Founders at Work.pdf

74 Founders at Work
Bob’s thesis was a project called Limited Service System. We used time
sharing then; we all shared the same computer over a terminal. The Limited
Service System was a way to throttle your usage so that nobody would use more
than a certain amount, so they could just give it away for free and know that
nobody would hog more than a certain percentage—because this one system
was being shared that could handle maybe 50 users or 100 users, and this is for
the whole campus.
Many of us working at that project were undergraduates or graduate students.
Those of us who were young and single would get together socially, too.
Bob had a car and lived off campus. He would drive us places, so we all got to
know Bob really well.
Bob and I always wanted to found a business together. We both had parents
who were entrepreneurs, so the idea of running your own business was a
normal thing. There are people who come from backgrounds where they’re
used to working for a company, and they couldn’t dream of doing it themselves
and not having that safety net. When your parents and family are entrepreneurs,
you know it’s nothing special. I worked at big businesses and I worked at
small businesses beforehand, so the idea of starting your own business was just
a normal thing.
Bob and I were sort of looking for years for something to go into business
with together, and clearly it would be in computers. It’s not uncommon to get
together with friends that you meet in college. You see that in a lot of startups.
The other advantage of the two of us being friends, and not just business associates,
was that a lot of the structure of our deals together was based on friendship
and not on other things. The friendship was stronger than a lot of the
business stuff. So even though we came to odds about things, even though
there might be a “Well, did you do more, or did I do more?” because we liked
each other and had a relationship, we were able to keep that from messing up
the business.
We’d be arguing all the time about stuff, but, on the other hand, we have a
strong friendship that still continues. Twenty-five years later, we’re still close
friends. So that was a help, because we didn’t have to think, “Do you get 35 percent
and I get 65 percent? How are we going to do this?” So many things were
just, “We’ll just do it 50/50. I’ll do this one, you’ll do that one.” That did make a
difference. Also, because we knew each other, there was a lot of trust, which
you need, especially in families, because family money was involved when we
started the business.
Livingston: Is that how you first got money to start a company?
Bricklin: We first started on our own. I was in business school, living as a student
on loans and savings. Bob was actually working as a consultant, so he was
getting money. We went through very little money to begin with, because we
used time sharing to do the programming. It was done on a separate computer
that you would log into, and then the resulting product was downloaded into an
Apple II we borrowed from our publisher, and then it was tested.