Founders at Work.pdf

320 Founders at Work
Right around the same time a friend of mine, Elsa Dorfman, the photographer,
asked if I knew anyone who would rent her house. I said, “How would
you feel about renting it to a little group of programmers, and we’ll use it as a
company office?” She agreed.
So we moved into Elsa’s house, and once you’ve gotten an office and you
have customers, things kind of take on a life of their own. The toolkit got more
and more popular, and we amazed the customers. Most computer programmers
don’t listen to what the customer wants. They have their own ideas of
what would be cool, so they spend a lot of time building stuff that the customer
doesn’t want. They don’t have an investment in the user experience.
A friend of mine was just telling me the other day that his company offshored
a product design to India, and said, “These programmers in India, they
did exactly what we told them, no matter how ridiculous!” Most programmers
don’t think about the user experience. They get a spec book, and they say,
“Well, I’m going to meet this spec to make the customer happy.” That’s not
really enough; you have to make something good for the user if you want to call
yourself an engineer.
The third element is just meeting the deadlines. If we’d said we were going
to do something by a certain date, we did it, and the customers were stunned.
Livingston: How many of you were there when you first started?
Greenspun: About five, and then we grew pretty quickly to ten. There was so
much repeat business because customers would be amazed that we delivered
on time and that it was more or less what they wanted and actually usable for
the end user.
Livingston: When you started, it sort of grew out of your own interest in
the Web?
Greenspun: Well, in response to people downloading the software. They
weren’t really interested in photo.net, but they had decided to adopt our software
toolkit. In some cases, they’d heard from Edward Tufte in his lectures.
People would ask, “What’s good on the Web?” and he’d say, “Nothing’s good on
the Web,” and they’d say, “C’mon, give us two good websites.” And one of the
ones he’d mention would be photo.net as an example with good design.
But most of the business was because we’d released free open source software.
The 15-year-olds would just use it, and the big companies would decide
that, since they had so much money and I guess not enough good programmers,
it made sense for them to pay us to help them out with it.
Livingston: What was unique about ArsDigita?
Greenspun: We tried to help each programmer develop an independent, professional
reputation. We had this idea that programmers could be professionals,
like doctors or lawyers, and, to that end, we wanted the programmers to be real
engineers—to sit down face to face with the customer, find out what was
needed, come up with some suggestions or changes based on the programmer’s
experience with similar services, and then take a lot of responsibility for making
it happen.