The moment I remember best from the portal race came from Jim Gilliam, who worked for me at Lycos. He was a rock star engineer, and he was also a rock star product manager. That combination is rare. Jim could do both, and he could do them fast.
We were watching our search logs, and one category was exploding. Music. People were searching for MP3 files everywhere. One day Jim came flying into my office. “Rob, we need to build an MP3 search engine. I think I can do it.” I said go.
He brought a sleeping bag in and camped out in his cube all weekend. He built an MP3 search engine on the back of our crawler and our search horsepower. You could type the name of a song and find the file immediately. The traffic was enormous. MP3 search became the second most popular service on Lycos. No other major search engine had anything like it.
It was so powerful that the music industry came after us. Hilary Rosen, who ran the Recording Industry Association of America, sent us a cease and desist letter directly. We took it down.
Two lessons from one weekend.
The first is what a tornado rewards. Jim did not write a requirements document. He saw a wave forming in the data and shipped something in two days that rode it. When you have someone like Jim, your job is to say go and get out of the way.
In a tornado, the person who ships the good version on Monday beats the team still planning the perfect version in June.
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
The second is what a tornado collides with. Every platform shift moves through infrastructure, consolidation, regulation and scale. Our MP3 search engine ran straight into the regulation stage before the rules were written. The law had not caught up, and the people being disrupted were not going to wait. Speed got us there first. It also got us there before anyone knew what was allowed.
Both lessons are true at once. Speed is life. And speed without judgment about where the arc is heading can carry you straight into a wall. AI is meeting the same wall. In December 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over training on its articles.
Jim.
Jim did not stay long at Lycos. He became chief technology officer of business.com, co-founded Brave New Films with Robert Greenwald, founded NationBuilder for organizers and wrote The Internet Is My Religion. Jim died in 2018. He was the best example I ever had of what one person with a sleeping bag and a clear idea can do.
Put it to work.
- Say goName the person who could ship the good version by Monday. Remove one approval in their way.
- Find the wall before you hit itWrite whose business your product disrupts and whether its rules are written yet.
- Decide before the letter arrivesIf the rules are unwritten, decide now what you will do when someone objects.
Quick answers.
Did Lycos have an MP3 search engine?
Yes. Rob Frasca writes in The Creator’s Journey that Lycos engineer Jim Gilliam built an MP3 search engine over a weekend on the Lycos crawler. It became the second most popular service on Lycos until the Recording Industry Association of America, led by Hilary Rosen, sent a cease and desist letter and Lycos took it down.
What lessons does Rob Frasca draw from the Lycos MP3 search story?
Two. A tornado market rewards the person who ships the good version fast. And speed can carry a product into the regulation stage of a platform shift before the rules are written.
Sources.
- Rob Frasca, The Creator’s Journey (forthcoming), Chapter VII, Execution Under Fire.
- Reid Hoffman, widely quoted line on launching early, as cited by swissmiss (April 22, 2012). Secondary source; Hoffman restated the line in a 2017 LinkedIn essay that could not be fetched for verification. Source
- The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation and OpenAI, filed December 27, 2023, as reported by Engadget. Source