Founders at Work.pdf

220 Founders at Work
We were on the top floor; we didn’t really have a place to put a gas generator.
The first thing we tried was putting it in the office next to the server room. We
started the thing up and it sounded like the end of the world. It was the loudest
thing I have ever heard in my life. You might think the problem with starting a
gas generator inside your office would be the exhaust, but it never got to that
point. It was so terrifyingly loud. We thought, “Even to avoid our customers
calling us up angrily because their stores are offline, we cannot endure this.”
After about 5 seconds, we just looked at one another and shook our heads and
turned it off.
Then we tried putting it out on the street in front of our building. The problem
was, we were up on the third floor. We got every extension cord we could
find in the place and stuck them together end to end, and they were just long
enough to get out the window and down to the street. But only just—it was so
close that the extension cord was actually tight. It was running through our
office at chest height and you could kind of twang it and it would go
“boinnnnnggg.” Then we started the gas generator up in the street and that was
just about bearable, so we ran the servers on that for a couple hours until the
power came back.
Livingston: Can you remember any other hair-raising moments?
Graham: At one point, in the Spring of ’96, when we only had about 20 users,
we all went off to this trade show down in New York—the first trade show we
ever went to. We came back and it turned out the server had crashed soon after
we’d left and had been down for 11 hours. And nobody noticed! We kept waiting
for the angry phone calls, and they never came. It was so early in the history
of the Web that nobody was ordering from these stores anyway, and they
weren’t even checking themselves to see if their sites were up. Half of these
people who had online stores with us probably didn’t even have Internet access.
Livingston: Do you have any regrets from the experience?
Graham: One thing I regret is how pathetic we were during much of this whole
process. We all had practically zero assets when we started, and this was during
the Internet Bubble, remember—very early in the Internet Bubble, but still,
there were people starting companies and getting them bought for like $5 million.
Millions of dollars, when the most money I’d ever had in my bank account
was about $10,000. There was a point where we started to seem like a real company—that
is, real enough that someone might actually buy us—and this made
us just pathetically eager to sell the company. We must have seemed like such
losers.
So I can understand now when founders want to sell out for a couple million.
Investors say, “No, you should wait,” but it’s easy for them to say. A million
dollars seems just overwhelmingly attractive when you have nothing. You don’t
care if it’s a good deal or not.
I also kind of regret being a zombie for several years straight. I really had no
life during Viaweb. If people are talking about some famous movie and I’ve
never seen it and have no idea what it’s about, it’s usually a movie that came out