Founders at Work.pdf

Ann Winblad 307
the leadership team that you can’t remedy quickly, the company will die of selfinflicted
wounds.
Livingston: Why don’t more women start software startups?
Winblad: You know, I don’t know the answer to this. I was at an IBM event
recently, and Sam Palmisano, in sort of the midst of his extemporaneous presentation
at this event, said, “My daughter, who is 13, is a math whiz, and she was
just really focused on math and now that she’s 13, she’s worried about appearing
too nerdy.” It was sort of like a segue and then he went back onto the speech,
“So I don’t know if she’ll stick with it.” I wrote him a thank you note, and I said,
“It was really great to be included in this IBM event. It was a great event, and I
caught that little sidebar that you said about your 13-year-old daughter, and
I hope we can do a better job . . . some of the successful women in the software
industry—myself, Carol Bartz, Heidi Roizen—all of us were math whizzes and
we had really fun teenage lives as well as adult lives and have been very
successful.”
It’s, first of all, a small number of women and an increasingly small number
of any gender being inspired by math and science. It’s a big problem. You’d
think, “Hey, this week in the news, the richest guy in the world—Bill Gates—
the President of China is spending more time with him than the President.
Steve Jobs, with this aspirational product, the iPod. Why don’t you want to be
those guys?” They have inspirational products, inspirational lives, and it’s not
like we’re under-covered in the media. Something is getting lost in the message
here, where it should be really inspiring: “All I have to do is figure out this
math-and-science thing, and I’m writing part of my ticket here.” Why that is not
pulling not only women, but pulling everybody to say, “I want to be like those
people,” I don’t know.
You’d think that everybody would want to have our jobs. We’ve all been
handsomely rewarded. The stories are not like, “Hey, we had patrician backgrounds
and silver spoons, and we bought our way into this.” We just “thought”
our way into these industries. The power of thought and math and science and
computing, you’re given that for free—it’s a choice you can make. You take that
choice, and it gives you sort of a magic wand to be a captain of an industry that’s
still fairly young, that’s driving the whole world economy. I don’t know. This is
just a mystery to me. Women running these companies have very rich lives. I
don’t know.
Livingston: What is your top advice that you give to founders starting
companies?
Winblad: We try not to give too much prescriptive advice. “Think like a big dog
and then figure out how you find leverage to get there.” You have to have tactics
to get to strategies, but you have to have a strategy, and you have to put your
strategy up here and then see “Where’s my gap” to get to this aspirational goal.
You’re always going to be short of people, you’re always going to be short of
money, you’re going to be short of source supply value. So you have to find
leverage points, versus working your way up through tiny little rungs and seeing
if you get there. Think like a big dog, and find leverage to get there.