Founders at Work.pdf

Philip Greenspun 321
We pushed the profit-and-loss responsibility down to individual teams. For
example, if there were two or three programmers working for Hewlett-
Packard, then those guys would be solely responsible for the project and making
sure that it got delivered on time and that the customer was happy. They’d
get a big bonus if they did a good job and the customer was happy and the thing
was profitable. Implicit in that was that, if it didn’t go well, we’d know whom to
blame.
Livingston: What were some of the biggest turning points?
Greenspun: One big turning point was getting Levi Strauss as a customer. They
had acquired a small company that made custom-cut khaki pants, and they
wanted a web front end for this new factory that they were building that could
take your measurements and sew you a pair of khakis to your specs. They asked
around MIT, “Who’s really an expert on building this kind of thing?” They came
to us and it was a happy coincidence, because they were happy to pay for lots of
software and infrastructure and tools and let us keep the rights to it all.
That was one good thing about working for non-technical companies. If
you worked for IBM, they make their money by owning technologies, so if you
build a technology for them, they want to own it. Whereas publishers or clothing
companies, they make their money by having a brand or unique content. I
did a lot of work for Hearst Corporation and they don’t want to give away the
content of Cosmo magazine or their relationship with Fabio, but if you build
some Perl scripts for them to do server administration, it doesn’t occur to them
that that’s something that they have to own and prevent other publishers from
getting hold of.
So Levi’s was a great client and it was a big turning point because it gave us
the money to build whatever we needed to build.
Another turning point was in 1998 when I published Database Backed Web
Sites. We were working on a site and the client said, “You have to finish this site
for us, because as soon as the book comes out, your phone is going to be ringing
off the hook.” I didn’t believe him, but he was right, and that was a huge turning
point. It was on my website for free, but having a hard copy in the stores
gave it a bit more credibility and more readers.
That was pretty much always how we built the business—tutorial publications
on our website, books in bookstores, and public lectures. Edward Tufte
gave us this idea of having a one-day seminar that people would come to and
learn. We would get 400 people to come to a free, one-day course, and then
maybe 1 or 2 would become customers and maybe 10 of them would adopt the
software.
Almost all of our marketing and sales was educational. We just thought,
“We’ll teach people stuff, and some tiny fraction of those people will become
our customers.” It seemed to work just as well as running ads, which were a
hard sell and kind of empty and a waste of people’s time. In this case, nobody
could ever say that we wasted their time. I think the same percentage of people
that read an ad in ComputerWorld magazine and bought something would read
one of our tutorials and buy something from us.