We always give a major update within 30 days after we launch a new product. Because that's really something that reinforces people's feelings about the project. If they buy in on day one and then they see a major new update after 2 weeks, they're really pleased. So for us, one of the secrets about how we market the product is to make sure that laun

When we started, we wanted to build a company that we would like to work at and we kept applying that criterion. 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

Livingston: How did you first come up with the idea of flagging? Newmark: I forget. I think it was my customer service team, not me. I don't recall, it was so long ago. Livingston: But it worked pretty well? Newmark: Yes. It works great in all sorts of ways, and it's also an expression of our values. Mutual trust. This is kind of democracy in real

Winblad: One of the big mistakes is that, when you form a company, there's a difference between being an inventor and being entrepreneurial to leading a company—being the CEO or, especially, the leader. You're not fending for yourself anymore. You're actually fending for shareholders. They can't be fending for their salary; they can't be fending fo

While it did seem fairly easy to build, it was a dilemma, because one of the big lessons from my first company was to focus. 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. My total weakness was not focusing on things. So

Livingston: Do you have any regrets from the experience? Graham: One thing I regret is how pathetic we were during much of this whole process. We all had practically zero assets when we started, and this was during the Internet Bubble, remember—very early in the Internet Bubble, but still, there were people starting companies and getting them bough

Livingston: Was it hard designing something for non-technical users? Perlman: It's extremely hard, because you have to design for someone who's not you. After a while, as you develop interfaces and have experience with them, you begin to think with the intuition of a person who does not understand the inner workings of the system. And you also have

That's a microcosm of our whole history: people would suggest things to me, and then I would figure out what seemed to make sense—what a lot of people were asking for—and then I'd do it. Even now, with a whole company behind it, we listen. We do stuff, we follow through, and then we listen more. What we do is almost 100 percent based on what people

Engineers—bottom-of-the-org-chart people—could come up with the ideas that would be the next hot products for the company. Everything was open to thought, discussion, and innovation. So I would never leave Hewlett-Packard. I was going to be an engineer for life there.