Founders at Work.pdf

Paul Graham 207
we didn’t want to learn. It seemed like this huge steaming turd that was best
just avoided. So the main thing we thought when we first had the idea of doing
web-based applications was, “Thank God, we don’t have to write software on
Windows.”
Livingston: So you have this major breakthrough. What were some of the next
things you did?
Graham: Pretty early, we got some funding from our friend Julian, who also
worked with us on Artix. He gave us $10,000. After about 6 weeks or so, it
seemed like it was going to be more work than we thought, so we got Trevor
Blackwell to work on it too.
Livingston: How did you know Trevor?
Graham: Trevor was in grad school with Robert. I asked Robert, “Who’s the
smartest grad student in the computer science program?” and he said “Trevor.”
I couldn’t believe it actually, because at the time I thought Trevor was a total
goofball.
Livingston: But you were soon convinced he was talented?
Graham: Trevor is a prodigy, in the original sense of the word. When we first
recruited him, we asked him to write this little piece of image-manipulating
software, to kind of test him out. For 2 weeks we heard nothing from him, and
I had pretty much written him off. Finally he sent me an email asking me to
come to his office to see what he’d done. I went there expecting to see this new
image software, and instead he’s rewritten our entire system in Smalltalk—
everything I wrote, plus everything Rtm wrote.
I basically said, “OK, you’re hired. Now go and write the damn image software,
because we’re not rewriting everything in Smalltalk.”
Livingston: You and Robert were already good friends, right?
Graham: Oh yeah. We had been friends then for about 10 years—since way
back. In fact, I think in the beginning it was only because he was friends with
me that Robert even did this. In the beginning he was just humoring me. It was
a year before he thought Viaweb had any chance of ever making any money.
Livingston: So you convinced him to spend the summer working on this
project. What happened in the fall?
Graham: Things kind of came to a head with Rtm. We had this angry phone
conversation where he said something like, “We’ve been working on this thing
for a whole month, and it’s still not finished.” It’s funny in retrospect, because
we were still working on it 3 years later. At the time, I was just thinking about
how to get him to keep working on it for another month. But that was the main
reason we got Trevor. Robert basically rebelled, so I thought, “All right, we
need more programmers.”
Livingston: If Robert was so reluctant, why did you start the company with
him?