Founders at Work.pdf

Ann Winblad 303
Livingston: Do you remember a time when people misunderstood what you
were doing because it was so new?
Winblad: My parents thought I was pretty much over the top because I had
this very prestigious job at the Federal Reserve Bank and went to work every
day from my apartment to this beautiful bank and got promoted and made a
bunch of money for my age. Why would I quit? It was very hard to communicate
to people who weren’t in the very small software industry what you were
doing. People didn’t question you; they couldn’t even converse with you.
At Thanksgiving: “What do you do again? . . . OK, thanks, that sounds really
interesting.” Minnesota was very different back then than out here. People
didn’t quit their jobs and start these companies.
Although, once you become an entrepreneur, it’s sort of like becoming an
alien. You notice there are other aliens! There they are, they’ve done that too.
How did you do that? It was mostly hard to converse about . . . you couldn’t get
wisdom from anyone. Comments like, “What would you do with this software
company?” “What’s a software company?” It was such a nascent industry, and
that’s really a gift to join a nascent industry that becomes a real one. If you’re in
the group grope phase, you can make tons of mistakes. Because there is no one
else competing with you or nipping at your legs. It’s a completely green field.
Livingston: Did you have competitors that you worried about?
Winblad: We didn’t ever worry about competitors. There were, over time,
other companies that started with various different offerings in what was called
“accounting software” then. But again, nobody had any market share—100 percent
is available for everyone, so we wouldn’t get it all anyway. It wasn’t a
competitive thing.
As we got into the ’80s, then it was clear that we should try to find leverage
points for the business versus just do it on our own, and we should also learn
from other players’ successes. And we weren’t competing head-on for customers,
because you could look this way and see different customers and they
could look that way. There was the show called Comdex (Computer Dealer
Exposition), which doesn’t exist anymore, and everybody sold their products
through computer resellers and, shortly after that, retail stores like
ComputerLand or BusinessLand. Comdex was the best thing that ever
occurred for us. You could see everybody there. It was pretty small in the beginning;
it was all in the one Hilton Convention Center in Las Vegas. We had some
really interesting experiences there because we had to decide whether we
should spend a bunch of money on a really nice booth.
How do you do a booth for a trade show? Who do you ask? Nobody knows.
So we started searching around for someone who has done booths for trade
shows, and we find this woman. Her name was Betty. I have no idea what’s happened
to Betty, because she was probably in her 60s then, so she would be
90 now.
Betty was this trooper woman—she was a little woman and very skilled—
and she said, “Oh yeah, I know how to build you a booth.” We said, “OK, fine,”
and we didn’t really pay any attention. She built a solid wood booth. It was not