Founders at Work.pdf

160 Founders at Work
might have been different.” So I might rely more on my intuition if I were to do
it again.
Livingston: Were you the ringleader to start the company?
van Hoff: Well, in a way. Jonathan and I came up with the initial idea to do a
startup, but you’re talking about a difference in weeks. Very quickly it became
the four of us. Then you need to make some decisions about when do you want
to leave and how much money are you going to put in. Then once you’ve left, it
gets quite interesting. Because then you’ve got to go for it whether you like it
or not.
Livingston: Were the founding shares divided equally?
van Hoff: Yes, we split it four ways. We were very lucky because at the time of
the IPO, the founders still had a fair amount of stock. Financially, the company
was structured really well. That’s mostly because early on, we had some really
good VC deals. Especially with four founders, if you’re not careful, you end up
with such a small portion of the company.
Livingston: What advice would you give to a group of people who worked
together and wanted to go out on their own?
van Hoff: Don’t take anything with you. Especially if you go and do something
that is somewhat competitive with your previous employer. Although you might
not have actually taken anything—ideas, physical things, or time—if you’re successful,
they’ll come and sue you just for fun. They’ll have a really good starting
point because you are a previous employee. You must have taken something
because you’re successful now, right?
So unless you go into a completely different area, you have to be very careful
about the intellectual property. So really what you’ve got to do is: don’t plan
anything, don’t write anything down. Talk about it over a beer and then leave.
And then you start. Don’t use any office equipment or email.
It’s irrelevant if the company fails, but if the company succeeds, that can be
a big problem. The funny thing is that they won’t sue you until you’re successful,
because why sue someone who is a failure? And this is particularly important
if you start out at a big company like Google or Amazon, because they have
a lot of time and money to spend on these kinds of things.