Founders at Work.pdf

230 Founders at Work
The other problem was that it didn’t work without Loaf. So that didn’t do
very well, but we got press for it. It was sufficiently innovative. Maybe I’ll
return to that idea someday.
Livingston: So press helped you get the word out about your projects?
Schachter: I was in USA Today in the late ’90s for Memepool, so it was always
from there I got a great deal of press and sort of had early training. My father
was the consumer advocate for the Long Island Railroad and was in the newspaper
all the time, so I got training sort of that way. When this stuff started happening,
I knew that you have x messages and when you talk to the press, any
question they ask is answered with one of the messages.
I understand talking to the press as an essential part of marketing. At the
same time, I understand that the consumers are the best marketers. If they love
your product and you give them the tools to market it, they will.
Livingston: What do you think about technical founders versus businesspeople
founders?
Schachter: I have never had a great deal of trust for people who don’t execute
on core ideas. I understand the value of needing someone to deal with that kind
of stuff—someone’s got to do the VC pitch and there’s got to be a CFO, etc. But
the guy who says, “I have a great idea and I’m looking for other people to implement
it,” I’m wary of—frequently because I think the process of idea-making
relies on executing and failing or succeeding at the ideas, so that you can actually
become better at coming up with ideas. It’s something you can learn. It’s a
skill, like weightlifting. That failed; that worked; continue. You begin to learn
how to make ideas. So if you are someone who can’t execute and all you can do
is come up with ideas, how do you know if they are any good? You don’t really
know if it’s a good idea until you’ve executed it. You need to understand the cost
of execution and so on.
Also, where I worked at Morgan, they were not hyper-trustful of MBAs. All
my coworkers were PhDs in computer science, mathematics, or physics.
Livingston: New York City doesn’t seem to be a place where too many startups
flourish.
Schachter: There’s a great deal of technology going on in New York City. In
financial places, there is lots of high-end, high-speed transactional technology.
There are a lot of good problems in finance. The technical problems faced
there are hard. One issue is that there is a lot of money to be made there and
the companies that are doing that pay. Some of the big brokerages pay a lot of
money annually for their technology.
Livingston: Why aren’t there more good hackers living in New York City then?
Schachter: There are. They work at banks and stuff and have side projects.
Livingston: So the smart hackers . . .
Schachter: They’re around. They just know when to be quiet and when not
to be.