogle?”
Ben: “He was the CEO of Yahoo. We’re f***ed. I’m going to have to shut the company down.”
Felicia: “Are you sure?”
Ben: “Didn’t you hear me? They fired Koogle. We’re f***ed.”
Looking back years later, Ben writes: “She had never seen me that depressed before, and she never forgot it.”
3: The next day, Ben and his team forged ahead with the Loudcloud IPO. They raised $162.5 million.
And, “it may have been the least celebratory IPO in history,” Ben recalls.
The struggles for Ben and Loudcloud were just beginning.
More to come in future posts!
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Reflection: When I feel certain that “it’s over” and that a single piece of bad news has sealed my fate, how willing am I to keep going anyway and see what is still possible on the other side of my fear?
Action: Recall one situation right now that feels doomed in my mind and choose one next courageous step to take this week—however small—to move forward instead of shutting the whole thing down in my imagination.
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