Founders at Work.pdf

120 Founders at Work
Livingston: So you had a major difference of opinion?
Williams: Yeah. I think a lot of that came back to the enterprise thing, which
she and some other people felt strongly was our best chance of making money.
If I was the guy in charge and we were dying, it’s reasonable to conclude it’s my
fault. And certainly there were other things I could have done. So everybody
left but me. (A lot of them needed to leave since we couldn’t pay them anymore.)
Everybody left, and the next day, I was the only one who came in the
office.
Livingston: How did you feel that morning?
Williams: That was a really bad time. Actually the day that everyone told me
they were leaving . . . I told everyone they were laid off and said, “Work with
me if you can.” And at the time, everyone had already missed one paycheck,
and they’d had it. These are, of course, my friends, and we were hanging out all
the time and we socialized together, so it’s much more than just the employees.
I think that same night I broke up with my girlfriend of 6 months.
Livingston: Sounds pretty grim.
Williams: Yeah, it was just the craziest bad time. The good news about all that
was Blogger was still running and, with no employees, we didn’t have expenses.
So we went from having $50,000 a month worth of payroll, to a couple of thousand
for our server infrastructure and our rent. It is probably closer to ten,
between five and ten, but a manageable number, not paying me anything. I
took some money every once in a while to pay rent, and I had long since put all
my money in and credit cards and everything else, but that was actually a much
more reasonable place to be because we didn’t have to make $50,000 a month
to pay people. We had to make a few thousand dollars a month.
So then other ideas started being much more feasible, and I was in some
other conversations. Now that we were known, opportunities came up. One of
the first opportunities was a little company called KnowNow, who wanted us to
build something, and later actually two of the people who worked at Pyra,
including Meg, worked for this company, and I did a little deal with them to
build something that was never launched. They killed the project, but it got me
$35,000, which was like months of burn rate at that point.
Shortly after that, in February, I ran into Dan Bricklin. Dan wrote me after
reading my blog. We were pretty public in terms of our communication, so I
posted when everybody left, and I wrote this whole story on my blog that was
pretty widely read, “Here’s what happened: everyone’s gone. It’s just me.” I got
a huge outpouring of support from that, and one of the messages was from
Dan Bricklin, who said that he thought what we did was great and he wanted to
help. We ended up meeting at an O’Reilly conference, which was in February
2001. We met and he basically agreed really quickly. He assessed the situation—what
I needed to keep going. (We had a lot of back bills at this point; we
needed to pay our hosting bill to keep the lights on.)
There were some confusing stories about what that deal was. Dan had a
company called Trellix that he later sold, which was a web publishing platform.