Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston

My whole life was basically trying to optimize things. You don't just save parts, but every time you save parts you save on complexity and reliability, the amount of time it takes to understand something. And how good you can build it without errors and bugs and flaws.

I see way too many people give up in the startup world. They just give up too easily. Recruiting is a classic example. I don't even hear the first "no" that somebody says. When they say, "No, I'm not interested," I think, "Now it's a real challenge. Now's when the tough part begins." It's hard to identify talent, but great people don't look for jobs, great people are sold on jobs. And if they're sold they're going to say no at first. You have to win them over.

I love this stuff; the persistence part is the part that I like. It's actually not fun when it's happening, but you know it makes a difference because 99.9 percent of the people give up.

"Success is 50 percent luck and 50 percent preparedness for that luck." I think that's a lot of it. It's being ready to take advantage of opportunities when they arise.

So I guess the last lesson is that people make all the difference in the world. Everybody says that people matter most, but boy, I've never worked with a finer group of people.

Venture capitalists, with the exception of people like Don Valentine, would tell you that they'd rather fund a great team than a great idea. The reason is that if they have a bad idea, great teams can figure out a better one. Mediocre people even with a great idea can screw it up in its execution.

One is hiring slowly and more carefully.

Another is be cheap, cheap, cheap.

Also, get the legs of the business underneath it before you...

I think really taking the time to understand the dynamics of the business, so we can scale it, is important, along with being cheap and hiring well.

while we looked for proper management. Because we all knew it wasn't us.

"If this thing is going to be as big as we want it to be, we're not the people to run it,"—although

They weren't as vested in helping Yahoo long-term as we were.

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.

No one is ever going

to be able to get so far ahead that we'd ever be in strategic risk of kingmaking a full-text search engine, because you just can't do that. Google ended up doing exactly that.

Probably more than anything, the business education gave me the confidence to know what I knew and what I didn't know. I knew my zone of operation and things that I was good at and things where I knew I should go ask because I didn't know what I was doing.

I don't think I understood the time commitment or the emotional commitment it takes to get something off the ground.

Any advice you'd give to someone who was starting a startup?

Part of it is "know yourself."

Try to do as much thinking up front as to what your breaking

point...

Before I joined, I knew where the line was, when I would quit, at what point, and so when I was in the game, it never crossed my mind.

Doing all that thinking all up front: why am I getting in, when do I leave, if I leave then why am I doing it, what gets me up in the morning, what could happen that could make me stop getting up in the morning?

All those personally motivating things—think them through before you get things started.

a lot of these companies didn't know they had that need. It was just a matter of breaking out of your shell and going out and talking to them—looking

Basically, you had to do a little bit of sales.

One of the things we did was that we listened to what General Motors was trying to accomplish.

I had to have this company next to University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier, a university down the street, because I knew that we needed to draw this talent to grow.

If you have the energy to do it, then you should try it yourself. But you do need to have the ability to form a team around you with good people. Talent attracts talent.

You have to have an unfair advantage in that you have to be good at something, or you have to have a direction that you're interested in or a market that you see an opportunity in—but you shouldn't get stuck too much on the details,

When it's your first startup, there are a lot of people involved. You take advice from a lot of people, and that advice is not always the best advice. Very often, your intuition tells you to do something different, but then you go with the advice from the experienced guys anyway. And there were a few occasions where I look back and think, "If only I had gone with my intuition, things might have been different." So I might rely more on my intuition if I were to do it again.

We spent a long time trying to convince these people to use something they didn't want before we had the idea that maybe we should make something people actually did want.