Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

Why the disconnect? I think there's a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the "spo

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.

Jerry was one of my best friends before we started the company, and it's his company, so doing business with friends—you always hear, "Don't do business with friends, bad idea." So one of the things that really helped me was that he and I had a conversation before I joined, "OK, here are the ground rules." And this is really wha

Microsoft was another concern. But they also were very, very slow. They finally today have a product called SharePoint, which is somewhat similar to the ArsDigita Community System. One thing that we did which enabled us to be much, much faster than our competitors was that we developed on and released our software from running real-world systems. F

I think this is something that people underestimate—that there are always people out there rooting for you. That is probably part of what you have to develop. They probably went back to their offices and said the following: "We got a great deal on this software and this great little company—I think those guys might be successful—called Open Sy

Livingston: What advice would you give to a programmer who's thinking about starting a company? Spolsky: I've got a lot [laughs]: Don't do it. It's going to suck. You're going to hate it. Can I steal one from Paul? Don't start a company unless you can convince one other person to go along with you. If you don't have two people (or I would even say

There was a recession in '73 and Hewlett-Packard had to cut back 10 percent. Instead of laying off 10 percent of the people, they cut everyone's salary by 10 percent and gave us one day off every two weeks. So basically they said "nobody goes without a job." And I like that sort of thing.

I think Yahoo is smarter now about dealing with startups than they were then. We were one of the first companies they bought, and I think the idea was, back then, that what you should do with an acquisition is "integrate" it, in the same way that a sugar cube becomes integrated with your tea. We basically got dissolved within Yahoo, and a

We spent a lot of time getting it right, knowing that the market was not ready for it. We disguised what later became the BlackBerry as a pager. Livingston: Because people knew what a pager was, they could say, "Hey, I need one of those"? Lazaridis: That's right. We gave them the opportunity to go two-way, so that they could send a messag