Founders at Work.pdf

390 Founders at Work
And you go sign a lease somewhere.
“Do you have business cards?”
“No, let me go get business cards.”
“Do you have a website?”
“We just launched it.”
“Well, is anyone coming?”
“No one’s coming yet, but I’ll get back to you when people are coming.”
“When you hit this level, then I’ll be interested.”
Everyone is looking for the next step. And so as you go along with each of
these confidence steps, you can pick up more and more people into what’s
going on.
So then you go talk to a venture capitalist, and they ask if any other venture
capitalist is interested. And then once you get other VCs interested, you say,
“Yes, they’re interested and maybe you guys could syndicate them and do the
round.” They say, “Well, have you received a term sheet from them?” Then
once you’ve received a term sheet, then the VCs get interested, and then
acquirers get interested. Women.com offered to buy us out for $32 million once
we got our term sheets.
You have to get to these levels to attract more people, and then you hit these
spark points, and in my process the spark point was getting the term sheets
from the VC. People suddenly want to work with you, loan you money; PR
firms want to spend your money, investment bankers want to meet you.
Livingston: Which spark point would you consider most significant for Tickle?
Currier: The launching of the dog test. When we started the company, we
wanted to change the world, and we had all these tests on the site to help
people in their lives. We had the anxiety test; the parenting, relationship, and
communication tests. And no one came.
I remembered that advertising agencies say if you want people to remember
an ad, include babies and puppies. So I thought, “We should make a fun
test. Let’s do a test for what kind of breed of dog are you.” So they came up with
a 15-question test that wasn’t scientific at all. We put it online, and 8 days later
we had a million people trying to enter our site. Our server was going down
every 10 minutes. We had to emergency unplug it from the wall, throw it in the
back of the car, and plug it into a T3 at an ISP in Lynn, Mass.
Once we got crazy traffic, we were able to then show the graphs to the venture
guys, and we were on our way. They said, “Anyone with traffic can make a
lot of money on the Internet, so I’m in.”
Livingston: Were there other hair-raising moments in the early years?
Currier: Most of them had to do with people. We had a VP of engineering who
wasn’t working out, and we had to let him go. But because he seemed unstable,
we arranged for a marshal to be ready to create peace once we let this guy go if
he really blew up and went crazy.
Livingston: Could you have recognized that this employee was bad news from
the beginning?