Lycos

Wait, turned down by who?

Three of the biggest names of that entire era: Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos, the companies that basically were the front page of the internet at the time.

All three looked at the actual search technology and passed because their whole strategy was becoming a portal, get you to land on their homepage and stay there, clicking around news and email and horoscopes, not send you somewhere else as fast as possible with the right answer.

A great search engine was, in their own business logic, actively bad for a portal.

He had left behind him in the cities of Greece governments favourable to him but populations resolutely hostile.

the long tradition of a free and once imperial athens made subjection even to a brilliant world-conquering despot intolerable and the bitter eloquence of demosthenes kept the assembly always on the edge of revolt against the macedonian party that held the reins of city power now when aristotle after another period of travel returned to athens in the year three thirty four b c he very naturally associated with this macedonian group and took no pains to conceal his approval of alexander's unifying rule as we study the remarkable succession of works in speculation and research which aristotle proceeded to unfold in the last twelve years of his life and as we watch him in his multifold tasks of organising his school and of organising such a wealth of knowledge as probably never before had passed through the mind of one man let us occasionally remember that this was no quiet and secure pursuit of truth that at any minute the political sky might change and precipitate a storm in this peaceful philosophic life only with this situation in mind shall we understand aristotle's political philosophy and his tragic end chapter one chapter two the work of aristotle it was not hard for the instructor of the king of kings to find pupils even in so hostile a city as athens when in the fifty-third year of his age aristotle established his school the lyceum so many students flocked to him that it became necessary to make complicated regulations for the maintenance of order the students themselves determined the rules and elected every ten days one of their number to supervise the school but we must not think of it as a place of rigid discipline rather the picture which comes down to us is of scholars eating their meals in common with the master and learning from him as he and they strolled up and down the walk along the athletic field from which the lyceum took its name footnote the walk was called paripatos hence the later name peripatetic school the athletic field was part of the grounds of the temple of apollo lysias the protector of the flock against the wolf lycos the new school was no mere replica of that which plato had left behind him the academy was devoted above all to mathematics and to speculative and political philosophy the lyceum had rather a tendency to biology and the natural sciences If we may believe Pliny, Alexander instructed his hunters, gamekeepers, gardeners, and fishermen to furnish Aristotle with all the zoological and botanical material he might desire.

Other ancient writers tell us that at one time he had at his disposal a thousand men scattered throughout Greece and Asia, collecting for him specimens of the fauna and flora of every land.

with this wealth of material he was enabled to establish the first great zoological garden that the world had seen we can hardly exaggerate the influence of this collection upon his science and his philosophy Where did Aristotle derive the funds to finance these undertakings? He was himself by this time a man of spacious income, and he had married into the fortune of one of the most powerful public men in Greece.

It's not a repeating number.

And you look at David I, the founder of Lycos and had the largest internet business station in the world and he invited me on there and, uh, I was on for years and sent me a letter.

Look at the letter.

10 million unique listeners.

Why do I believe them? First of all, I think that the magic of sort of the digital media landscape has been the learning curve, right? Just think back to all your early adventures.

I think back to my early days of Yahoo and Lycos and the beginning of Google.

And the magic of this industry is that everything's new and everything's rapidly changing.

I still miss flash banners.

It's picking which specific company is going to win while you're standing inside the bubble.

If you cast your mind back to the late 90s and you're convinced the internet is the future and you're right about that and you started looking for a company that will own internet search, The obvious choice at the time might have been Infoseek or Lycos or AltaVista or Excite, the biggest, best-funded search leaders that had become household names.

Every one of them is now a trivia question.

The company that eventually won, Google, barely existed during the bubble and only came to prominence in the early 2000s, after the bubble had burst.

Like who?

Think of Lycos in the early days of search.

Or Friendster and Myspace in social media.

The first mover often absorbs the massive financial burden of mapping all the dead ends.

And so we'll have to see what happens on the other side of this.

But my belief is that, yeah, you're going to have some, one of the large players, right? And if you think about the internet era, I would have never guessed AOL would not have thrived or Yahoo, or you can pick, you know, Lycos or Netscape.

Like these are all public companies that don't exist.

So when I look at today, Just because ChatGPT is what started all this doesn't mean that OpenAI is going to be ultimately the biggest winner.

Jeeves.

I'm a Lycos dude.

You Jeeves.

Axe Jeeves.