Founders at Work.pdf

208 Founders at Work
Graham: Well, first of all he was my best friend, so I really trusted him, but he’s
also one of the best programmers in the world. I’d rather have a quarter of his
brain working on some problem than 100 percent of most other people’s.
Livingston: Where did you work?
Graham: In Robert’s apartment. His housemate was away that summer, and I
moved into his room.
Robert used to get up early, whereas I stayed up till four and got up at noon.
So we would kind of work a 24-hour schedule. I would write some new code
during the night and send Rtm an email saying, “OK, we’ve got all these new
features in my part of the code.” Then he would write the corresponding stuff
in his part. So we got code written very fast.
Livingston: On one computer?
Graham: Uh, well, there was a large university nearby whose computers we
sort of unofficially used.
Livingston: Nearby in Cambridge, Massachusetts?
Graham: Yes.
Livingston: What was the next big turning point after you realized you could
make this web-based?
Graham: The next turning point was when we had a working demo—when we
actually built an online store using our software and you could order from it,
and edit it through Netscape. We started Viaweb in the middle of July ’95 and I
think we had this first demo in early August.
Livingston: Who were the first people that you showed the demo to?
Graham: The first people we showed it to were some potential investors. We
ultimately decided not to take money from them, because they wanted a majority
share of the company for a comparatively small amount of money. But the
existence of these potential investors did spur us to write our first version, to get
that demo working.
Livingston: Once you had this demo, did you start thinking about signing up
customers or were you focused on raising money?
Graham: What we really thought we needed to do was write more software.
We were software guys. Maybe someone who knew more about business would
be thinking about going and getting customers, but frankly the idea of customers
frightened us. We thought, “Before we go get any customers, why don’t
we just write a few more thousand lines of code?”
Livingston: Why were you frightened of customers?
Graham: Being a sales guy and being a hacker are two very different kinds of
work. We were very comfortable dealing with hacking, but dealing with customers
seemed like this terrifying unknown. If it seems strange to you that we
were afraid of customers, imagine how the average sales guy would feel about
modifying the software running on his laptop. The idea would seem terrifying.
Whereas to a hacker, big deal.