Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston

There was always something, every day. I could not sleep well for 4 years. If you are in charge of technology at a really fast-growing company that gets lots of publicity, there's always something that worries you.

Try to have a good cofounder. I think it's all about people, and, if you are doing it completely alone, it's really hard. It's not impossible, in particular if you are a loner and introverted type, but it's still really hard.

If you have a good team, you are halfway there. Even more importantly, perhaps, you have to have a really strong cofounder. Someone you can rely on in a very fundamental way.

So for a long time I got away with, "Don't ask how it works. Max will solve

it." It worked OK until the scalability problems hit us, and then I had to be much more vocal and explain to the board, "Here's what's going on. Here's what I'm doing about it. It will be OK. Just chill out." Then, when the fraud thing became my primary concern, obviously I had to get involved much more because it had to do with things they dealt with on a daily basis: money. So I had to prepare much more thoroughly. The whole boy-genius thing had to be discarded for the much more serious attitude and language.

Understanding that things need to he clearly explained to shareholders.

People were definitely grumbling about how the startup culture was being lost, even internally. But then, when we got to eBay, which was three times the size, it was even less so. But, as you grow larger, you need more structure and coordination and meetings.

As companies grow more structure is inevitable whether employees like it or not.

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 plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.

Why don't you quit and start working on this and I'll give you half of my salary?" So at least he could support his family. I didn't need that much money.

Team sacrifice.

ubiquitous

Hotmail used word of mouth to spread the word.

Just get a digital marketing company to handle launch campaign.

I good way to get advitisers on board

The one lesson that I've learned in my experience while I did Hotmail and since I've done Hotmail is you have got to own the customer. The customers came to us for free at Hotmail. Even though they were free customers,

what the last 10 to 15 years of my experience of the Internet has taught me is that it's OK if you don't monetize them right up front. Eventually you will be able to. But having that customer base and being able to tap into that customer base and upsell them on services, or advertise—you can always make money off them.

Users can always be monetized.

make sure you write a business plan because it will crystallize your thoughts to communicate your ideas with somebody else. Make sure that once you have written your business plan, you have somebody read and critique it and ask you questions.

Great advice.

Essentially it's a plan that says what the company is going to do, what problem it is going to solve, how big the market is, what

the sources of revenue for the company are, what your exit strategy is for your investors, what amount of money is required, how you are going to market it, what kind of people you need, what the technology risks are, marketing risks, execution risks. Those are the fundamentals of what goes into a business plan, and many people have it in their heads but don't write it down.

Second is, don't try to change user behavior dramatically. If you are expecting people to dramatically change the way they do things, it's not going to happen. Try to make it such that it's a small change, yet an important one.

And the other lessons are you've got to own the customer and make sure there is a full loop between your product and that it has the least amount of resistance before you get to your end customer. Do partnerships; what Google did with partnerships was phenomenal—giving the search away to other companies to help them make their so-called portals. But in the end, Google got the customer because they got the branding.

Some famous person said, "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.

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.

Important advice about hiring.