Founders at Work.pdf

154 Founders at Work
We spent about $1,400 to furnish the entire office, including equipment
like a fax machine and printer. We all used cell phones at first, and we had no
Internet access for the first couple of weeks, just the whiteboard.
Livingston: You took a pretty big risk to decide to start a company without an
idea. You must have known that the four of you were pretty compatible?
van Hoff: You know, in a hot market like that, you saw a lot of people with crazy
business ideas that were never going to work but they were getting funded. We
were coming out of the Java project and felt that it was a pretty safe bet that if
you are part of a core team and you leave together, getting an idea is not that
hard. Anybody can have good ideas.
Over the years, I’ve learned that the first idea you have is irrelevant. It’s just
a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what’s wrong with it and
you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a
better idea and the second idea is always the important one.
After Marimba, when I started Strangeberry with Jonathan, we had no plan
whatsoever. We just put in some money and decided to spend a year brainstorming.
We built all sorts of things, and everything we did turned out to be
very relevant, because you’re in the right area and you are giving yourself time
to investigate. Eventually, you run into an interesting idea and you execute on
that. People are really the key.
Livingston: When you left Sun, did they try to stop you?
van Hoff: Kim and I did a very dramatic thing. We arranged to have a meeting
with Scott McNealy. He asked what we were there to talk about. When we told
him that we were leaving to do a startup, he said, “Well, I can’t wish you good
luck, because everybody would go and do this. But I’ll tell you one thing: don’t
fuck with me.”
One of the things that we wanted to build was a user interface builder. Java
was an interesting model, but there weren’t any tools for it. So we spent the first
few months working on a user interface, and then these guys from a small
startup visited us and showed us their product, and it was pretty much what we
were doing. They were acquired by Netscape like the next week, and they
turned into the IFC (Internet Foundation Class). It was ironic because that
eventually turned into the JFC, or Swing, the Java toolkit.
Livingston: Were you devastated that another company was doing the exact
same thing?
van Hoff: Not really. Once they were acquired, we sort of threw in the towel
because Netscape was so popular and there was really no way we could compete
with that. We hadn’t spent a lot of time on it yet. We had some prototypes
and it was working quite well, but we moved on really quickly.
It was very surrealistic at the time because we had a lot attention from the
press. There was a full-page photograph in Wired with no information at all. We
weren’t telling anyone what we were doing—mostly because we had absolutely
no clue and we didn’t want to let on.