Founders at Work.pdf

Livingston: Which also must be a problem since you are so well known. Some
people must think, “This is my ticket!”
Ross: I can’t tell you how many times I get an email from someone who just
wants to have dinner. So we’ll have dinner, and we’ll chat about politics, the
weather, whatever. Then we’ll have dinner again, and slowly it comes out that
they want something. Eventually you find out that they want to come work for
you, or they want to . . . sometimes they don’t even know what they want, but
they know they want something. It’s hard to see what people’s intentions are at
the beginning.
We’re also overly paranoid because the first thing we did when we started
the company was talk to a bunch of entrepreneurs who told us, “Don’t tell anyone
what you are doing. VCs are sharks.” Meanwhile, you hear from the VCs,
“You’re too paranoid.” So it’s hard to find the right balance and be human,
because you don’t know who’s genuine and who’s not.
Livingston: It must be frustrating not to be able to share your idea.
Ross: Incredibly. If you ever want to stop a conversation dead in its tracks, just
use my magic words: “stealth mode.” I’ve also found “programmer” to work
well in many situations. But we’ll have our day.
Livingston: Are there any lessons that you learned in the Firefox days that you
are applying to this new startup?
Ross: One is to make sure you are always in communication with the people
who are eventually going to use your product. It’s very easy to just lock yourself
in a room and code all day, and you forget what the real problems are that
people are having. So you have to keep talking to people and keep refining what
you are doing.
I also learned how you build up the right kind of buzz about your product in
an honest way. With Firefox, we catered to the bloggers first, even though they
weren’t our primary target audience. Once you get the prominent bloggers to
pick up the scent, you attract the intermediate press, the PC Worlds and the
CNETs. You still don’t have any moms or dads yet, you don’t have any nontechies,
but once the mainstream press sees PC magazine talking about it, then
they start to cover the story, and they actually make it kind of a self-fulfilling
prophecy. They write that “everyone is talking about Firefox” when, of course,
mainstream users haven’t even heard of it yet. But they are going to, now that
the New York Times wrote about it.
Livingston: What are your biggest challenges starting a startup?
Blake Ross 403
Ross: One is, in general, not knowing what’s “normal.” Investors hand us
“normal” term sheets, consultants ask for “normal” fees. I’m 21—I haven’t seen
enough of the extremes to know what’s normal. Our approach has been to make
decisions slowly and methodically, do our research, and figure out who’s on the
level and who’s selling us lines before signing anything.
The other problem is just finding the time to finish the project and still see
my family, my friends, my girlfriend. It’s very hard as two people. It’s a very big
project.