3. 1 Max Levchin, Co-Founder
PayPal
• Quotes
– They have totally changed the starting
idea
• But between the founding and the actual
PayPal, it was just this tug-of-war where it
was like, “We‟re trying this, this week.”
Every week you go to investors and say,
“We‟re doing this, exactly this. We‟re really
focused. We‟re going to be huge.” The next
week you‟re like, “That was a lie.”
3
4. 2 Sabeer
Bhatia, Cofounder, Hotmail
• creative definition of a business plan
– A business plan is nothing more than
your own communication to a person
not sitting in front of you-an imaginary
person who will read it. Try to answer
every possible question that that person
could raise. That‟s the description of a
business plan, really.
4
5. 3 Steve
Wozniak, Cofounder, Apple
•
Computer
very generous founder, purely technical guy
– “Rather than sell it to somebody who‟s already got a lot of
money, why don‟t I give the Apple employees the opportunity?”
We were going to go public soon and it was going to be worth a lot
more (and was eventually), so basically I sold it to 40 Apple
employees. Our legal department was very concerned because
they were supposed to be sophisticated investors. They finally
gave me the OK. I did the deal and sold it to them, and they each
pretty much got a house out of it.
5
6. 4 Joe
Kraus, Cofounder, Excite
• there were 5 Stanford classmates, who started the company. Very
vivid case of starting with friends attitude
– We originally had the company divided evenly: everybody had a sixth.
When investor came in...Graham and I went and had meeting with the
whole team and said" we think we need to redistribute equity in a way
that isn't even"...I don't remember the specifics of conversation. I
remember it being very awkward and I remember it being quiet...I
think you you need something stronger than greed pulling people
together at that moment when greed alone would have caused huge
fractures in redistributing.
6
7. 4 Joe Kraus, Cofounder,
Excite (2)
• about success
– Some famous person said, “Success is
50 percent luck and 50 percent
preparedness for that luck.” I think
that‟s a lot of it. It‟s being ready to take
advantage of opportunities when they
arise.
7
8. 5 Dan
Briclin, Cofounder, Software
Arts (producer of Visicalc)
• You can fail big just one step from the huge success
– We had been approached by H&R Block to buy our
company for, I think, $50 million in cash, plus stock. It
was based on the numbers we had. It was kind of
bogus, but whatever. They had a division called
CompuServe, and we were going to be bought by
CompuServe. We had board approval from both sides.
We got sued a day or two before the deal was
consummated.
8
9. 6 Mitchell
Kapor, CoFounder, Lotus
•
Development
Kapor was a VisiCalc product manager at Personal Software when
he wrote VisiPlot and VisiTrend, companion products to VisiCalc.
He left to found Lotus just as legal conflicts were distracting
VisiCalc’s developers, and the arrival of the IBM PC opened a
window of opportunity for a better spreadsheet.
– In the 60s where I came of age, business was not a cool thing. We
were all counterculture people with long hair and sex, drugs, and
rock'n'roll. It was 60s; I have the pictures to prove it. I don't
remember any to if, but as someone said, if you can remember the
6os, then you weren't there. But it turned out I also have some
entrepreneural talent
9
10. 7 Ray Ozzie, Founder, Iris
Associates
• about technical founders
– Understand that it‟s a rare, rare case when a
tech entrepreneur is the right one to lead a
startup for a long period of time. You have to
feel comfortable in your own skin in terms of
what you‟re good at and what other people are
good at. Know when the shift to chief
technologist is the right thing for the company.
10
11. 8 Evan Williams, Cofounder,
Pyra Labs (Blogger.com)
• This story was the one of the best for me ! In 2011, after dot com
crisis Pyra seemed near death. Williams remained as the only
employee and managed to bring the company back from the brick.
By 2003 Blogger had 1 million registered users. That attracted the
attention of Google, who made Pyra the first acquisition
– After my first company died, I did an inventory of the projects I had
worked on in the last year. There were something like 30 projects that
I had started on and not finished. Pyra was working on some big
thing, but it appeared that real blockbuster was Blogger, a side project
with little attention at the beginning
11
12. 8 Evan
Williams, Cofounder, Pyra
•
Labs era
dot com
(Blogger.com) (2)
– At that time it was pretty much the belief
that, if you have buzz and you have
users, you can raise more money
– 2011 - Everybody left, and the next day, I
was the only one who came in the office.
• Simplicity
– How far you can get on a simple idea is
amazing. I have a tendency to add more
and more-the ideas always get too big to
implement before they even get off the
ground. Simplicity is powerful.
12
13. 9 Tim Brady, First Non-
founding Employee, Yahoo
• Livingston: Any advice you’d give to someone who was starting a
startup?
– Brady: Part of it is “know yourself.” Try to do as much thinking up front
as to what your breaking points are. One of the things I think I did
well was that I never spent any time thinking about quitting or any of
these doomsday scenarios, “Oh, God, what if this doesn‟t happen.”
Before I joined, I knew where the line was, when I would quit, at what
point, and so when I was in the game, it never crossed my mind. I
also knew why I was involved, what motivated me, and I didn‟t spend
a lot of time perse-verating on that stuff.
13
14. 10 Mike Lazaridis,
Cofounder, Research in
Motion, Canada
• investment in talent
– One of the things I realized was that to get strong co-op
students, you had to start early because, by the second
year, you‟ve lost them already to some other company. So we
started hiring first- and second-year students, knowing that they
were not really going to be full-time employees for 3 to 4 years
after that. It was a 3- to 4-year investment we started making
with students early on because I knew their value. We treated
them like full-time employees. We‟re the largest co-op employer in
Canada.
14
15. 11 Arthur van Hoff,
Cofounder, Marimba
• business plan
– We exceeded our own expectations in the end. But
a business plan is a tool that you use to sell the
idea to VCs. The VCs look at it and say, “There‟re
no spelling mistakes and the math seems right. But
I like the people so let‟s invest.” A lot of the
decision-making is very emotional. There‟s no
formula that identifies good business plans versus
bad business plans.
15
16. 11 Arthur van
Hoff, Cofounder, Marimba
• (2)
about motivation to join startup
– Everybody that joins a startup hopes to get rich.
They also do it because it‟s fun, but you‟re taking a
bet on winning a lot of money. But the odds are
skewed against you because not a lot of startups
actually succeed in fulfilling that bet.
• about taking something, when leaving a
big company
– The funny thing is that they won‟t sue you until
you‟re successful, because why sue someone who
is a failure? And this is particularly important if you
start out at a big company like Google or
Amazon, because they have a lot of time and
money to spend on these kinds of things.
16
17. 12 Paul Buchheit
Creator, Gmail Paul Buchheit
was Google‟s 23rd
• employee.
about changes
– think, in general, people are uncomfortable with things that are different. Even now
when I talk about adding new features to Gmail, if it isn‟t just a small variation or
rearranging what‟s already there, people don‟t like it. People have a narrow concept of
what‟s possible, and we‟re limited more by our own ideas about what‟s possible than
what really is possible. So they just get uncomfortable, and they kind of tend to attack
it for whatever reason. But for me, I am more interested in things that are new, and so
I‟m always excited just to see what will happen. That was actually one of the biggest
reasons I joined Google in the first place.
17
18. 13 Steve Perlman
Cofounder, WebTV
• what it means to work hard
– What I would typically do is not sleep for 2 nights; then
I would get 4 hours of sleep and go back to work for
another 2 days in a row, and then get 4 hours, and so
on. It was the hardest I‟ve ever worked in my life.
Sometimes I‟d take 10-minute cat naps by just laying
my head down on my shoulders-just so I‟d get some
REMs. As soon as the dreams come, it resets your brain
a little bit and you‟re able to work again. We were
sleeping at our desks.
18
19. 13 Steve Perlman
Cofounder, WebTV (2)
• true personal commitment
– Though we were quite frugal, it still was a high cash burn. We were just about
out of money. So I mortgaged my house, liquidated all my assets, and brought
in all the cash I could to help it.
• power of testing
– a story told to me by the Mac team-but they said that, when they first did the
dialog boxes for the Lisa, instead of saying “OK,” it said, “Do It.” They found that
people were reluctant to click on that, and they couldn‟t figure out why.
Then, once they had a test subject there who just wouldn‟t click on it, they
said, “Why didn‟t you click on that little button there?” He said, “I‟m not a dolt.
Why would I click on that?” People were reading it as “dolt,” not “do it,” because
it was an unusual combination of words. So they changed dialog boxes to say
“OK.” That little change greased the skids for people to click on dialog boxes. It‟s
very small stuff like that, very often-that somebody sees something and has the
wrong impression. The only way to learn that is by doing a lot of testing.
19
20. 13 Steve Perlman
Cofounder, WebTV (3)
• Livingston: What has the potential to go most wrong in the first year when a
startup is such a fragile organization?
– Perlman: The worst thing that can happen to a startup is if the founding team-or the
people who are leading the thing-do not get along. And it‟s deadly when they don‟t get
along in front of the troops.
• A synchronized view of the world doesn‟t mean you don‟t argue about things, that
you don‟t have disagreements. You must agree on the philosophy, though, and on
the vision. There are many ways to get there, but if you can‟t agree on the
vision, then obviously you‟re never going to agree on how to execute.
20
21. 14 Mike Ramsay
Cofounder,TiVo
• success of the media product
– I‟m not sure if people still get today that the combination of the
technology development and the getting to market of a
product, the development of a channel and the marketing and the
brand building of that product, the management of the media
companies and their desire to destroy you, and the management
of this highly competitive situation every step of the way, where
you had to win every day in the marketplace and worry about
intellectual property
21
22. 15 Paul Graham
Cofounder,Viaweb
• finding the market
– Graham: Before Viaweb we had a startup called
Artix. We were going to put art galleries online. The
problem was, art galleries didn‟t want to be online.
They still don‟t want to be online. We spent a long
time trying to convince these people to use
something they didn‟t want before we had the idea
that maybe we should make something people
actually did want.
22
23. 15 Paul Graham
Cofounder,Viaweb (2)
• Livingston: Tell me a little about your relationships with your first
customers.
– Graham: We felt like we had to have five or six customers to launch.
And for these first customers, we basically would do whatever they
said in order to get them as customers. We gave them the software for
free for as long as they wanted. We built their sites ourselves. If they
needed to have images in them, we would scan the images. We were
basically web consultants, because we needed users; you can‟t launch
a thing like this without having any users.
23
24. 15 Paul Graham
Cofounder,Viaweb (3)
• difference in valuation
– But they still wanted to buy us after that, so we arranged to have a
meeting at Julian‟s loft in New York. One of our investors was a metals
trader, so we figured that he must be a great negotiator and we‟d let
him handle it. The guys from the big company said, “We want to buy
you for $3 million.” And he said, “Well, I won‟t sell you the company
for $3 million, but for $1 million, I‟ll sell you an option to buy the
company in 6 months for $20 million.” At that point the guys from the
big company just got up and walked out.
24
25. 15 Paul Graham
Cofounder,Viaweb (4)
• hiring CEO
– It was such a relief to have someone who would deal with the
investors, so that we could just write software and make users happy.
That‟s all we wanted to do.
• making yourself look better
– If anybody ever did want to come and visit us, we pulled all kinds of
tricks to make ourselves seem more legit. When that first giant
company wanted to buy us and sent people over to check us out, all
we had in our so-called office was one computer. Robert and Trevor
mostly worked at home or at school. So we borrowed a few more
computers and stuck them on desks, so it would look like there was
more going on.
25
26. 15 Paul Graham
Cofounder,Viaweb (5)
• acquisition
– So many companies play hard-ball in acquisitions. It‟s so
stupid. Don‟t they realize that the people they‟re trying to
squeeze are going to have to work for them afterward?
Yahoo was very upstanding about the deal.
• the point where people say, “We want to buy you,” the
chances of it falling through are like 80 or 90 percent.
So you can‟t let yourself believe. If someone wants to
make you an offer, fine, but don‟t change your plans
based on that. Just keep going.
26
27. 16 Joshua Schachter
Founder, del.icio.us
• Livingston: What were some of the biggest
technical problems that you encountered?
– Schachter: Scaling, inevitably. Scaling, dealing with
bandwidth, dealing with routing, networks. This is
for consumer Internet kind of stuff, but there‟s a
great deal of stuff that you have to flawlessly
execute on. It has to be done well, but everybody
does it well, so it doesn‟t differentiate at all.
27
28. 16 Joshua Schachter
Founder, del.icio.us (2)
• marketing and PR
– When this stuff started happening, I knew that you have
x messages and when you talk to the press, any
question they ask is answered with one of the
messages. I understand talking to the press as an
essential part of marketing. At the same time, I
understand that the consumers are the best marketers.
If they love your product and you give them the tools to
market it, they will.
28
29. 17 Mark Fletcher
Founder, ONElist, Bloglines
• Livingston: So Bloglines was something that you created for
yourself to use and then backed into doing a startup around it?
– Fletcher: I had an inkling that it could be interesting, but I guess I
thought it was a little ahead of the curve. I started ONElist because I
wanted to start a mailing list for my parents, and at that time you had
to download software and you had to have a computer connected to
the Internet. It was just really difficult for an average person to put
together a mailing list. So it was the same thing. I guess my advice is:
solve a problem that you have, first and foremost, and chances
are, other people may have the same problem.
29
30. 17 Mark Fletcher Founder,
ONElist, Bloglines (2)
• Livingston: When you were developing Bloglines, were you
following a purposeful plan or were you just like, “Let’s build this
product and see what happens.
– Fletcher: My philosophy on these types of companies-consumer-based
Internet companies-is that you don‟t need to worry about the business
model initially. If you get users, then everything else follows. Basically
any technology can be copied, any concept can be copied. In my
opinion, what makes one of these companies valuable is the users.
That can‟t be copied.
30
31. 17 Mark Fletcher Founder,
ONElist, Bloglines (3)
• time to sell
– my PR person saying, “So it‟s been 2 weeks since we‟ve been in
the Wall Street Journal. When are we going to be in again?” And
she said, “Don‟t you dare expect this kind of stuff forever.” So you
have to figure out when is the right time to sell, what you want
out of an acquisition-both in terms of money and whether you
want to stay on. Would you be happy with somebody else running
the company? It‟s a very personal decision. And there are better
times to sell than others.
31
32. 18 Craig Newmark
Founder, craigslist
• being non-profit
– “Hey, let‟s run craigslist and see if we can run
a nonprofit.” To make a long, painful story
short, that effort failed. I kind of knew it was
failing, probably mid-way through 1998, but I
was in denial. A couple of our biggest job
posters took me out for lunch and
said, “Hey, this isn‟t working. Get real and
make this more serious.”
32
33. 19 Caterina Fake
Cofounder, Flickr
• out of office work
– There are a lot of companies that are virtual companies-a bunch of
people that are living in different places, but I think that‟s tough. You
can do it with one or two people, but I think for the most
part, everybody being in the same place is important.
• success
– Livingston: What surprised you most? Fake: The whole thing has been
a surprise. We started out expecting to do the game and we ended up
doing a photo-sharing site. We never expected that, could not have
planned that. Catarina Fake The success that Flickr has seen has been
a huge surprise. Obviously when you start a business you hope and
pray that it will be successful, but I think it‟s also something of a
surprise when it actually happens.
33
34. 20 Brewster Kahle Founder,
WAIS, Internet Archive,
Alexa Internet
• Livingston: Tell me about some of the most hair-raising moments.
– Kahle: Going broke. When you just don‟t have enough money to pay
the bills. We would usually live with the amount of money in the bank
that would be about 2 to 4 weeks worth of the bills. We‟d never have
more than that. If we got up to 2 or 3 months, we would think of
ourselves as being flush. Living a bootstrap in a non-market-we‟re
trying to make a market go based on making servers in a client/server
publishing environment based on the Internet, that people didn‟t
understand. So it was very difficult, but it was a good disciplining time.
34
35. 21 Charles Geschke
Cofounder, Adobe Systems
• predicting the market
– I am not a hunter, never have fired a gun, but I‟m told that if you want
to shoot a duck, you have to shoot where the duck is going to be, not
where the duck is. It‟s the same with introducing technology: if you‟re
only focused on the market today, by the time you introduce your
solution to that problem, there‟ll probably be several others already
entrenched. It will be hard to dislodge them, and hard to convince
people that what you have is so much better that they should make a
change. Much better to figure out where the marketplace is going to
be in a few years, focus on providing a solution to that, and let the
market forces catch up to you.
35
36. 21 Charles Geschke
Cofounder, Adobe Systems
(2)
• individual approach
– I remember, when we first hired people in the original
days, John and I would take turns hand-delivering a
dozen roses to the spouse if it was woman, a bottle of
cognac if the spouse was a man, and then champagne to
the employee. We did that for the first 18 months and
then it got to be too much and we started giving it to
them at work. I suspect we don‟t do that anymore.
36
37. 22 Ann Winblad
Cofounder, Open
Systems, Hummer Winblad
• recommendations
– Whenever I‟m going to join a board, I
will ask people for personal references.
Your friends, your business
colleagues, whatever. I‟ll address these
references as these are not going to
make or break this deal, but I want to
understand this person. How do they
work, how do they think?
37
38. 23 David Heinemeier Hansson Partner, 37signals
David Heinemeier Hansson helped transform
37signals from a consulting company to a product
company in early 2004.
• Livingston: What were the features that people liked most when
they saw it?
– Heinemeier Hansson: The funny thing is that most people were
impressed by all the stuff Basecamp didn‟t do. They were used to
these big, honking products that tried to do everything, where they
just needed something simple.
• building the audience
– Since they were already reading about what 37signals was doing, we
went the other way around: first we built the audience and then we
figured out a product. We blogged about Basecamp even before its
launch, making previews, and it was viral from there. So it helped that
37signals had a big audience and had an easy way of selling into that
audience.
38
39. 23 David Heinemeier Hansson Partner,
37signals David Heinemeier Hansson helped
transform 37signals from a consulting
company to a product company in early
2004. (2)
• Livingston: So, much of your innovation was driven by your own
needs, rather than your clients’ requests?
– Heinemeier Hansson: Very much so. It‟s good to be market-driven in
the sense that you should know what‟s going on, but you can‟t let your
customers drive your product development. You need to be able to
innovate on behalf of your customers, but they often don‟t know what
they want. And it‟s the same thing for programmers. If you went
around and asked them what they wanted in a framework, you
wouldn‟t get a good product out of that. You need to be able to source
input from a lot of sources, and then have your vision of what it‟s
going to be and then drive that.
39
40. 23 David Heinemeier Hansson
Partner, 37signals David Heinemeier
Hansson helped transform 37signals from a
consulting company to a product company
in early 2004. (3)
• out of office work
– Livingston: Was it challenging having several of the 37signals
team in different places? Heinemeier Hansson: We view it as
advantageous actually, because the 7-hour time difference leads
to “alone” time. In a company where everyone is in the same
place, it‟s very easy to walk down the hall and interrupt
somebody. If you‟re part of a distributed team that‟s 7 hours
off, you‟re bound to have a good portion of the day where you just
get work done. There are no interruptions.
40
41. 24 Philip Greenspun
Cofounder, ArsDigita
• justifying outsource
– Greenspun: People used to say, “Why should we pay you guys
$30,000 to $50,000 a month to do this thing, when we can just hire
our own programmer?” What I would tell them is, “Each company has
one class of stars. In some companies maybe it‟s the salespeople, and
in some companies maybe it‟s the mechanical engineers. There‟s going
to be one class of people for whom it‟s really easy to hire more people
like that.” Hospitals are a good example. If it‟s a good hospital, the
doctors will be good, and it‟s very easy for them to hire good doctors.
But it‟s hard for them to hire any other kind of person. Hospitals don‟t
have really good advertising people; those people want to work on
Madison Avenue. So we would say, “You‟re a very capable person, and
you‟re going to have a very easy time hiring people like yourself. We
don‟t know your business and we‟d have a hard time hiring someone
like you, but we have a very easy time hiring someone like me, who‟s
an MIT-trained computer science nerd. It‟s cheaper for you to use
us, because we have really great programmers, and great
programmers are a lot cheaper than mediocre programmers. So even
if you give us a profit margin, it‟s still cheaper than doing it internally.”
41
42. 24 Philip Greenspun
Cofounder, ArsDigita (2)
• what programmers he wants
– I want them to be able to sit at the table with decision-
makers and be real engineers-to be able to sit with the
publisher of an online community or an e-commerce site
and say, „OK, I‟ve looked at your business and your
goals; here are some ideas that we can bring in from
these 10 other sites that I built, these 100 other sites
that I‟ve used.‟ And be an equal partner in the
design, not just a coder.”
42
43. 24 Philip Greenspun
Cofounder, ArsDigita (3)
• growth
– There were some warning signs. Consider McKinsey, which holds itself
out as one of the world‟s leading repositories of knowledge on how to
manage a business. They say they‟ll never grow their company by
more than 25 percent per year, because otherwise it‟s just too hard to
transmit the corporate culture. So if you‟re growing faster than 25
percent a year, you have to ask yourself, “What do I know about
management that McKinsey doesn‟t know?”
• Livingston: If there was one thing you could have done
differently, what would it have been?
– Greenspun: The one thing would probably have been slightly
slower growth, I guess. Not to worry so much about the
competition, concentrate on getting really good people who
shared the company‟s vision, who could be mentored to the
point where they could then recruit somebody else.
Basically, just limiting growth.
43
44. 25 Joel Spolsky
Cofounder, Fog Creek
• consulting and software
– Spolsky: Absolutely. Remember, the original model
was, “How can we become a big consulting company
and then build a software company inside a consulting
company?” The consulting company was a means to an
end. It was to get cash flow, so that you could build a
real software company. And when you were done, the
theory was you‟d still have these consultants, but
software companies often need consulting arms.
44
45. 25 Joel Spolsky
Cofounder, Fog Creek (2)
• coupons in software marketing
– automatic email with a 25 percent-off
coupon that you have to use in the next
72 hours.) When we launched that, it
did increase our sales a little bit. It gets
people to evaluate the demo version
right away-because they don‟t want to
lose their 25 percent off coupon which is
going to expire.
45
46. 26 Stephen Kaufer
Cofounder,TripAdvisor
• looking for a business model
– After a year and a half, we had closed one licensing
deal, with Lycos, where they were featuring our content
on their travel portal, and we were getting a revenue
share on what they made selling advertising on the
pages that we produced for them. Everyone else
basically wanted to be paid to feature our content, and
we wanted to get paid to have our content featured. So
there was a pretty big disconnect.
46
47. 26 Stephen Kaufer
Cofounder,TripAdvisor (2)
• failure
– You just want the failure to cost you a couple of weeks, a month or
two-it depends on the industry-a small, fixed cost. It‟s the old adage:
if we‟re not failing at something on a regular basis, we‟re just not
trying hard enough.
• hiring right people
– But if I ever start another company again, I‟d love to have as a
founding or very early team member someone who was a trusted
recruiter. Because the difference in almost any position between
someone who does a good job and someone who does a great job
might be 20 percent more in salary, but it‟s 100 or 200 percent more
in throughput.
47
48. 27 James Hong
Cofounder, HOT or NOT
• growth
– We were panicking at this point. There was no plan
for a business, it was just, “How the fuck do we
keep this thing going?” We weren‟t trying to figure
out what kind of boat we needed to build, we were
trying to keep from drown-ing. But we did know a
few things: we had to reduce our costs, we had to
make it make money somehow, and we needed
more machines.
48
49. 28 James Currier
Founder,Tickle
• Livingston: Which spark point would you consider most significant
for Tickle?
– Currier: The launching of the dog test. When we started the
company, we wanted to change the world, and we had all these tests
on the site to help people in their lives. We had the anxiety test; the
parenting, relationship, and communication tests. And no one came. I
remembered that advertising agencies say if you want people to
remember an ad, include babies and puppies. So I thought, “We
should make a fun test. Let‟s do a test for what kind of breed of dog
are you.” So they came up with a 15-question test that wasn‟t
scientific at all. We put it online, and 8 days later we had a million
people trying to enter our site.
49
50. 28 James Currier
Founder,Tickle (2)
• Livingston: What was most surprising to you about
starting a startup?
– Currier: How painful it was. I woke up on October
3, 1999, at around 4 a.m. with my chest burning from
fear and pain about not knowing what to do, and
worrying that I had taken my friends‟ and mentors‟
money. I had realized that what I was trying to do was
not working, and that I didn‟t know how to fix it and I
was in way over my head.
50
51. 29 Blake Ross Creator,
Firefox
• attitude
– We weren‟t trying to strike it rich with Firefox. It‟s open
source and it‟s free. We weren‟t trying to take over the
world; we had kind of modest goals, and it was OK if it
failed. We were a lot freer to make risky decisions. If
you can afford to do things that way, it‟s just so much
better. You‟re not thinking about venture capitalists or
marketing or sales. Just product and users, all day every
day.
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52. 29 Blake Ross
Creator, Firefox (2)
• marketing of software
– Ross: I thought marketing was
something that required a degree and
formal experience. It turns out that
marketing is just making the product
good enough that people spread it on
their own, and giving them ways to do
that. It‟s a lot easier and more natural
than I thought it would be.
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53. 30 Mena Trott
Cofounder, Six Apart
• office
– Having an office made a difference. Working out of the home is the
hardest thing to do, because you can never leave work.
• don't be afraid to charge
– That‟s some advice for people: don‟t apologize for wanting to be a
company. You see so many people who say, “Oh, we won‟t charge;
things should be free.” It‟s like you don‟t think you‟re worth being paid
for your time. I feel even more strongly about this when it‟s an entire
company rather than just me and Ben. We can be kind of the fools
that will work for free, but I‟m not going to make other people suffer
for that.
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54. 31 Bob Davis Founder, Lycos
• growth
– In a growth business-which is where you always want to be as an
entrepreneur, because it‟s a lot more fun than the alternative-things
are breaking every day. The accounting system that I used in ‟95 was
useless in ‟98. The systems and the computers that I used weren‟t
powerful enough 12 months later. The facilities that we would lease
weren‟t big enough. The data center wasn‟t powerful enough to
manage the computers we needed. Everything would crumble, and
you needed to be one step ahead of that all the time. So amazing
growth was a challenge, but it was an awful lot of fun.
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55. 32 Ron Gruner Cofounder, Alliant Computer
Systems; Founder, Shareholder.com
• living dead
– One of the things that I think is dogma within venture capital is that you
don‟t want to manage what they call the “living dead.” I don‟t know what
the numbers are now, but back when I was working with venture
capitalists, their rules of thumb were: typically one out of ten companies is
a really big hit; roughly three out of ten go belly up pretty quickly, and you
get rid of them. The other five to six are what they call the “living dead.”
They grow nicely, organically, but don‟t generate spectacular returns, and
they take management time and energy.
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56. 32 Ron Gruner Cofounder, Alliant Computer
Systems; Founder, Shareholder.com (2)
• about dealing with investors
– The second thing was, having been chief executive at Alliant for 10
years, about halfway through that process I realized, “As the boss, I‟m
spending 40 percent of my time on things that don‟t directly contribute
to getting computers out to customers.” In other words, raising
money, dealing with investors, dealing with lawyers, those kinds of
issues. So I said, “In the next company I do, I want to be able to
spend 98 percent of my time focused on the customer and only 2
percent on secondary factors that lead to that.”
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57. 32 Ron Gruner Cofounder, Alliant Computer
Systems; Founder, Shareholder.com (3)
• advantage of no VC in capital
– At the time, I owned about two-thirds of the
company, and I felt that just makes life so
much simpler, particularly for me. But I think
for everybody else, too, because we would sit
in a conference room, talk about
something, make a decision, and be going. We
could make important strategic decisions in an
afternoon if we chose to.
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