Founders at Work.pdf

332 Founders at Work
Livingston: What about your board?
Greenspun: We were supposed to have two outside board members to break
this kind of deadlock. They were subject to the venture capitalists’ approval,
and they wouldn’t approve anyone. I’d say, “What about this MIT professor?”
And they’d say, “No, he’s not qualified.” “What about this person who’s started
and run a $100 million company?” “Not qualified.” They never proposed anyone
themselves, and whoever I proposed, they shot down.
Basically, with their CEO that they brought in, they had a three-to-two
board majority no matter what. And they said, “We’re going to run this company.
We’re going to make all the decisions, and you’re just going to be a
figurehead.”
I got very upset. It was a difficult time for me. I didn’t have enough perspective
to realize . . . A couple of my friends, John Gage and Bill Joy, the
founders of Sun—I know John, and I don’t think he’d be upset if I told this
story—he would scream and yell about the direction that Sun was taking and
how bad it was, and Bill Joy would say, “C’mon, John, calm down, it’s only a
company.” Which is the right perspective to have, but I didn’t have that distance.
If I had been on the board of somebody else’s company and the same
kind of thing was going on, I could have probably contributed in a more positive
manner just by having less emotional stake in the matter.
Remember, I’d financed the company and I owned most of it, so it was a big
asset for me. It was my only asset, basically. It was just too personal. So after
about 6 months, because they had no management experience, no P&L experience,
no engineering experience, and no numbers experience, they couldn’t see
that what I was telling them was right and that they were headed for some
serious financial and customer losses. They just thought I was injuring their
self-esteem—that’s what they said.
They basically fired me and all but one of my cofounders. They pushed
them out of the company within a month or two. I’d been fired 2 months after
they came in; I just didn’t know that I’d been fired. I was still getting a paycheck,
but nobody was listening to me. They were telling people, “Don’t listen
to him; he doesn’t have any power.”
I was chairman of the board. I’d been fired probably within a month and
half, but it took me 6 months to realize it. They finally said, “OK, you’re fired
now, but you can still be on the board.” I initially thought, “Maybe this is good.”
I was sitting in my bathtub reading the New Yorker magazine, and I realized
that I’d been psychotic. That I’d thought, “If I don’t write software, people
won’t have any software. If I don’t write books on how to do things, nobody will
learn how to do things. If I don’t teach at MIT, these students will never learn
anything.” It hit me: I could sit here in this bathtub for the rest of my life reading
the New Yorker magazine, and Microsoft will eventually write all the software
that people need, and maybe it will be clunky and expensive, but so what?
It’s not my problem. They’ll get the software they need, eventually. If I don’t
teach at MIT, they have $5 billion in assets, and they’ll be able to hire somebody
much better than I am to teach these kids.