Founders at Work.pdf

Livingston: Who did you learn things from?
Joshua Schachter 231
Schachter: Albert, the guy I mentioned. I learned a lot from Fred Wilson of
Union Square, certainly. I learned a great deal from my Morgan folks. I learned
a hell of a lot about how to understand problems. It was rough sometimes, but
they pushed me far. My coworkers at Morgan were smart people. One of the
people we worked with won the Nobel Prize for economics while I was there. It
was a fast, smart environment.
I remember when I interviewed at Google the first time around and they
were making derogatory comments about where I worked: “Well, here you’ll
get to work with PhDs and computer scientists.” And I’m like, “I already do.”
Livingston: So it didn’t work out when you interviewed for a job at Google?
Schachter: I went out there once and was rejected because I didn't know C++.
Livingston: Was there ever a time when anyone tried to trick you or take
advantage of you?
Schachter: Yes, but it would not be polite to talk about it. There were several
cases of people wanting to get equity in advance of other people, or weird deals.
Livingston: As a new startup founder who has never done a deal or negotiated,
do you think you need to be careful of getting taken advantage of?
Schachter: In general, I found VCs to be significantly politer than the folks I
worked with. The worst they did was not call me back. I’d never hear from
them again. Brad Feld does a nice blog talking about how the VC process
works. He says they never call you back to say no—they don’t want to close the
door in case they want to open it again, but they don’t want to actually give you
a response. Very few VCs actually said, “Sorry, we’re not interested.”
Livingston: How did the process of starting your own company and then selling
it change you?
Schachter: It pushes you far. You learn a lot. I did a round of funding, I was
writing code, I was hiring people, chief architect designer, negotiator, you name
it. I did all of it, for the most part.
When Albert got up to speed and was working full-time, he did a great deal
of work there as well.
Livingston: What surprised you most about having your own startup?
Schachter: It’s a combination of sudden freedom to run things as you please
and crushing responsibility in which you know you have to do certain things in a
certain way at a certain time. That eradicates all of that freedom. You become
a robot on rails. You know what you have to do and you are working in a certain
direction.
Maybe other people are different, but I think that every step was sort of the
inevitable, inexorable progress due to the previous steps in the path. It’s not like
I had no choice, but everything I did was the only choice because it was the only
thing that made sense at the time. It’s not that long ago, but no regrets, that was
the path to take. Everything that had to be done was done.