Founders at Work.pdf

Ron Gruner 445
Because de Castro was a hardware engineer like I was, I would view him as
my primary mentor during those years. During the ’80s, like I said, we had a
good board of directors. Tom Perkins played a very key role. I think I absorbed
a lot of the wisdom from him by osmosis—just in board meetings, and how he
conducted himself. How he did a good job, I thought, of managing conflict and
disagreements. I have to say I’m surprised, though, by how public he’s let the
internal HP board battle become. Seems to me that it’s been very costly to HP.
Livingston: Was there ever a time at Shareholder.com when you wanted to
quit?
Gruner: No, not really. I really enjoyed most every day. I enjoyed driving into
work, looked forward to it. Every company has its pros and cons. The nice
aspect of Shareholder.com was that it was indeed a recurring revenue stream.
So we had almost no financial worries. We could predict our quarterly revenues
within a couple of percent the first day of the quarter.
The worries that we had came from the fact that we were basically in the
news business. When earnings season came out, we might be doing 50 earnings
calls and webcasts and news releases on the same day. Every one had to be
done on time and perfectly, because an earnings release, for all intents and purposes,
is a legal document. So where we sweated was just managing that
process. It’s like running 50 television stations at the same time.
If you screwed up, it was very visible. On rare occasions we did. We might
get one webcast mixed up with another company. We’d fix it within 3 or 4 minutes,
but it’s extremely embarrassing. And, believe me, chief executives don’t
like that at all.
I’d be the one to call up and apologize, and that was just part of the job.
Most people were very reasonable, and they would understand—things go
wrong. I would use the analogy of a cell phone (that was when cell phones were
really getting hot). I’d say, “Look, we’ve all got cell phones or car phones.
Sometimes they just screw up and they go wrong. And this is the same kind of
stuff; this is pretty advanced technology and sometimes things go wrong.”
But we did occasionally lose a client that was just irrational, saying, “My
boss told me to fire you because you made this mistake.” We’d typically give
them a credit for the whole thing, and we’d say, “If you ever want to come back,
we’d love to have you back.” And many did.
Livingston: What advice would you give to someone who had never started a
startup but was thinking about it?
Gruner: I went to an executive conference several years ago in New York. One
of the most interesting sessions had about six chief executives, all of whom were
very successful, and the moderator asked, “If you could describe in one word
the key to success for your company, what would that word be?” Very few
answered in one word. Some of them said integrity, or communications, and
things like that. The last person to talk was Michael Dell, and he said one
simple word: persistence.