Founders at Work.pdf

106 Founders at Work
reboot PCs, they restore them from backups, they lose them. It has to be very
resilient. We wanted to make sure the algorithms we were using would scale to
what we needed.
All those early technology choices were like that. Initially we thought we’d
be using Java, but we ended up not using it because we concluded that there
would never be a stable runtime environment that we could count on on all
desktop PCs. It didn’t seem like Sun, with all due respect, really was on a path
to having a stable client-side environment. And we needed the thing to work
within several clicks on random PCs worldwide without anybody supporting
them. So we ended up having to do a lot of extra work using C++.
Livingston: Was there an initial customer who was so happy with the product
that you just knew Groove was going to fly?
Ozzie: We launched Groove in beta in October 2000, 3 years to the month
when we first formed the company. We didn’t ship the first commercially available
version of Groove until April 2001. When we did, we announced a 10,000
seat deal with GlaxoSmithKline, the major pharmaceutical company. They are a
big Notes customer, but saw the opportunity for Groove to address some of the
cross-boundary collaboration needs they have in bringing new products to market.
In hindsight, that initial sale may have hurt us more than it helped. We
deluded ourselves into thinking we could sell Groove into enterprises like
GlaxoSmithKline far more quickly and systematically than turned out to be the
case. We really hadn’t paid our dues yet in terms of making Groove “enterprise
ready.” We did that in subsequent releases of the product, but still struggled to
develop a successful, repeatable sales model for the enterprise. It was
extremely difficult to sell new technology like Groove into enterprises at a time
when their sole focus was on reducing costs and increasing security.
Livingston: What else was hard in those 3 “stealth” years?
Ozzie: The thing that’s not really characteristic, that doesn’t really translate
from both of my startups to what other entrepreneurs do, is that I think of the
challenges I take on as 10-year challenges, not filling a quick market niche.
There tends to be some time where I’m building up a level of technological
advantage for when we get to market. With technology, there’s no such thing as
a sustainable advantage, but you can get a good running start if you concentrate
on doing something hard really well.
In Notes, it was the database and replication environment and the security
aspects. In Groove, it was the security aspects again and this transaction synchronization
and the peer-to-peer XML-based communications. Most people
find risk and uncertainty very daunting. In both Notes and Groove, there was
both technological uncertainty and market uncertainty. We knew we were
embarking on something that was technologically very difficult and would take
several years. But you know that the market is going to change during those
years, so virtually everything you do, you have to late-bind the decisions. You
can’t completely predetermine all the user interface or integration decisions.