Founders at Work.pdf

62 Founders at Work
forward that my life wasn’t going to be about being in an office, working with
people I didn’t want to work with and doing jobs I didn’t want to do.
The next summer, to avoid the risk of my parents buying me another job, I
contacted a high school friend who was an artist and said, “Let’s start a T-shirt
company together over the summer.” How do you start a T-shirt company that
runs only 3 months and then evaporates? The answer is that we found a group
of clients that actually buy summer wear in the summer—which is very unusual
because in retail, you buy your summer goods in the winter and winter goods in
the summer. Nobody’s buying T-shirts in the summer in traditional retail. But it
turns out that private school bookstores have a lot of gear: T-shirts, sweatshirts,
hats, etc.
We went to some of the larger printing houses in Los Angeles, who laughed
at our orders because they were so small. They wouldn’t do them. But in touring
the facility, we inevitably met the foreman of the line, who usually had a
backyard operation—some silk screening units in the backyard.
That summer we made $25,000. For college students that was huge. Also,
our days were great: we’d get up a little late, do sales calls in the morning and
show our portfolio and designs. In the afternoon, we’d go surfing or some outdoor
activity and at night we would get together and do designs. It was a blast.
So I definitely had the bug. I also worked for Domino’s Pizza in college, at a
prepress house—all sorts of ways to try to earn some money. But the stuff I
loved was doing something on my own. By the time senior year rolled around
and my parents were saying that I should get a job, my whole thing was, “No, I
don’t want to get a job. I want to figure out how to do something in tech.”
Even though I’m not technical—I was a political science major—your role
models at Stanford if you’re at all entrepreneurial are tech entrepreneurs. You
don’t have to look very far and you see buildings with names like Hewlett
Packard, etc. There were even classes on this stuff that I started taking.
The smartest person I knew, by far, was my friend Graham Spencer, who
was my next door neighbor freshman year. I thought, “If I can convince him to
do something, then I bet we can make something interesting happen.” He was
being courted by Apple, Microsoft, and all the big players of the day, and my
pitch was “Look, those guys are always going to want you and it’s rare that you
are going to be in the position in life where you have so little responsibility,
except to yourself. So now’s the time to do it. Yeah, we don’t know anything.
We’re dumb and we’re just coming out of college. But now’s the opportunity.”
Once Graham agreed, we gathered four of our other friends and went to a
taqueria down in Redwood City and the dinner was focused around figuring
out what this company was going to work on. “We are a company. Now what on
earth do we do?”
Livingston: How did you choose to involve your four other friends? Because
they were friends and you trusted them, or they were technically good?
Kraus: They were willing, capable, and friends—all of those things at once.
They were all technical, they were all enthusiastic about starting something like
this—it sounded like a good idea to them, as opposed to something they were