Founders at Work.pdf

Philip Greenspun 333
That was an epiphany; I didn’t have to work 7 days a week anymore, doing
stuff that was repetitive in a lot of cases. I’d been building multiuser Internet
applications for 20 years, with a lot of excursions into the CAD computer and
engineering world as well, but basically 10 years exclusively in Internet apps. So
I thought, “I can be doing something else. I’m an investor in this company. Let
them build this company. Let them deal with all these issues. I’ll just collect my
dividends.” I thought maybe this was a good thing, that I could do new stuff—
new research projects that were interesting to me.
Meanwhile, because these people didn’t know anything about the business,
they were continuing to lose a lot of money. They hired a vice president of marketing
who would come in at 10 a.m., leave at 3 p.m. to play basketball, and had
no ideas. He wanted to change the company’s name. This was a product that
was in use in 10,000 sites worldwide—so at least 10,000 programmers knew it
as the ArsDigita Community System. There were thousands and thousands of
people who had come to our face-to-face seminars. There were probably
100,000 people worldwide who knew of us, because it was all free. And he said,
“We should change the company name because, when we hire these salespeople
and they’re cold-calling customers, it will be hard for the customer to
write down the name; they’ll have to spell it out.” And they did hire these professional
salespeople to go around and harass potential customers, but they
never really sold anything.
Because I wasn’t a great manager—and I knew I wasn’t—I said, “I’m organizing
this company like McDonald’s. Each restaurant is going to be managed by
a few people, and they’re going to have profit-and-loss responsibility. If they
make a profit, they get to pocket half of it. If they make a loss, we’re going to
know who’s responsible, and we’re going to go there and fix it, and there are
going to be consequences for those people.” That’s a very easy way to run a
business. It’s naturally profitable. People have all the right incentives to make
their customer happy, to do the thing on time, to take the customer’s money,
deposit it in the bank, and then move on to the next one and get their bonus at
the end of the year.
Without even realizing what a risk they were taking, the new management
said, “Programmers are only good at programming. They shouldn’t do anything
but program. So we’ll hire salespeople to sell, and not have programmers try to
sit with the customer.”
At the time, Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) didn’t have any salespeople.
They always had the people who were executing the project sell it. “You
eat what you kill” was the phrase at Accenture. You don’t have a salesperson go
out and tell the customer, “We can do this,” making promises and then handing
it off to a programmer.
So they ignored the wisdom of Accenture and the history that we had of
profitability, and they said, “We’ll hire professional salespeople to sell. The programmers
will program; they will not be responsible for anything other than
coding and listening to their boss back in the head office in Cambridge. The
salespeople won’t have any responsibilities having to do with the project, they