Founders at Work.pdf

Paul Graham 219
the truth. Our strategy for selling our software to people was: make the best
software and then tell them, truthfully, “this is the best software.” And they
could tell we were telling the truth.
Another advantage of telling the truth is that you don’t have to remember
what you’ve said. You don’t have to keep any state in your head. It’s a purely
functional business strategy. (Hackers will get what I mean.)
Livingston: Were there things that nontechnical people misunderstood about
what Viaweb was doing?
Graham: Constantly. No one ever seemed to get that the software ran on the
server. Nowadays there are so many web-based applications that you take this
for granted, but this was a year before Hotmail. We would explain to people
how the thing worked and give them a demo and they would say, “Great. Where
do I go to download it?”
After we got bought by Yahoo, a reporter who had been covering us for the
past 2 years wrote an article about the Yahoo acquisition and at the end said “It
only takes 10 minutes to download.” After covering us for years, the guy still
thought this was client software.
Livingston: Is there anything that you would have done differently?
Graham: I wouldn’t worry so much about seeming like a real company. Now I
would just say, keep it a bunch of guys operating out of an apartment for as long
as you want, because there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that, especially if
you’re writing great software.
Another thing I would do is open an online store ourselves. We did use our
software for building our website. We were the only one of all our competitors
who actually used our software for building our own corporate website. But we
didn’t have anything people could buy online. If we had been selling stuff,
we would have understood what life was like from the merchant’s point of view.
Livingston: What was one of the funniest moments?
Graham: Probably the time we tried starting a gas generator inside our office.
There was this huge blackout in Cambridge that lasted for about five hours. We
always had our servers in our offices with us. We didn’t trust this collocation
stuff. Nowadays, collocating is the standard thing to do and even big companies
do it, but we felt like we had to have those servers in the room with us. So when
the power went out, our servers were really dead.
We had some battery-powered UPSs, but they would only last for half an
hour. They were really designed for power spikes, not for the power going out
for 5 hours. So I dispatched Trevor to Home Depot to buy a gasoline-powered
generator as fast as possible, while I sat there watching the UPSs’ power go
down, turning off servers one by one—thinking about which customers were on
each server and which ones would be the maddest, and turning off whichever
server would have the least mad customers on it. Eventually I had to turn off all
the servers, because it took Trevor a while to get to Home Depot and back.
Finally he showed up with this gas generator, and we weren’t really sure
where to put it because we were in this small office building in Harvard Square.