Internet Advertising Pioneer: Kevin O’Connor, Founder of DoubleClick and FindTheBest (Part 3)

Sramana: At that time people were still doing concept financing. The Internet happened because of concept financing. I wonder if the Internet would ever have happened if we did not have concept financing.

Kevin O’Connor: I’m not sure I agree. Eventually everything shakes out in a capitalistic market. It took a bit longer for things to shake out in the Internet because there was so much of a fake economy there. One of the phrases I hated most about the Internet was “the new economy” because that implied you did need to have profits. The value of a company was based on revenue. That created a fake economy.

Sramana: We saw a lot of valuations without revenues.

Kevin O’Connor: Most of those companies ended up dying. We found that 75% of our customers in 2001 went out of business.

Sramana: There were concepts that came about early on, like Netscape the browser, that had no business model until they had the application server. If nobody funded the browser, then the gateway to the Internet never would have happened. Amazon took a long time to make money.

Kevin O’Connor: Their concepts were solving a problem. If you solve a problem, you create value. There were so many concepts back then.

Sramana: Amazon started the e-commerce category. They started a new way of doing things. It was not obvious that people were going to give their credit card to an Internet site.

Kevin O’Connor: It was the same old economy. What Amazon and eBay did great was to remove the friction from the economy.

Sramana: I think eBay was a different story. They introduced something different.

Kevin O’Connor: It was happening in the offline world. When I heard the eBay story, I laughed. I thought it was a joke. I came back to the office and told people that a guy dropped out of Stanford to do a flea market online. Crazy!

Sramana: In the mid-1990s there was plenty of VC money available to do experimental stuff. DoubleClick got funded and the market started to show attraction.

Kevin O’Connor: In the early days people thought we were crazy. We were totally wrong. The Internet became bigger than any of us could envision. Nobody thought it would get this big.

Sramana: When did you leave DoubleClick?

Kevin O’Connor: We sold it in 2005.

Sramana: When did you go public?

Kevin O’Connor: We went public in 1998. We sold it to Hellman Friedman in 2005, and they sold it to Google in 2008. I was there through 2005.

Sramana: At this point, in 2005, you are fabulously wealthy and have had great success from DoubleClick. What happened next?

Kevin O’Connor: We moved to Santa Barbara in 2001 and I really focused on Venture Capital. I invested in startups. My passion and talents involve coming up with new ideas and building them. Venture capital gave me a chance to do that and I did that for seven years.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Internet Advertising Pioneer: Kevin O'Connor, Founder of DoubleClick and FindTheBest
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