Founders at Work.pdf

86 Founders at Work
well right away, often. It was a precursor to Windows in the days when the PCs
weren’t powerful enough to do it. So for all of its advancing the art of things and
cool stuff they did, it wasn’t its time, and they ended up selling it off to make
some money, and they ended up going belly up. It was bad all around.
What I do realize is there are advantages to selling at a peak. You don’t know
when the peak is. I know people who sold their businesses when everybody
thought you were crazy. “The business is going through the roof; why are you
selling now?” And in hindsight, of course, it turned around. Six months, a year
later, the business started crashing. They didn’t get the peak, but they came
pretty close.
There are some people to whom it’s worth taking the risk, because you risk
going for the big one, and, in a portfolio, that’s good. But as they say on Wall
Street, the bulls make money, the bears make money, but the pigs get slaughtered.
In other words, don’t be greedy. Whether you think things are going up
or things are going down, you can make money going both ways. But, if you are
piggish, are greedy, that’s when you have problems; you’ll be irrational about
that.
It is worth it sometimes, if you can do it, to reach for the stars. Microsoft
didn’t reach for the stars. Microsoft was step by step by step to where they got,
and it was profitable all the way to it. So that’s the traditional way of doing it.
The Google, Netscape way, those things, sometimes it works, and sometimes—
usually—it doesn’t. But sometimes it does, and the payoffs are incredible. But,
if you’re a business person who wants your business to succeed, as a business,
because you like that business, you take a different view. So the risk profiles are
different.
A lot of people make money because they’re very good at timing. We were
close. If we hadn’t been sued, I would have done pretty well financially, because
Bob and I owned most of the company at the time. And we would have had an
interesting next step, going into what was probably the leading online business
at the time. Maybe it would have ended up into the Internet or something, or it
would have made the jump better. Who knows? But it didn’t happen.
Livingston: Do you have any regrets? That one was out of your hands.
Bricklin: Yeah, it was out of our hands. If we had been able to settle in advance,
the thing would have closed, and we would have made a lot of money, and we’d
have a bigger house, and whatever. But, you know, as I always tell people, here
it is, 25 years later, and you’re still interviewing me. There’s fame and fortune. I
didn’t get much fortune out of it, but, on the other hand, the fame has basically
given me a meal ticket ever since, and I learned a lot from it, and the rest of my
life has been pretty good. All in all, I can’t complain. I did a lot better than I
ever expected to, in all sorts of ways. So there are no regrets about that. I mean,
each thing, you think, “Well, if I had put this feature in, it would have been
better.”
Livingston: Do you remember any disagreements that you and Bob had?