Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston

There's kind of a backwards logic that says: when you are young, you should learn from people who are experienced, so later on, if you want to do a startup, you can take the risk. And that's a myth that was created from school. You need to learn to get to the next level. The biggest roadblock to the entrepreneur are liabilities in your life.

So I discussed this with my family, who were involved in psychology, and asked, "Are we our own favorite subjects?" We're very concerned about ourselves and the people we know. I realized that no other technology allowed us to get media about ourselves. All the other media technologies allow us to learn only about people we will never know. Tom Cruise, Tom Brokaw—we know a ton about those people and yet we'll never know them.

Livingston: Was there ever a time when a competitor did something that made you fearful? Currier: iVillage started copying us, and I was very worried about it for probably a year, and then it all just faded away. Probably because it's hard to get the engineers, the psychologists, and the writers to talk to one another. You've got to build a culture and communication amongst a small group of people so that they can get things done.

around their relationships with each other and the product we needed to create. I genuinely cared about my people, and I built a culture where you communicate—you don't blame—and you learn what the heck the other person's talking about. You, psychologist, you need to learn a little about engineering. You, engineer, you need to learn a little about what the user actually experiences. You have to understand why they like the question this way so that the writers can do their job. So it was really just a matter of empathy that I had for the team, and communication style. You have to figure out how to hire people who are nice, communicative, smart, and capable. If you're missing one of those four things, you can't stay. And so you have to churn people out and be willing to let them go. It was painful, but I knew from the beginning we were going to have to do that.

Companies usually worry about competition for financial reasons, but when we did Firefox, money was just always sort of there. There were donations, seed money from AOL; we eventually got this Google deal, but it wasn't a source of fear for us, because we knew if it didn't make money . . . It wasn't even supposed to make money—it was a hobby, right, so we didn't really care. I was in school. It didn't have to succeed.

I thought marketing was something that required a degree and formal experience. It turns out that marketing is just making the product good enough that people spread it on their own, and giving them ways to do that. It's a lot easier and more natural than I thought it would be. Now I can't stand meeting with professional marketers who try to "craft" the "message" and all that junk.

If you're doing a startup and you're relaxed, you should be very worried.

Machiavelli said you judge a leader by the strength of his generals,

Data General was a very entrepreneurial—almost Darwinian—kind of environment. Ed de Castro and the other founders would try hard to hire the best, most aggressive people they could find, and then let those people go off and oftentimes compete on their own.

In the '80s and early '90s, the investor relations officer was really an underappreciated asset. They were understaffed and underbudgeted. So we would go in and say, "Our job is to make your life easier. You send us the information; we'll take care of it." And we told them discreetly, "If anything gets screwed up, we take the bullet. We're here to help you."