Founders at Work.pdf

Ann Winblad 305
to do that after hours so the whole office doesn’t smell like burned cheese.”
Later, we had forklifts and conveyor belts and the whole thing, because we had
palettes of software we had to ship around the country. I never had a college
class on any of this.
Livingston: There were no mentors? People who had gone through it before?
Winblad: It was so new. There were many mentors who had gone through
business—we had a great lawyer. But he’d never built a software company. He
didn’t ship booths around the country or shrink-wrap software. Or license software.
Nobody had. Rumor has it that Lotus thought it was so cool to have the
shrink-wrap machines that, whenever they’d ship a new product, they would
shrink-wrap the head programmer and unwrap him quick before he smothered
to death. I don’t know if that’s fact or fiction.
So for us, it was never stressful because we didn’t feel the cadence of competitors
on us. It was tiring and it was hard, but it was a lot of fun. It was like,
“OK, now what?”
Livingston: Was there ever a time when you wanted to quit?
Winblad: No. You also learn how to optimize your time, and you get really
good at that. You do it wrong—and I see entrepreneurs do this, “Let’s get up
earlier and stay up later.” I started putting the stuff I needed to read in my bed
so, when I’d wake up, it would be there to read, so I’d maximize my time.
You’re young, and you are really sort of superhuman. But you are not very efficient
doing that, so that’s where people who become your business colleagues
start saying, “That’s not going to work.” That’s stuff that you do get help from
friends and advisors. Like, “Hey, you are better off taking a month-long vacation
and turning stuff over and getting fully rested and charging at it again than
trying to figure out how you might personally live off 4 hours of sleep a night
forever.”
Livingston: Looking back, do you think you were a typical founder?
Winblad: Yes. I think that I had all the good parts of a typical founder and all
the bad parts of a typical founder. You get good at figuring things out so that you
don’t just view every problem as if it needs a brand new lens, which, of course,
it doesn’t. And you learn on the job, so you do a lot of things poorly. Unless
you’ve managed people before, you don’t really know how to do that well. So
you have to build skills. I think it’s really interesting being a venture capitalist
because, when you’ve got 30 years of experience, then your challenge is how to
teach and not tell. Because you want people to figure it out. You want to make
sure that you can grab them by the coattails if they are falling off a cliff, but you
want them to discover the edges by themselves.
That’s the biggest challenge of moving from being a business leader to being
a business investor. Your job is not to tell, but to teach.
Livingston: Do you think you are a better judge of good management teams
because you were once a startup founder yourself?