Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

actually made the conscious decision to, rather than put together a 5-year business plan, put together my basic thoughts on strategy and manage the company quarter to quarter. Turn quickly if things have to change, but manage it that way.

One of our take-aways from that was that you can almost always take a negative situation and turn it to your advantage if you work hard at it. We took something that was a very negative potential situation and made some real friends. Anytime we had a client situation that blew up—and those happen in the business, things go wrong—we would always say

It's just really freeing not to be . . . 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 think

I don't spend that much money because once you get used to spending money, it's very hard to get unused to. Happiness is reality compared to expectations. If I have low expectations for material things in my life, then I'll be happy. If I get used to fancy meals all the time, not only will it ruin McDonald's for me, but even the fancy food would be

At the earlier stages of the company, when you're actually out trying to get some customers, do whatever the hell the customer wants. If they're going to pay you, the customer is right. Because you need that initial money. You need that customer on the list to go get the next one. If you have to give away whatever you're doing, give it away. Get th

Tip number two: you can't get too attached to your vision in a startup, because things may change. It's not a sign of failure to change your vision. I remember in a previous company, we wanted to be this, but we were offered a consulting contract to do this, that, and the other thing, and, yeah, that wasn't in the plan, but we'll take that, because

Livingston: Are there any lessons that you learned in the Firefox days that you are applying to this new startup? Ross: One is to make sure you are always in communication with the people who are eventually going to use your product. It's very easy to just lock yourself in a room and code all day, and you forget what the real problems are that peop

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

We knew, even then, having watched how Data General financed itself, that you wanted to generate two things when you're looking for money. One is a sense of exclusivity, saying, "This is a very special kind of deal and not everybody is going to get into it." And secondly, a sense of urgency, so you can get people to make a decision.