Founders at Work.pdf

266 Founders at Work
Another lesson that I learned out of Thinking Machines was, if you’re trying
to get your company to think differently—to do something interesting—pick
your setting carefully. Thinking Machines was set in an 1800s Victorian mansion
on 100 acres of forest just outside of Boston. It was a park, basically. Working in
an environment where, if you got stuck, you’d go for a long walk is very different
than trying to do a startup and think differently if you’re in Suite 201 in some
major office complex. That was a lesson that I’ve used every startup since.
Thinking Machines had the great fortune of starting with $8 million in the
bank, because some very rich individuals really believed in it. It was not
venture-funded, and it was founded with the idea that it was going to take years
and years and years to actually get something real done. That allowed Thinking
Machines to attract a very interesting set of people. Richard Feynman worked
there, Stephen Wolfram, Marvin Minsky. I found that I had better access to
professors in a company than I did when I was in school. So that was an interesting
way of trying to figure out, “What should the company do?”
They took a good summer to try to figure that out and, actually, through a
bunch of the first year, which is a luxury that most startups don’t have. Usually
you have to work really hard to try to get your first release built. So being in an
interesting setting with brilliant people coming by, it was quite a unique
startup—very unlike the West Coast startups that I’ve seen.
Livingston: What were some of the big turning points early on?
Kahle: We hired a fellow from Digital Equipment Corporation—his title was
VP of Reality. The idea was to try to help a bunch of folks that had great ideas
out of MIT, but had never really produced a supercomputer before, figure out
“How do we actually do that?” I remember being invited to give a design review
of the core central processing unit of this new computer, and I really didn’t
know what a design review was. It was quite embarrassing. But it was very helpful
to inject a VP of Reality. It stirred up the culture to try to get it so that we
could actually produce working machines.
There was a lot of trust in very young people in that company. People were
in their early 20s. So the basic design and building of the machines—even
though we were completely underqualified, looking back on it—was entrusted
to a very young set. But it made it fun. We were absolutely glued to the project.
We didn’t really have much of a rest of a life.
Livingston: Were there any experiences where you thought, “If I start a
startup, I’m not doing this”?
Kahle: The blessing of Thinking Machines and the curse of Thinking Machines
was that it had a lot of money. If you have a lot of money, then you can be
detached from people that are going to pay you in the future.
My first startup upon leaving Thinking Machines was a bootstrap. We had
no investment at all, and I had no savings, so it was self-funded from the beginning.
That was a night and day cold bath. It was sort of like going from the
Roaring 20s, when champagne is coming from everywhere, into the depression,
where you are washing your baggies and reusing twist ties.