Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days

So many companies at the time took their consumer Internet thing and made it an enterprise Internet thing and then died anyway.

I’ve come to realize over the years that companies are just the people that make them up.

Everyone heard
“Internet,” but then they went and signed up for AOL because it was the easiest way to get online. Although we thought it was crazy, AOL’s walled garden was bigger than the Internet for a handful of months there, which made our strategy impossible.

I’ve never taken the perspective of “build a cool piece of technology and see where it goes.” It’s more or less been based on an intuition about a hole in the market—or, more accurately, a future hole in the market.

We wanted to be very selective in how we hired people. We had a process we called
“chemistry, mechanics, and religion.”

the biggest thrill is frankly not the financial success, it’s the ability to have an impact. Because we’re both engineers at heart and that’s every engineer’s dream—to build something that millions of people will use.

That was the ironic thing, because when you need money, nobody will return your calls. When you don’t need money and you say, “Sorry, guys, don’t need any money,” they can’t stop calling you.

The other thing is that there’s kind of an attitude here that people should try things, and, if they fail, if they understand why they failed, they may actually be a better investment in the next round than somebody who quickly succeeded just by sheer luck.

“Why didn’t you click on that little button there?” He said, “I’m not a dolt. Why would I click on that?” People were reading it as “dolt,” not “do it,” because it was an unusual combination of words. So they changed dialog boxes to say “OK.”

I always had these little fictitious motivations that motivated me and got me to do such great work.