Founders at Work.pdf

302 Founders at Work
I think this is something that people underestimate—that there are always
people out there rooting for you. That is probably part of what you have to
develop. They probably went back to their offices and said the following: “We
got a great deal on this software and this great little company—I think those
guys might be successful—called Open Systems. And this young woman got up
there, and she had the balls—or stupidity—to ask us each to rip out checks for
$10,000.”
It was such a big victory and we didn’t have cell phones at that time, so I’m
on the pay phone in the airport going, “I’ve got $120,000 in my handbag!” We
did a lot of creative things that in hindsight were very, very thoughtful. I was
very fortunate that these three guys—that we all challenged each other quite a
bit, that no one thought anybody’s idea was better than the other’s. So we had to
vet our ideas against each other and sort of “win” amongst each other—the best
strategy, idea, whatever. You’re very lucky if you have an ensemble early on
where no one just sort of accepts that you make all the calls. That you are really
working in the beginning as an ensemble.
When we fund early-stage companies, even though there is a CEO named,
in most cases in the ensemble, it is an ensemble. That’s sort of what you look
for: is there an early ensemble where everyone’s rowing the oars and looking at
where the boat is going and watching out for each other? That it is not sort of
the “Let’s get the org chart together and you’ll lead us all.”
We did have an office in an apartment building and the first real vacation I
took, I got a phone call that there had been a fire, which, of course, was the
indication that we should move out. The fire burned my old cheerleading letters,
old yearbooks and memorabilia, but, miraculously, it didn’t touch our computers
or our software.
It was like, OK, you burn up the useless stuff. That stuff’s nice to have, but
you look at it once every 30 years.
Livingston: How did the fire start?
Winblad: It was in an air conditioning unit in the back of the building. It was
just faulty wiring. The building was built in the ’20s and it was a cheap building.
It was a five-bedroom apartment I’d rented in a beautiful area of Minneapolis
called Kenwood, but it was a dump of a building. It had beautiful wood floors
and a bunch of rooms and a big dining room and living room. The dining room
was a computer room, and the kitchen was big. So we had four offices, plus my
bedroom, which I could use as my own office as long as I straightened it up
every day. Then the living room we used as a cubicled area for the rest of the
guys, but it was more than time to move out of there. That was another, “It’s
time to really either fish or cut bait here. Well, I guess we’re going to have to
move to a real office now.”
And that does change the real demeanor of the company. Once you start
committing to leases, furniture, a capital budget; it does change the cadence of
a company for the better. You can only virtualize the company for a very short
period of time.