Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston

I was actually single at the time, I didn't have a mortgage, so the idea of joining a little startup that may well be destroyed was just like, "That will be fun." Because I kind of thought, "Even if Google doesn't make it, it will be educational and I'll learn something."

WAIS was one of the earliest forms of Internet search software. Developed before the Web, it was in some ways a predecessor to web search engines.

What I'm really trying to do is build an industry." Not build a company, build an industry, so there would be all of these pieces that would make network publishing come about.

Build an industry

Some people thought it was a little crazy to think about starting an industry, but it seemed like it made sense to me.

Boston, especially back in 1990/91, was in recession and having trouble. California was also in recession, but in California there were dreamers. There were people who wanted to think about new and different things and wouldn't think we were crazy to try to build this thing.

Tell me about some of the most hair-raising moments.

Most people have a very difficult time imagining something they can't see at least a demonstration of.

If you can get a demonstration—or, worst case, a video—it communicates an idea better than hand-waving for hours. So get to a demo quickly.

What did you learn?

One thing I learned from Marvin Minsky (one of the founders of AI) was, "Pick a big enough project, something that's really hard, something that over the years you can work on." I've found that that has been a great guiding piece of wisdom.

So the idea of going and putting everything online is something really big and hard. How do you make a library such that everybody has access to everything?

"That couldn't be that hard. How much information is there? It's not that much." So even in the era of Thinking Machines, we knew what it was we were trying to build. It just takes longer than one thinks.

Looking back on all of your experiences, what surprised you most?

Desktop publishing became very popular. For an investment of a few thousand dollars you could, in effect, be your own printer and publisher. So it opened up a whole lot of new businesses. As graphic artists and designers began to learn how to use a computer, we brought out products like Adobe Illustrator. All of a sudden, the whole industry began to move, and within less than a decade the entire printing and publishing industry went from the old analog world completely over to the digital world. That was a tremendous thing to see, and of course it was a huge benefit to us.

We just take for granted what you guys created. Geschke: That's what's really cool. That's when you know you've had an impact. I know I can speak for John on this too, but the biggest thrill is frankly not the financial success, it's the ability to have an impact. Because we're both engineers at heart and that's every engineer's dream—to build something that millions of people will use.

I think this is something that people underestimate—that there are always people out there rooting for you. That is probably part of what you have to develop.

So Betty says,

The power of problem solving

It was tiring and it was hard, but it was a lot of fun. It was like, "OK, now what?"

You're young, and you are really sort of superhuman. But you are not very efficient doing that, so that's where people who become your business colleagues start saying, "That's not going to work." That's stuff that you do get help from friends and advisors. Like, "Hey, you are better off taking a month-long vacation and turning stuff over and getting fully rested and charging at it again than trying to figure out how you might personally live off 4 hours of sleep a night forever."

You do learn that people get to be fully formed adults fairly early and it's hard to change people's behavior, although it is easy to cushion how they behave with people that buffer their weaknesses.

Something is getting lost in the message here, where it should be really inspiring: "All I have to do is figure out this math-and-science thing, and I'm writing part of my ticket here." Why that is not pulling not only women, but pulling everybody to say, "I want to be like those people," I don't know. You'd think that everybody would want to have our jobs. We've all been handsomely rewarded. The stories are not like, "Hey, we had patrician backgrounds and silver spoons, and we bought our way into this." We just "thought" our way into these industries. The power of thought and math and science and computing, you're given that for free—it's a choice you can make. You take that choice, and it gives you sort of a magic wand to be a captain of an industry that's still fairly young, that's driving the whole world economy. I don't know. This is just a mystery to me. Women running these companies have very rich lives. I don't know.

The need for ambition

It turns out that when you build only software that you absolutely need, you don't get more software than you'll actually use.

Fav

I wanted them to have a real professional résumé. In the end, the project was a failure because the industry trends moved away from that. People don't want programmers to be professionals; they want programmers to be cheap.

The biggest roadblock to the entrepreneur are liabilities in your life. It's not whether or not you can be a good entrepreneur, it's whether you have to make a mortgage payment or support other people.

Experience will come when you face certain problems and live through them. And the best way to do that is to put yourself squarely in the path of those problems.

I think entrepreneurs want to make money. It's not that they do it for the money, but they want to make money. Because money is the measuring stick; it's how they know if they've won or not. And I think a lot of what drives entrepreneurs is the kind of legacy they are going to leave. They want to make a mark in the world and feel like their life mattered. Entrepreneurs are the kind of people who love ideas and want to build things, and add value to the world.