Founders at Work.pdf

402 Founders at Work
Livingston: So the stakes were lower. Did you ever want to quit?
Ross: Well, I did in a way. I went back to school for 6 months, and I wasn’t
working on the project much during that time. It wasn’t that I walked away—
we knew there were people working on it—but it was leisurely because we
knew that Microsoft wasn’t coming back any time soon.
Livingston: Now you are in a “real” startup. How did you get started?
Ross: In some ways, the media and the venture capital industry made it happen.
From our earliest days at Netscape, Joe and I were always shooting the breeze
about how terrible software was and what we would change if we could. After
some Firefox press hit, we started getting emails from investors saying, “We
want to meet.” And we’d think, “Meet about what? It’s an open source hobby
project.” Then we realized, “They want to meet about funding us, so we should
probably get some kind of company together.” We figured this was the perfect
opportunity to act after years of talk.
Livingston: You wanted to take advantage of the rising tide?
Ross: Right. We already had ideas around software, and we said, “This is the
time to do it if we are going to do anything. People are going to listen to us right
now, so we might as well go for it.”
Livingston: Do you have a name?
Ross: We’re calling it Parakey for now, but who knows if it will stick. Firefox was
our fourth name.
Livingston: Can you tell me about any of the challenges you’ve faced?
Ross: One thing is just time. Whenever I’m doing something now, I feel like I
should be doing something else instead. If I got married tomorrow, I’d probably
be worrying about a code issue during the ceremony and deliver my vows in
Python. It’s a nonstop state of stress. The first couple months we did the startup
and all these venture capitalists were emailing us, we felt like we had to meet
with all of them. We thought, “Oh my God, we have to say yes; we can’t say no
to these people.” Now we realize that time is our most valuable resource, and
every minute we spend in one of these meetings just sitting there is time
wasted.
Things are getting better. We’re starting to push people away to give us
space to work, but in some respects it would be so much easier if the Firefox
thing hadn’t happened. We should be setting our own timeline, but people are
already waiting for what we’re going to do next, so it’s hard to relax under these
kinds of circumstances. It’s a lot of pressure.
Livingston: Who are your mentors? Is this Joe’s first startup, too?
Ross: Yes. That’s kind of the problem. We don’t have that one person who has
done this a thousand times who can advise us. We have a good lawyer. We’re
looking for a mentor who doesn’t have ulterior motives and who is aligned with
our interests.