Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston

As Howard Aiken said, "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

second was that nobody knew what the business model was going to be. In fact, Excite really never got the business model right at all. We fell into the classic problem of how, when a new medium comes out, it adopts the practices, the content, the business models of the old medium—which fails, and then the more appropriate models get figured out. For

see way too many people give up in the startup world. They just give up too easily. Recruiting is a classic example.

99.9 percent of the people give up. And Vinod gave me that lesson in spades. I think I would have given up with Netscape. I wouldn't have known what to do. I

The reason is that if they have a bad idea, great teams can figure out a better one.

One is hiring slowly and more carefully. Another is be cheap, cheap, cheap. Also, get the legs of the business underneath it before you run terribly fast.