Founders at Work.pdf

70 Founders at Work
unannounced.” We did all this stuff; we called them constantly; we just basically
acted like the bidding wasn’t over. And made a total pain in the ass of ourselves.
It would have been embarrassing if it weren’t so serious.
Then luck struck: MCI couldn’t deliver its service to Netscape on time.
Netscape wanted its money and they wanted to have a vendor in that slot, so
they came back to us and said, “OK, we’ll take your $3 million and you can be in
the NetDirectory play and good luck.” I can tell you that, had we given up, we
never would have gotten the deal back. And without that deal I don’t think
Excite would have had its run at all.
That was what helped launch the company. It’s so ironic. If you look at the
way that a lot of huge companies get built . . . Microsoft built itself off IBM,
unwittingly. Excite built itself unwittingly off Netscape. Google built itself
unwittingly off Yahoo. I don’t think we would have gotten where we got without
the Netscape deal and we certainly wouldn’t have gotten the Netscape deal
without a really valuable lesson in persistence.
I see way too many people give up in the startup world. They just give up
too easily. Recruiting is a classic example. I don’t even hear the first “no” that
somebody says. When they say, “No, I’m not interested,” I think, “Now it’s a
real challenge. Now’s when the tough part begins.” It’s hard to identify talent,
but great people don’t look for jobs, great people are sold on jobs. And if they’re
sold they’re going to say no at first. You have to win them over.
For example, we had this VP of marketing that I worked to get for about
3 months. He was the former VP of marketing at QVC. He called me literally
the day before he was supposed to move out to California and said, “I can’t do
it.” I said, “Well, we’re going to have dinner tonight, so I’m coming out to New
York.” I got on a plane and went to New York and sat down with him. And I got
really lucky: we’re at the restaurant and we were quiet for a second and you
could hear people talking about the Net. They were talking about Hotmail and
AOL and the Internet boom going on. So I said, “Look, these people aren’t talking
about home shopping, they’re talking about the Internet. So your choice is,
‘Do you want to be part of the past or do you want to be part of the future?’”
I love this stuff; the persistence part is the part that I like. It’s actually not
fun when it’s happening, but you know it makes a difference because 99.9 percent
of the people give up. And Vinod gave me that lesson in spades. I think I
would have given up with Netscape. I wouldn’t have known what to do. I
wouldn’t have had the chutzpah to just say, “No, we haven’t lost, we’re still
negotiating, aren’t we?” And treating it as if I didn’t hear their “no.” It was very
unfamiliar to me originally.
Livingston: What was most surprising to you?
Kraus: That opportunity creates opportunity. One of our first acquisitions was a
company called Magellan, an editorially oriented search engine. The primary
reason for doing the deal was to show that in a space that was ripe for consolidation,
we were going to be doing the consolidating, not being consolidated.
Because otherwise the deal didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. It was a
momentum play.