Founders at Work.pdf

352 Founders at Work
Livingston: Why do big companies get it wrong?
Spolsky: I worked at Viacom, which is a culture of creating MTV and Comedy
Central. It’s not even about creating MTV and Comedy Central; it’s about buying
MTV and then buying Nickelodeon, and then merging MTV and
Nickelodeon and creating a thing called MTV Networks and playing political
games with that, and then maybe selling one of them off and buying CBS.
In order to succeed in that environment, those are the things you have to be
good at. And if you need to make some interactive websites or MTV needs a
web server or whatever the thing is, then you don’t even hire programmers; you
hire some people who know some people who might know something about the
technology. Eventually, you get somebody who thinks, “Let’s get some programmers
in here,” and they actually hire a programmer. And if they are lucky,
they get a good programmer, but they will torture that programmer until that
programmer wants to cry and leave.
A company that is not designed to create high-tech products is very unlikely
to have the culture or the DNA that it takes to create high-tech products. So if
you are a high-tech person in that company, then you’re basically a glorified
typist in some sense. It’s very unlikely that the kind of people who would be successful
in an entertainment company would even understand what programmers
do that makes them more than typists.
Livingston: Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
Spolsky: The biggest mistake that we consistently made is that we kept getting
all kinds of interesting marketing ideas. Well, the first problem we had is that
we thought we didn’t understand sales and marketing because, indeed, I am a
programmer and Michael is a programmer. We thought that the whole business
of sales and marketing, which we recognized as being utterly crucial to the success
of a high-tech company, was completely mysterious to us.
When we read about it, we knew that we were bad at the particular skills
that we needed to do sales and to market things. We didn’t have any kind of
budget for marketing. So we were just afraid of the so-called “go-to-market”
strategy. I see a lot of startups in their first couple of years kind of flail around—
exactly the same way we did—trying to figure out, “Oh shit, how are we going
to get people to buy our stuff?”
We had this dream that we would find a company that would sell and market
our products, and we would do development. There would be some kind of
50/50 split. But search as I may throughout the history of the annals of computer
software, I could only find one example in which one company sold a
product and the other company developed. It was Lotus Notes, which was
developed by a Boston-area company called Iris Associates.
They had a deal that was a 50/50 split with Lotus, basically. Lotus
Development did all the sales and marketing and bought copies of Notes from
Iris for, I believe, 50 percent or something. It is probably 25 percent of the
MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) or something like that. That particular
relationship, before Lotus completely acquired Iris, lasted long enough
that I thought that maybe this model would work.