Founders at Work.pdf

296 Founders at Work
you hope they’ll be successful for a long time, the law of averages and experience
tells you that at some point they will peak and they will probably begin to
decay. So you’ve got to be investing today in what your future’s going to be 5 or
10 years out.
We do try to maintain that attitude; we try and have projects focused on
new ideas and concepts, but it’s hard. So we’ve done a combination of both
internal investment over the years and acquisitions. We’ve done several acquisitions
of the style of Photoshop, where we’ve seen a new idea and a new concept
partially developed and we can bring in the resources of getting it to market and
integrating it with other products to make it much more successful than the
group could have done probably on their own.
Livingston: You and John are engineers and researchers, yet you were the main
executives up until a few years ago. You were obviously better at running a business
than originally predicted back when you raised money.
Geschke: I don’t think there’s any mystery in running a business. I think it
helped that we were in our 40s, that we had worked for a variety of organizations.
We had worked in other companies, but tried to leave their bad ideas as
proprietary to them. We tried to pick the best things that we saw.
When we started, we wanted to build a company that we would like to work
at and we kept applying that criterion. I remember, when we first hired people
in the original days, John and I would take turns hand-delivering a dozen roses
to the spouse if it was woman, a bottle of cognac if the spouse was a man, and
then champagne to the employee.
We did that for the first 18 months and then it got to be too much and we
started giving it to them at work. I suspect we don’t do that anymore. Doing
things like that to make people feel like they were part of a community helped
build a rapport inside the company so that our turnover rate has been among
the lowest in the Valley ever since we’ve been in business. Particularly with people
who are the top performers, our turnover rate has been not only single digit,
but typically 1 or 2 percent. And that’s because we’ve made it an interesting and
rewarding place to work. So I get frustrated sometimes by people who have
never run a business who are legislating things like stock option accounting and
so on. They don’t have a clue of what it takes to run a business.
Livingston: Is there any other advice you would give to someone who was
thinking of starting a startup?
Geschke: If you aren’t passionate about what you are going to do, don’t do it.
Work smart and not long, because you need to preserve all of your life, not just
your work life. One of the things that I felt really good about is that we—from
the very first employees, including John and me—enabled telecommuting from
day one. So everybody had a phone line and a modem and a terminal in their
house, the day they joined the company. (Now, of course, they have their own
personal computers and everything).
It’s devious, because I suspect we got a lot more hours of work out of them.
It’s the same reason we give them a great lunch at a discount price.