Founders at Work.pdf

212 Founders at Work
So many things can go wrong with deals, and they all do. Before we ultimately
got bought by Yahoo, we probably had nine or ten different acquirers that we
were talking to, and things always went wrong for one reason or another.
Livingston: So then what did you do? Go back to business?
Graham: Yeah. There were always two stories going on simultaneously with
Viaweb. There was the software and the customer story, which just went
smoothly and wonderfully the whole way along. We kept writing great software,
we kept getting more and more customers, the customers loved us, the growth
was this beautiful, smooth upward curve. Simultaneously, there was this story
about the business, which was one disaster after another. So most of the actual
turning points are not software or customer turning points, because everything
went great there. All the turning points are business turning points.
The next one was probably when Robert went off that summer and took a
summer job working for another company. He went to work at DEC SRC out in
California. The problem was, he didn’t tell me he was going to do this until . . .
Well, actually he never told me. A few days before he left, we were having
dinner with some friends and one of them said, “So Robert, are you looking forward
to California?” I looked at Robert and said “California?” And it turned out
he was going to leave in a week for the whole summer.
So now I had to explain to our investors why one of the founders of the company
they had just invested in had gone and taken a summer job working for
another company. That required all my spin abilities.
Livingston: What did you tell them?
Graham: I said that this was part of his graduate student career and that it was
a common thing for people in graduate school to take jobs working in research
labs during the summer and, yes, this was another company, but it was really
more of a research lab than a company. That part was certainly true. When they
tried to turn AltaVista into a company, it was disaster.
Livingston: What was the next turning point after Robert left for his summer
job?
Graham: Our main angel investor, the metals trader, was encouraged that the
big company had wanted to buy us, so that spring he’d put more money in—still
angel-scale money. We weren’t desperately running out of money, but we were
going to run out sometime in the fall. The angel investor decided that we
needed to have a business guy as CEO and that he wasn’t going to give us any
more money unless we got someone. So that summer, as well as trying to deal
with Rtm being in California, we spent our time talking to various business
guys.
The problem with all of them was that they had delusions of grandeur. This
was the beginning of the Internet Bubble, remember, and I think all of these
guys saw themselves as some kind of grand CEO, while we programmers
labored in the kitchen cooking the food and washing the dishes. If the deal
were simply that the business guy would be the public face of the company, but
we would be allowed to do what we wanted and make sure everything worked