Founders at Work.pdf

218 Founders at Work
I think Yahoo is smarter now about dealing with startups than they were
then. We were one of the first companies they bought, and I think the idea was,
back then, that what you should do with an acquisition is “integrate” it, in the
same way that a sugar cube becomes integrated with your tea. We basically got
dissolved within Yahoo, and all the people working on Viaweb—or Yahoo Store
as it then became—got dispersed to all the corresponding bits of Yahoo. The
engineers got put with the engineers and the people working on customer support
got put with the support people and the sales guys got put with the Yahoo
sales guys.
It seemed to Yahoo that this was the most efficient, organized way of doing
things, but actually it was terrible for us. We had been this little tight-knit group
that worked really well together and suddenly we were spread out all over
Yahoo.
Livingston: Any general thought you have on the acquisition process, since you
had several offers?
Graham: Never believe it’s a deal till the money’s in the bank. Even at the point
where you walk in that room to sign the final papers, there’s still a 10 percent
chance the deal’s going to fall through. At the point where people say, “We want
to buy you,” the chances of it falling through are like 80 or 90 percent. So you
can’t let yourself believe. If someone wants to make you an offer, fine, but don’t
change your plans based on that. Just keep going.
Livingston: Looking back, what surprised you most in your experience with a
startup?
Graham: One thing that was surprising was that it actually worked. There we
were, in the summer of 1995, thinking, “We don’t know anything about business,
but we’re good programmers. Maybe if we write a really good program,
we’ll make something all these users will want and we’ll get lots of users and
then some big company will buy us.” And 3 years and enormous numbers of ups
and downs later, that’s exactly what happened. We had this theory about how
business might work, and we sort of forced it to conform to our theory.
I know Robert was surprised that we made any money, because I have a real
index of how he was feeling about Viaweb early on. A couple months in, he and
I were having dinner, and I made a bet with him that if he ever made a million
dollars out of Viaweb, he would get his ear pierced. So the day after the Yahoo
deal closed, Trevor and I grabbed him by one arm each and took him down to
the Garage in Harvard Square, where all the teenagers get their nose rings, and
we got his ear pierced. He spent a long time trying to pick out the smallest one.
Livingston: Some aspects of business turned out to be less of a mystery than
you had thought. What did you find you were better at than you thought?
Graham: I found I could actually sell moderately well. I could convince people
of stuff. I learned a trick for doing this: to tell the truth. A lot of people think
that the way to convince people of things is to be eloquent—to have some bag
of tricks for sliding conclusions into their brains. But there’s also a sort of hack
that you can use if you are not a very good salesman, which is simply tell people