Founders at Work.pdf

410 Founders at Work
20 offices, and I said, “If we need an office that big in a year from now, then I
don’t know what we’re doing, because we don’t need that many people.” He
said, “OK. You can make that decision.” So we got like a 1,500-square-foot
office that we outgrew in 8 months. People asked why we got such a small
office, and it was because I thought everything else was too big. I realized that
on my own. It was really important; he did it in a good way.
Livingston: This is surprising, based on the stories I’ve heard about investors.
Trott: The Neoteny investment was such an anomaly. We were this incredibly
early-stage company that had no structure, no employees, no really good
accounting, nothing but the LLC. But we had a huge customer base, which I
don’t think most startups have. We had hundreds of thousands of people using
our products, and it had been operated with so few resources. So we had to
really start from scratch.
If it wasn’t for Barak, I don’t know where we would be now. We knew what
we knew, which was the product. But there were all these little things that you
just have no clue about. It was incredibly overwhelming. But if you think about
it too much, then you don’t do it. You almost have to not know what you’re getting
into to actually do it.
Livingston: Tell me about other things that went wrong.
Trott: Ben and I were still trying to do everything ourselves, and that was
incredibly stupid because we just wore ourselves to death. Ben and I pretty
much were the only people that built the first version of TypePad. We said,
“Let’s not hire anybody. We did Movable Type on our own. We can do TypePad
on our own.” And it killed us.
The slow pace at which we hired was good for the budget because we were
able to operate on that $600,000 for a really long time. But at the same time, it
wasn’t good that it was at the expense of our health.
I made the decision to put Barak in at CEO in November of 2002, but he
didn’t become CEO until July of 2003. He was kind of acting like CEO in
January 2003. He worked without a salary. He got paid eventually, but he
worked under just a promise that he’d be made CEO, which was amazing. To
work 6 months with just an understanding—he had a lot of faith in us.
Livingston: Why did it take so long?
Trott: Because we were just so focused on operating the business. He had his
employment letter that I had to write and we had to consult a lawyer—it’s kind
of a big thing to put a CEO in. Because of all the negotiations (that were really
minor, actually), it just always got put on the back burner.
Livingston: What else went wrong?
Trott: Skimping on hardware sometimes. I wouldn’t recommend that. We
often had to replace the stuff we bought because we had been so worried about
costs.
But that’s not always a bad thing. With LiveJournal, Brad [Fitzpatrick]
wrote everything instead of buying things. That worked for him. He did his