Founders at Work.pdf

James Currier 393
At an HBS reunion, we had a roundtable for all of us who had been entrepreneurs,
and one of our professors asked, “What didn’t HBS teach you about
this?” And I said, “Pain.”
I only remember one class that came close: the professor walked out of the
class with tears in his eyes, having recounted the story of his friend who had
started a cable company, and it destroyed his life, destroyed his family, and
moved him to a place where his life was a waste of time. That was the only indication
I had at HBS about how painful this is.
Having gone through this already, my ability to start another startup is now
much higher. If you could give a student a tenth of that understanding at business
school, it would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and years of
effort to understand that you will sleep for 4 hours a night for 18 straight
months if things are not going well.
Livingston: Would you do it again?
Currier: Oh yeah. But it won’t be nearly as hard this time because I have
money in the bank now, and I know what I’m doing. And I know what the probabilities
of different things working are, and I would know how to do it, so it
would be a lot less painful. You’d still have to be obsessed with it; you’d still not
be present with anything else; but if I thought it could do something important,
then I would do it again.
Livingston: Your company was acquired by Monster. How do you preserve the
startuppyness of Tickle within this big company?
Currier: You try like hell to preserve the startup feel because you are the personality
that likes to start things and you don’t like an environment that’s not
starting. We’ve kept our doors as desks; we refuse to move from our office; and
Monster has been fantastic about leaving us alone. We’re just out here doing
our thing. We are very lucky, and I still enjoy and want to build a great legacy
for Monster. But I won’t be here forever. I can’t. I’m a starter.
If Yahoo had acquired us, they would have made us move to Mountain
View, and would have made us a widget on a feature on a division of a department,
and everyone would have left, and the whole thing would have died. And
Wall Street would have applauded roundly.
Whereas Wall Street has been perplexed by Monster’s acquisition of Tickle.
Yet it’s so obvious: we’re the largest career testing site in the world, we’ve got
matchmaking capabilities between people for romance, and we can use the
same matchmaking capabilities by measuring different dimensions for jobs. We
can take job matching to the next level—the next stage for high-end job finding.
And Monster gets the value of every person and every product we have here
because there was no overlap.