Founders at Work.pdf

100 Founders at Work
Livingston: When you were developing Lotus 1-2-3, you always had working
code. Wasn’t that type of incremental development very much ahead of its
time?
Kapor: Yes. I think Sachs and I saw it the same way. We figured out a number
of things very early on that became conventional wisdom. I’m not sure that we
were that much smarter than anyone else. But we had the requisite smarts and
we were in the right place at the right time. So this developing close to the target
machine and having code running, it seemed obvious once you looked at it
that there were enormous benefits to it. The reason it wasn’t obvious is that the
machines were barely powerful enough to do development on.
Typically, the systems you develop on could usefully consume a lot more
computational power than what you might actually need in the delivery platform,
and so that’s the argument for doing the development not on the target
platform. But there were corresponding disadvantages because it tended to
produce bloated—not optimized—code if you’re using a cross-compiler or
cross-assembler. And optimization of limited resources was the name of the
game when you were talking about a 64K machine. So what worked in the minicomputer
world—the techniques and best practices—just didn’t work for
microcomputers. I shouldn’t say that, because Sachs did come from the minicomputer
world, so that’s not right. But a lot of the conventional wisdom was
just wrong and that’s what saddled a lot of people. They just didn’t think things
through from first principles.
And always having something running was a Sachs thing, because it was just
his experience it was a good thing, and I saw it and said, “Yes indeedy, we
should do this,” long before extreme programming.
Livingston: Was there ever a point when you wanted to quit?
Kapor: After we shipped and the business felt like it was getting out of control,
yes. The most fun parts were from time-equals-zero till 1984. I was terrified
about stuff—how’s this going to come out, what’s going to happen?
I did almost walk out. We raised a second round of venture capital, which I
think, if I had been more sophisticated about business, we wouldn’t have
needed to do. We could have just borrowed the money. We turned cash flow
positive so quickly. If I had been a little bit less risk-averse . . . but that’s another
story.
We got to the closing for the second round and they had a very sharp lawyer
on their side—our lawyer wasn’t so good—and all these things were happening
at the last minute, all these onerous terms, and I got up and said, “I’m not going
to do this. I don’t have to do this today. We don’t have to close here and I’m just
not going to agree to this. I’m gone.” And they backed down completely on
their onerous terms.
I was just pissed off about this for a long time. These were supposed to be
our investors, they were supposed to be on the same side, but they were highly
adversarial and totally willing to take advantage of us. And saw absolutely nothing
wrong with that. I don’t really like conflict, was a conflict avoider; it takes a
lot for me to get up. And I really was going to get up and go home and we really
weren’t going to close.