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Founders at Work.pdf

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112 <strong>Founders</strong> <strong>at</strong> <strong>Work</strong><br />

knew I didn’t want to work for anyone. I taught myself web development—this<br />

was in the middle of the boom and there was lots of work to be had as a contractor.<br />

I knew I was going to start another company. I just wasn’t ready yet. So<br />

I was a web developer on contract for about a year and a half, and worked in<br />

various companies like Intel and HP. Finally I got to the point where I said,<br />

“OK, I am going to start another company.” This was very much in the middle<br />

of the boom.<br />

I had visions of raising money and building something cool, but originally<br />

the idea for Pyra was around web-based project management, or collabor<strong>at</strong>ion,<br />

which was an area I had been interested in for a long time. The idea for Pyra<br />

was the personal and project inform<strong>at</strong>ion management system: to build projects<br />

for clients around their intranets and help them organize their work and personal<br />

inform<strong>at</strong>ion. It is a web applic<strong>at</strong>ion where you would put your stuff, things<br />

you are thinking about, things you had to do, things you wanted to share with<br />

other people. There is not exactly a corollary to it today, but it is along the same<br />

lines as Basecamp or Ta-da List (but more complic<strong>at</strong>ed). There are a lot of<br />

products th<strong>at</strong> are about organizing your work and stuff. Th<strong>at</strong> was wh<strong>at</strong> I saw as<br />

the big idea, and I had specific ideas about how th<strong>at</strong> could be done better than<br />

it had ever been done before.<br />

Around the time I was thinking about starting the company, I was talking to<br />

a friend of mine, Meg Hourihan. She got excited about the idea and said, “Hey,<br />

let me start it with you.” She had been a management consultant and was really<br />

smart, so I said OK. I had been contracting, so I had a little bit of money, so I<br />

could coast for a little while, but we didn’t know anybody. We weren’t hooked<br />

into the startup scene.<br />

Everyone was getting funded, but it is still completely just a network. You<br />

have to know the right people. Whether it’s good times or bad, you have to<br />

know people and you have to talk their language, and we were just from a different<br />

place and not hooked into th<strong>at</strong> <strong>at</strong> all. So we just said, “OK, here is the<br />

product we are going to build,” and we started building it. We actually kept contracting<br />

on the side—I had a contract with HP. Th<strong>at</strong>’s how we paid the bills—<br />

we turned my personal contract into the company’s contract and we did a little<br />

work on th<strong>at</strong> and we did a little work on our project, and th<strong>at</strong> is how we started.<br />

Livingston: Wh<strong>at</strong> was the point where you really said, “I know this is going to<br />

work and I am going to do this full-time”?<br />

Williams: Well, for me it was always the point of no return. Meg actually kept<br />

her other job, but only for a couple of months. We were pretty hardcore. So we<br />

formed the company and said, “OK, we are building this thing.” We hoped to<br />

raise money. We just didn’t know how yet. We focused on building the product<br />

first.<br />

Livingston: So, you built the product and then did you have to raise money or<br />

did you keep relying on consulting fees?<br />

Williams: Well, we kind of tried. We started talking to the few people we knew,<br />

but we just didn’t have any inroads for th<strong>at</strong>. We wrote a business plan, I think.

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