Founders at Work.pdf

278 Founders at Work
Kahle: I’ve had two. Most people don’t have mentors. They say, “Well, I’ve had
influential teachers. I’ve learned a lot from this person.” But they don’t think of
it as a mentor. A mentor is a life guide, somebody that you might work with, but
somebody who is helpful toward watching bigger issues about things that guide
your life.
Danny Hillis, who was 4 years older and whom I worked for at MIT and
Thinking Machines, has been a guide and a help ever since. The other was Bill
Dunn. I found those two men, both being very kind and smart, had the ability
to know what was going to happen—even though they had way too little information.
I’d always sort of note down their wild ideas and think, “Did they come
about?” A few years later you find out they were right. Some people are just
more right than they ever deserve to be.
Livingston: You’ve done startups in the East and West Coast hubs. Is one place
better than the other for startups?
Kahle: Oh, I think it’s much easier to do a startup on the West Coast. There are
all the facilities and services available to you. You can put together a marketing
department out of part-time people. You can hire an accountant to just do
exactly what you need. You need a lot less infrastructure that you control to do a
startup on the West Coast than on the East Coast.
If you started with $8 million, you can buy everything you need; but if you
are starting, just you, you can do a startup out of your bedroom. In fact, a lot of
people do. In fact, most bedrooms I think are startups! The idea that you can
start on a shoestring, that you can hold a meeting in a coffeehouse and that’s
OK, is perfectly legitimate on the West Coast.
Livingston: Why not in Cambridge?
Kahle: Maybe you can do that now in Cambridge; maybe it’s changed. But
there’s a more institutional idea that you have to be more proven. San Francisco
is full of dreamers. It’s the people with the new ideas. It may be bad, they may
be inappropriate, they may fail, but I love the idea that we can do something
new and different—something that hasn’t been done before, something that’s
going to affect a lot of people. There’s an idea that you can pull something off
here. That sort of uplifting nature to San Francisco and the Bay Area in general
really lives on. This is a city of dreamers, and that’s what makes it just a
wonderful place to live and to work.
Livingston: Looking back on all of your experiences, what surprised you most?
Kahle: How long things take. To start a company and to get to a point where
one has a critical mass—you have an office, you’ve got your CFO, you’ve got all
of the infrastructure to become a viable entity. I think about 20 to 40 people is
a golden size, because you’re not spending all of your time doing things that
you’re not that good at. There are other people in the organization with more
specialization in different areas. It takes a couple years to really get that
debugged.