Elon Musk on building his first startup Zip2

Zip2, a California company that provides online access to information about cities around the country. Everything from where to eat to how to get around. The company's chief engineer and founder is 27 year old Elon Musk. And how old were you when you started this company or what became this company? 23. It's a classic Silicon Valley story. Before there was the vintage Jaguar, the six figure salary, the cute dog, and the nice house to share with the pretty girlfriend, There was the $200 a month office with the leaky roof. It was just the nastiest place you can imagine. And you lived in it too. And I lived in it too, and showered at the ymca. Take us back to when you really started with all of this. Well, that was the summer of 95. I had no money whatsoever. I was working, doing research in Silicon Valley on a completely different subject and trying to start this company at the same time. And when it came time to decide do I want to do graduate studies or do I want to start this company, and I decided to start the company, I had no money as a graduate student, I would have received a scholarship and a stipend and so forth in starting the company. I had nothing, I had no income source. So we found that an office was actually cheaper than an apartment in Silicon Valley. So we got this dinky little office that had a leaky roof. It was just the nastiest place you can imagine. And you lived in it too. And I lived in it too, and showered at the ymca. This lasted for about three or four months. And the reason we chose this office, in addition to it being really cheap, was that there was an Internet service provider on the floor below. So we were able to get really cheap Internet access by drilling a hole in the floor and connecting to their server directly. This industry is so young and we don't really know where it's going. But what do you see as the future of the Internet? I think the Internet is the superset of all media. It is the be all and end all of media. One will see print, broadcast, arguably radio, essentially all media folding into the Internet. And what the Internet amounts to is it's the first two way communication medium that is intelligent. It allows consumers to choose what they want to see, when they want to see it, and whether that be radio, whether that be print, whether that be television broadcast, I think it's going to revolutionize all traditional media. Now Musk has his own computer command center and his business is thriving. To his delight, Microsoft has tried and so far failed to get a hold in Zip2's market. You always keep an eye on him, though.