Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

Livingston: You must have been displeased with your investors for doing that to you. Graham: Well, everybody ended up rich, so it's hard to be too displeased. I'd rather have an investor who invested in us and made our lives hell than one who didn't invest in us at all, which is what most investors do to most startups. I mean, we needed their money

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Another thing is that luck comes in many forms—and often looks bad at first. I always look back on the deals that we didn't do and the things that didn't work out, and realize what seemed like a bummer at the time was really lucky. Like the early acquisition opportunities. These obviously would have been really bad, as opposed to what happened late

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Livingston: Was the code tuned to the IBM machine? Kapor: It was tuned to the Intel 808X 16-bit architecture. And Sachs was also very, very good. He was just an artist at high performance with limited resources. I didn't know how good he was; I got lucky. I knew he was good, but he was a genius at this sort of stuff. The two of us together was esse

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Livingston: Is there any other advice you would give to someone who was thinking of starting a startup? Geschke: If you aren't passionate about what you are going to do, don't do it. Work smart and not long, because you need to preserve all of your life, not just your work life. One of the things that I felt really good about is that we—from the ve

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I always had these little fictitious motivations that motivated me and got me to do such great work. So I sat down and designed the floppy disk, and Randy Wigginton (he was the guy just out of high school) and I came in every single day including Christmas and New Years for 2 weeks. I came in every single day leading up to, I think it was January 3

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Livingston: What surprised you the most? Ozzie: How difficult the go-to-market challenges are. I suppose it shouldn't have surprised me, but in both the cases of Notes and Groove, building a market in something that's new can be as, if not more, challenging than building the technology. We were building some very complex technology, and I thought,

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Livingston: What's the most important part of your culture? Newmark: The culture of trust. The moral compass. Livingston: And you make sure, when you hire someone, that they have one? Newmark: The other people on my team do, yes. Since I've had such bad luck in interviewing—that's because I'm not suited to it—I have no role in the hiring whatsoever

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Graham: One of the big things we got wrong was that we thought our users were going to be catalog companies. Now all the catalog companies are online, but back then, they just didn't want to hear about the Web. This was late '95, early '96. A lot of people didn't even have web access yet. So these middle managers at the catalog companies we called

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Livingston: What is your favorite bit of advice you'd give to a technical person who wanted to start a startup? Schachter: Reduce. Do as little as possible to get what you have to get done. Do less of it; get it done. If you've got two things that you want to put together, take away until they go together. Don't add another thing. Because you can u

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