Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston

The investor didn't want to take any risk. It was absurd. They only do this because they can get away with it, because they have the money and you need it and "fuck you." (I hope that goes in the book.)

I thought that Accel was more different than I ultimately concluded they were. But I don't think that they were worse than everyone else.

You know why VCs are like this? It's not that they are bad people; it's the limited partners.

I've never taken the perspective of "build a cool piece of technology and see where it goes." It's more or less been based on an intuition about a hole in the market-or, more accurately, a future hole in the market.

So you don't want to fill today's needs, but try to capture some window that will happen in the future.

Lotus Notes ended up being a multifaceted piece of software; it had email, it was used for collaborative workspaces for people to do dynamic work together. It was used as a content management system, as an application server. Groove was really meant to fulfill just the collaborative workspaces piece.

Before I start a company, I typically write a couple of founding documents. One of them is very outside-in: it's a scenario-based document, describing the high-level challenge that I'm trying to address and the end user scenarios that we are trying to solve. This attempts to explain what we're trying to accomplish to anyone who joins the company orwe might need to get financing from. Then I create a second, bottom-up document describing the different technologies that will have to be assembled to accomplish that vision.

I take on as 10-year challenges, not filling a quick market niche.

Once you start down the treadmill of taking venture capital, it's "how many rounds before people give up on you or you have a positive exit event?"

you are separate from the thing that you're building,

Whether it's good times or bad, you have to know people and you have to talk their language, and we were just from a different place and not hooked into that at all.

It was easy, and that was a key thing for me because I wasn't lacking the knowledge about how to publish to the Web

It was one of those things that, by automating the process, completely morphed what it was I was doing.

So that was a little bit of an insight. To me it was, "Heck, that's handy." But it was not dissimilar to what othe...

"This is that little tweak that makes it kind of m...

While it did seem fairly easy to build, it was a dilemma, because one of the big lessons from my first company was to focus.

"Maybe Stuff should just be our product?" And we agreed, "That's too simple, that is too trivial."

"That's too simple, that is too trivial."

It caught on a lot more than we expected. It was really designed to appeal to web geeks.

we now had a product that people were using, but it wasn't the "real" product.

we could focus on the stupid little Blogger app that people were using, or we could work on our real product.

it was not that the technology was new, it was that we had figured out this medium, at least one of the native forms of what the Web was good for.

there were probably hundreds of new users a day.

I think one of the things that kills great things so often is compromise-letting people talk you out of what your gut is telling you. Not that I don't value people's input, but you have to have the strength to ignore it sometimes, too. If you feel really strongly, there might be something to that, and if you see something that other people don't see, it could be because it's that powerful and different. If everyone agrees, it's probably because you're not doing anything original.

I think I was also surprised by the success of something so simple.

How far you can get on a simple idea is amazing. I have a tendency to add more and more-the ideas always get too big to implement before they even get off the ground. Simplicity is powerful.

how do you intercept a market trend? How do you intercept an industrial trend?

the first idea you have is irrelevant. It's just a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what's wrong with it and you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a better idea and the second idea is always the important one.

"Well, I can't wish you good luck, because everybody would go and do this. But I'll tell you one thing: don't fuck with me."

Anybody can run a company up to 100 people. You just have to be intelligent and have good intuition.

VCs are an interesting bunch; you can't live with them, you can't live without them.

A lot of people get stuck on the idea. They all want to invent something and go execute on it. I think that's a fallacy. 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, because you can't foresee your future anyway.

It turns out to make a big difference in how you build things.

Honestly, I was pretty sure AltaVista was going to destroy Google.

I don't care-it's whatever it takes to make the damn thing work.

It's very small stuff like that, very often-that somebody sees something and has the wrong impression. The only way to learn that is by doing a lot of testing. In fact, that's one of the reasons why the iPod was such a phenomenal success where the MP3 players before were not. The iPod had the design sensibility of an average person just trying to listen to music, whereas the previous MP3 players were kind of technical exercises in understanding how music files are stored, and perhaps required very delicate balancing of your fingers to hit the buttons the right way, and so on.

We never expected people would still be using a dial-up connection and browsing on their TV in 2005, but there's still a significant market there for a device like WebTV,

companies are just the people that make them up.

They were doing things that were just taking sideways turns from the core product, which were interesting things to work on in a playground kind of environment as engineers, but were not focused on the product execution.

I found that they are just culturally a whole lot more conservative and cautious.

I had a meeting recently with a couple of early 20-year-olds who have decided to drop out of Stanford because they got bored, and they are trying to raise money to fund their startup.

They just thought, "Here's a couple of people that have got a fascinating idea. Who knows if it's going to work or not, but we'll give them some money and see what happens."

It fascinated us because, once you looked under the covers, you realized it was a very difficult technical problem.

We went back to the VCs and said, "Thank you very much for the money. We've changed our minds. Here's what we're going to do and here's why we think it's a good idea."

That had never been done before. Nobody had ever thought of it before. It was a brand new idea.