I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is that you're not really going to build one specific company. The goal—at least the way I think about entrepreneurship—is you realize one day that you can't really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what that thing is. We had six different business pla

If they had been on the job, I would have gone and done something else because the opportunity wouldn't have been there. But I saw a gap in the marketplace and I said, "We should do something that lets you do bigger spreadsheets, that's faster, that takes full advantage of the IBM PC, that integrates the graphing, so you could hit one button t

There was a clear divide between someone who was interim and someone, like myself, who was fully invested in making it work. I had moved my whole life from the East Coast for it; my fortunes were tied to this thing, whereas theirs weren't necessarily.

Graham: Probably, but I worried about all the different things that could kill us and all the different ways they could kill us. People start startups to get rich, but what keeps them going day to day is the fear of failure. You've said, "OK, I'm starting this startup and I'm going to get all the users and be successful," and once you've