Founders at Work.pdf

64 Founders at Work
We bought two Sun machines. I bought one from an earthquake researcher
in Berkeley for $600. Honestly, the biggest fight we had in those early days was
over a used copier that I bought for $300. I’d used a substantial fraction of our
capital on a copy machine while Graham was out of town, and we had this
major fight about having spent all that money on a copy machine. Graham
thought it was foolhardy to spend that much on a copier, and my view was that
I was spending all my time having to go to the bank and get dimes for the copy
machine at the math and science library, so I’d rather just buy this thing. It was
used, and it never worked, so he was right and I was wrong—it was a stupid
purchase.
We basically sat in the garage coding for around 18 months. In retrospect, it
was really fun. But I remember a lot of worry. “Are we doing anything of
value?” We were building the core engine, the indexing engine that would actually
index the text, and the search libraries that would query that index.
It got cold in the garage and we didn’t have a heater, so we would use the
dryer for heat. We’d tape the little button down that made it run with the door
open.
In about mid-’94, we now needed to put an interface on the software to start
showing demos.
Livingston: Were you still living off the original $15,000?
Kraus: Yeah. Some of us had part-time jobs. I got my nickname during that
time: “Phone Boy” (which it still is). My job every morning would be that—I
was doing some coding, but not very well—I would read the Wall Street Journal
to find out if there were people that I might call that could be interested in
search stuff. So I invariably just did cold calls most of the time, “I saw your
name in the Journal and we’re this little startup . . .” I didn’t know any better.
Why wouldn’t somebody take us seriously?
Livingston: Was there a cold call that you made that turned out to be pivotal?
Kraus: No, the pivotal things were all unintentional. Like the way we got
turned on to the Web: it was about ’94 and we were deciding between two technologies
for the interface. How do you present search technology to the user if
it’s not a command line?
One was HyperCard and the other was this Web thing. And Graham, wisely,
chose the Web. I believe it was because of that particular chance moment that
we ended up being web-oriented and got known as a web search thing.
The intentional things were rarely pivotal in those early days, but the being
persistent, following-your-nose thing made a big difference. The chain of
events that led to our funding had no connection. You write them all down in a
line and you wonder how these all led to each other, but the chain was very
direct from step to step.
When I graduated, my college girlfriend gave me a book called Accidental
Empires. It was a gossip history of Silicon Valley by a guy whose pen name is
Bob Cringely. In it he writes, “Here’s a tip for entrepreneurs. Call me, I’m a
cheap date.” So I call him and we get together for lunch and I tell him what