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He would ask questions like, "What's the market?" And I'd say, "A million." And he'd say, "How do you know?" And I said, "Well, there's a million ham radio operators, and computers are more popular than ham radio." Nobody in the world could ever deny that. But it's not the sort of analysis that they wanted.
I crashed my car and totaled it.
Nobody ever saw us have an argument. The disputes were very rare and minor, of any sort between us, and they were usually just misunderstandings.
The original impetus
Some famous person said, "Success is 50 percent luck and 50 percent preparedness for that luck."
"The people that are running this are stupid and they don't listen to me and I don't like being here, being told what to do."
everyone comes in with some kind of agenda.
disruptive technology—who
At the time it was like, "Consumers aren't spending money. Go to companies—they're the ones with money."
by-the-skin-of-my-teeth
I said, "Pay me $12 a year, and I'll take the ads off your blog."
After the first 4 to 5 months, you could see what was coming; you knew you were on the wave; things were only going to grow.
I'm suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people, if they were playing Russian roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how much would they have to be paid to play one round? A lot of people were almost offended by the question and they'd say, "I wouldn't do it at any price." But, of course, we do that every day. They drive to work in cars to earn money and they are taking risks all the time, but they don't like to acknowledge that they are taking risks. They want to pretend that
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The reason is software was considered an algorithm, and an algorithm is not patentable.
wet-behind-the-ears
just by happenstance
What Y Combinator prints on our T-shirts: make something people want. If you make something users want, they will be happy, and you can translate that happiness into money.
A great deal of what we did was putting out fires.
multiplies it 100-fold.
Apple also bought a little less than 20 percent of the company, which quintupled the value of the original investors' money.
we ran into a hiccup.
It didn't last long because Oracle said that they didn't want to risk getting in trouble with the IRS for hiring people as 1099 employees and having the IRS say that they should have been W2s. They said, "Look, we're not hiring anybody to be a 1099 employee, so either work for us on the payroll (and we don't want to hire you guys full-time) or form a corporation that we can hire."
Most computer programmers don't listen to what the customer wants. They have their own ideas of what would be
"we're going to have fun, we're going to have the beach house and a Ferrari."
consulting is a business where your revenue is just a multiple of the number of people you can hire. Software is a business where your revenue can grow much faster than the people you hire."
the idea was that the consulting would grow linearly with the number of people as you hired more good people that you could rent out as consultants, and the software business would grow like the hockey curve because, at some point when it took off, you wouldn't actually have to hire new people. You could just make more copies of the software you were selling.
Everybody is charging $250 an hour for these consultants and paying them $60 an hour. We would pay them the equivalent fully burdened of $64 an hour.
my mantra has always been, "Listen to your customers, not your competitors."
And you say to them, "Who's your cofounder?" And they say, "My significant other—husband or wife. My cat."
the crown jewels of the business—fundamentally
keep this company afloat.
If the founding team splits in the first 6 months, that can be pretty devastating to the birth of a company.
We chose the pricing based on what we thought would be an impulse buy.
for what I considered a paltry sum.
feel vindicated.
For example: "What are you calling it? Give it a name so we can talk about it." So you decide on a name—Emode. "Do you have a business plan?" So I would give them a one-page business summary. "No, I want a real business plan." So I wrote a business plan. "Do you have any employees?" "No, I don't have any employees. I need to go get some." "Do you have any money?" And you go talk to some angels. "Do you have an office?" And you go sign a lease somewhere. "Do you have business cards?" "No, let me go get business cards." "Do you have a website?" "We just launched it." "Well, is anyone coming?"
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reborn from the ashes of Netscape.
grassroots, word of mouth,
