Founders at Work.pdf

Stephen Kaufer 373
It’s perfectly fine if you knew that customer through a past life and that’s
how they got to be a customer. Maybe they’ll be even more honest with you. If
it means adding a new feature to your product, or whatever, to close that initial
sale, and it’s not on strategy, screw the strategy. Do it, collect the money, get the
customer, and move forward.
Then, as you’re growing, sort of mid-stage, what I tried to foster here is an
attitude of risk-taking, where all I want to know really is what’s my downside
scenario in terms of time and opportunity cost? If I can try something offbeat,
weird-sounding, and it takes a few weeks, and the downside is, in my case, I rip
it out of the live website, or, if you’re producing software, I rip it out of the
piece of software, or I don’t document the feature if I’m producing a piece of
hardware or whatever—if the amount of time spent making a mistake is small,
don’t be afraid to make a lot of mistakes without a lot of time analyzing whether
you should or shouldn’t do it.
On the Web, it’s particularly easy to try something and get feedback. If it
doesn’t work, drop it. I’ve come up with really interesting ideas that were utter
and complete failures on the site, and I make fun of myself in company meetings
when I talk about those. Then I look at each group and say, “Hey, I’m
hoping every one of you—in addition to all the successful ideas you’ll come up
with—aren’t afraid to come up with some resounding failures.” You just want
the failure to cost you a couple of weeks, a month or two—it depends on the
industry—a small, fixed cost. It’s the old adage: if we’re not failing at something
on a regular basis, we’re just not trying hard enough.
Livingston: Obviously your story ended wonderfully. You were acquired for
around $200 million?
Kaufer: Yeah. I don’t think of the story ending that way, but that’s how the third
chapter ended.
Livingston: Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. But most startups do want to have
a liquidity event. Would you have done anything differently before that, to get
there?
Kaufer: No. With TripAdvisor, it all really did work out well. Certainly one of
the keys to our success was being fanatical on the hiring side of things. I was
almost going to answer, “Well, I would have liked to have hired more top-notch
folks throughout the company earlier.” Because I’m still in that position now—
I’m still struggling to fill positions with the types of people that we want to hire.
It’s not something that we do very efficiently here. It takes us a long time to fill
a req.
When we do fill a req, we have a fantastic success rate. Many observers and
people that have done due diligence on TripAdvisor over the years have commented
on the caliber of individuals here. But if I ever start another company
again, I’d love to have as a founding or very early team member someone who
was a trusted recruiter. Because the difference in almost any position between
someone who does a good job and someone who does a great job might be
20 percent more in salary, but it’s 100 or 200 percent more in throughput. If you