Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

This sounds so myopic in hindsight that I’m almost embarrassed by it, but, at the outset, I didn’t even have a view on whether or not I should pursue venture investment, and I had no real concept for how I wanted to design a business—at least not beyond its engineering function.

One thing I do look back on fondly was how incredibly focused we were. Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren’t working on. You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing.

To pick a somewhat trivial example, at fireside chats with Mark (the predecessor to the co... See more

The problem was simple, but the solution was anything but. After several fits and starts, lessons learned the hard way, and five years of bootstrapping (building a business that relied on revenue rather than venture capital), we built a multifaceted business. The Behance Network grew to enable more than twelve million creative professionals to show

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