Founders at Work.pdf

342 Founders at Work
charter operation because he’s dead. It’s not that he was a bad pilot; it’s just that
his level of confidence to level of skill ratio was out of whack, and he made a
bunch of bad decisions that led to him dying, which is unfortunate.
In aviation, by the time someone might be your employee, probably their
perceived skill and their actual skill are reasonably in line. In IT, you have
people who think, “I’m a really great driver, I’m a great lover, I’m a great programmer.”
But where are the metrics that are going to prove them wrong?
Traffic accidents are very infrequent, so they don’t get the feedback that they
are a terrible driver because it’s so unlikely that they’ll get into an accident. A
girlfriend leaves them—well, it was certainly her deep-seated psychological
problems from childhood. Their code fails to ship to customers. It was marketing’s
fault!
If a software company dies, you can blame the marketing people.
Programmers almost all walk around with a huge overestimate of their capabilities
and their value in an organization. That’s why a lot of them are very bitter.
They sit stewing at their desks because the management isn’t doing things their
way. They don’t understand why they get paid so little. It is tough to manage
these folks. But on the other hand, there are better and worse ways to do it. If
you want to ensure that the customer gets high-quality code and that the product
is high-quality, you have to step on these younger folks’ egos and say, “No,
that’s not the way to do it.” The question is, how harsh can you be? I could have
been kinder and gentler for sure.
I think I was good with the customers. That’s one thing: I realized that businesspeople
didn’t have any ethics in a fundamental way. Forget how they dealt
with me and other stuff, but here’s one example where I realized that having
basic ethics was an operational advantage. There was one customer that didn’t
want to pay their bill, and they were upset with us. There was a meeting about
this, and I was with the new CEO and one of the MBA guys that worked for
him, talking about this customer. It was out in the Los Angeles office. The managers
said, “This customer’s upset with us. How do we get him to pay us more
money?” I said, “How much do they pay us?” They said, “$700,000.” I said, “Is
their site launched?” They said, “No.” I said, “How much did we tell the customer
that it would cost them until their site is launched?” They said, “About
$700,000.” I said, “Well, then why are we having this meeting? Why are we talking
about getting more money out of these people? Shouldn’t we be talking
about getting their site launched?”
It was a perspective that was completely alien to them. What value are you
delivering to the customer? Are you delivering what you said and what they
paid for? I didn’t think of myself as a pious, ethical expert, but at least I had that
much: if you take money from a customer, you should deliver some value to
them. After the meeting, I called up American Airlines and got on a plane. It
was a Friday and I had some social commitments for the weekend, but I
cancelled them. I flew out to LA and told the programmers that I wanted to see
them on Saturday and talk about the customer.