Founders at Work.pdf

Ray Ozzie 107
You cannot early-bind marketing and positioning decisions because the market
and competitive environment will be different.
Some people cope with uncertainty by being really comfortable in their own
little box. Some developers, for example, will divide the problem and divide the
problem until they only have to work on this little piece of the database or this
little piece of the communications, and they just don’t worry about the stuff
above that. They leave that to people like me to deal with, in terms of the risk
and continuing to be on the right path. To be on that long of a time frame, you
have to be able to change as the market changes.
So there were a number of things over the course of the years at Groove
that changed dramatically. At one point early on, we were giving an equal focus
to the media/entertainment and productivity applications of our technology.
When we started Groove in ’97, it was the Bubble, and because you can apply
technology in many ways, we thought that we’d bring it to market to serve a
number of different things. By the time we brought it to market in late 2000,
things were starting to get a little serious, and we decided to concentrate on the
productivity realm instead of consumer applications.
Then once we really doubled down that path, it meant that we had to take a
lot more enterprise manageability things seriously than we had early on, which
brought with it a lot of burden and a lot of changes within the company.
Livingston: If you do have this long time frame, are you extra nervous about
competitors? And do you have to manage people’s expectations differently?
Ozzie: In a startup, you’re on this mission together. Everyone has to feel that,
and you have to hire people who are willing to believe in something they are
trying to accomplish. And in that era, it was very challenging in two dimensions.
Hiring in the dot-com era, when a lot of these people’s friends were getting
rich, was hard. But the other thing was that the type of software we were building
had many systems software elements to it. A lot of it was lower-level communications,
storage, application framework–type code, and hiring was more
difficult for that type of talent at that time. In an earlier era when DEC was big,
it was easier to hire systems software talent.
But what held people together was the belief that you’re really going to
change the world. I think that’s the nature of many startups. You believe that
what you are doing is going to have a dramatic impact. You might not exactly
know how, but you really have a belief. That keeps you going and going through
many changes and a lot of uncertainty.
Livingston: What about managing your investors’ expectations?
Ozzie: That’s a difficult subject. There are pros and cons to taking money. The
best kind of company is one where you don’t have to take any money.
Livingston: Did you use your own money for Groove?
Ozzie: Yes, I funded the first few years myself. But eventually I took some
money from Mitch Kapor and then others. Not so much because I needed it at
that point, but because I knew that, ultimately, you cannot accomplish something
completely on your own. You really need to develop a network of people