Founders at Work.pdf

98 Founders at Work
When I was running Lotus, we never had a single employment discrimination
lawsuit; we had a whole bunch of different alternative dispute resolution
conflict management approaches, through the employee relations function.
And then we had a diversity committee that had out gays and lesbians on it—
this was in 1984. We were the first corporate sponsor of an AIDS walk. We had
a corporate philanthropy committee in which the employees actually made
decisions about where the money went, not the pet projects of senior management.
So for many people what was memorable and important about Lotus was
that it was the best place they ever worked.
The other thing to say is that because I lost control of the company—I felt
overwhelmed by what I had created, did not know how to step up to it, put
enough brakes on, hire the right people and be collaborative—I wound up
jumping ship and leaving pretty early, in 1987. And my successor, a very poor
choice on my part, did not share the same vision or values and he wound up disassembling
most of what we put in place. So it was a bittersweet sort of thing.
It was ultimately not sustained. Learn from that, too.
Livingston: Can you remember anything else that surprised you?
Kapor: Oh, almost everything. I didn’t expect to find myself in this situation. I
really didn’t. Being successful surprised me enormously, shocked me, especially
the magnitude of it. VisiPlot was a success and I had made some money, but I
didn’t understand how big the industry was going to get; how big we were going
to get.
Our original business plan called for $3 to $4 million in sales. Ultimately, in
1983 it was $53 million. So it was a 1,700 percent forecasting error. And then it
tripled the next year to $150 million. I was totally unprepared for the magnitude
of the success and the rate of growth. It would have been psychotic to say
it was going to get that big that fast. Or you’d have to be prescient, but I’m not.
So mainly what I was thinking in those days was “We’d better make sure
that we don’t blow it, having gotten here.” And worrying that it could all fall
apart as quickly as it came about. So I was terrified! Inwardly. And excited. And
unprepared. I became a minor league celebrity in Boston, being recognized in
restaurants, and that was weird. And people started to act differently around
me, because when people are seen as having power or they’re seen as having
some special resources, people get weird because they project their fantasies
onto the person or they start telling you what they think you want to hear. If you
watch people around Sergey Brin and Larry Page from Google, it’s very amusing,
but, to be the recipient of that . . . I wasn’t particularly prepared for, nor did
I want most of that. I mean, I liked attention, but it’s a lot to get used to and a
lot of it made me profoundly uncomfortable.
And there was a series of values challenges that came up with running a
business that I was unprepared for that were very painful.
Livingston: Can you describe one?
Kapor: Lotus as a company wound up suing some other companies that
were copying our look and feel. Now, that was not done on my watch. I was