Founders at Work.pdf

Mitchell Kapor 97
I did not set out to build a big company. I actually wanted to be a software
designer. I saw having a company not exactly as being a necessary evil, but there
wasn’t a good alternative. My experience had convinced me that being a program
author and having somebody else publish it wouldn’t give me enough control
over the process. In Hollywood, the very successful directors like Steven
Spielberg quickly understood that they also needed to be producers and have
their own studio in order to retain control. It was a similar thing.
There were some other funny things about it. In the ’60s, when I came of
age, business was not a cool thing. We were all counterculture people with long
hair and sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. It was the ’60s; I have the pictures to prove
it. I don’t remember any of it, but as someone said, if you can remember the
’60s, then you weren’t there. But it turned out I also have some entrepreneurial
talent. It’s not surprising—my father was a small businessman, my grandfather
was a small businessman, it kind of runs in the family. But I think I had cultural
biases against seeing it or valuing it that took a while to get over. So while Lotus
was getting started, I just saw it as a vehicle to doing great product. I never
wanted to have a big company.
Livingston: The word “creative” comes up a lot when you do a search for Lotus.
Did you make a conscious effort to have a creative atmosphere at the time
when programmers were considered dull and nerdy?
Kapor: Yeah. I was interested in really cool products, so I guess that’s where
that came in. I had a very unconventional background and really no interest in
building a button-down business culture. And I’m not an engineering geek,
either. These types of companies tend to reflect the personalities and interests
of their founders. Microsoft is very much cast in Bill Gates’s image; and Apple,
Steve Jobs; Borland, Philippe Kahn. And so we tended to have more creativity
and innovation.
The other thing that I cared about a lot right from the very beginning was
creating a workplace that treated people well. At Software Arts, they felt I had
attitude problems. I didn’t respect authority. I basically thought, “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.” It was a mixture of keen insight and adolescent
emotions that I carried for a very long time. So when I unexpectedly found
myself running this high-growth successful software company, the thought of
making it be the kind of place that I would want to work at and different from
all those other places was incredibly appealing.
There were some other key people there who shared that feeling and I
think I probably hired them. And so we did all sorts of very progressive things
with the corporate culture. We invested in the human resources function extensively.
We surveyed all the employees annually on quality of work-life issues,
and took what we heard very seriously. We had a corporate values statement
that wasn’t just on a piece of paper. We actually at one point tied a portion of
the managers’ bonuses to how well their direct reports viewed them exemplifying
the corporate values. I made every single manager get on the support lines
and listen to customers, no matter what function they were in.