Founders at Work.pdf

Ann Winblad 299
got my masters degree at night and Saturdays while at the Federal Reserve
Bank, and I was only the second woman in the whole Federal Reserve banking
system that had a masters degree. In the whole Fed system!
When I went there, it was the first real business experience I had—
although I had had part time jobs. I’d never been in a corporation, and it felt so
glamorous to have a cubicle. Minneapolis is a bright city. There’s the Nicollet
Mall and you were right downtown in the city. It’s like getting a job in San
Francisco.
But it just wasn’t inspiring. No one was chomping at the bit. I actually can’t
remember—I knew I was going to quit, but I can’t remember the moment
where I thought, “I’ll quit and start a company.” I still felt very empowered,
like, “This isn’t this hard a job. This is a big job and I’ve already gotten promoted
once in the first 3 months and I know I can earn money. I can always
come back to this, so why don’t I break out?” So the three guys from the
Federal Reserve that started the company with me—one guy did quit his job
and the other two took a year sabbatical, just in case this didn’t work. They held
on to the safety ring.
There were not a bunch of people saying, “Start a company, start a company.
Let’s do this. Let’s build something from scratch.” It’s so long ago now that
I just remember the general feeling that there was very little to risk. I was
somehow already fully trained for anything that might confront me. Of course,
all that is false; there’s a lot of risk and you are never fully equipped to . . . you
just have to be very adaptable. It turned out I was adaptable. I didn’t know that
until I did that, but it was just a feeling of fearlessness. “What’s the risk? What
will I have to lose? I’m sure I can do this.” It was not cockiness, just that
moment you feel in your youthfulness that you are sort of empowered to
achieve.
I think what does separate some entrepreneurs from other entrepreneurs is
we’re not handwringers. We don’t worry about the unknown. We don’t really
worry about the risk points ahead. As you get older and you get more experience,
you train yourself to think ahead about the risk points versus just to take
the next hill. But non–risk-takers and non-entrepreneurs would really have big
headaches about this. They would need some level of comfort and safety.
That’s something that we look for in entrepreneurs—that they have the
courage to do the job. That they’ll have the ability to judge the business situation.
They’ll have the ability to lead people. They’ll have the ability to interact
with the marketplace and to really build confidence into strategy.
Livingston: I read that you initially started out as a consulting company and you
would do the “real” startup project at night, even though you hadn’t figured out
exactly what you planned to do.
Winblad: Yes. We did that because no one had any money. There wasn’t a
Y Combinator around to even give us $6000. In fact, I exhausted all of my
savings on the incorporation fees and was about $500 short, which I had to borrow
from my brother, who was in high school. But he had a job. He was the only
one who had $500 to borrow from that I knew. So we had to find a way to cover
ourselves.