Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

Being at the right place at the right time also helped. The business world was poised to adopt personal computers. They were reasonably priced and they did something useful, which turned out to be Lotus 1-2-3. So the market just expanded dramatically, far faster than anything any of us in the company would have imagined.

Graham: Before Viaweb we had a startup called Artix. We were going to put art galleries online. The problem was, art galleries didn't want to be online. They still don't want to be online. We spent a long time trying to convince these people to use something they didn't want before we had the idea that maybe we should make something people actually

I think it's really important that you have a realization of what's important. You can't stress over things that you can't necessarily control. Even though we can control the success of the company to a certain extent, you have to be grateful for what you've got. We were able to buy a house. We never thought we'd be able to buy a house. That's a hu

Being everywhere all the time made us look bigger than we were; "Oh yeah, we'll be in New York, we'll be there." I'd say, "Jeff, I have all these things on my plate," and he always responded, "No, we're going." It was someone who had come from a big company who knew how to act like a big company, even though behind the

Livingston: Do you remember why you finally decided, "OK, we will do this"? Williams: I had come to the conclusion that blogging was going to dramatically impact the Web. After I thought about it a lot and saw what people were doing, I decided that this made tons of sense. The conclusion I came to then was kind of the one I stuck to, whic

We knew, even then, having watched how Data General financed itself, that you wanted to generate two things when you're looking for money. One is a sense of exclusivity, saying, "This is a very special kind of deal and not everybody is going to get into it." And secondly, a sense of urgency, so you can get people to make a decision.

I think I was good with the customers. That's one thing: I realized that businesspeople didn't have any ethics in a fundamental way. Forget how they dealt with me and other stuff, but here's one example where I realized that having basic ethics was an operational advantage. There was one customer that didn't want to pay their bill, and they were up

Livingston: You must have been displeased with your investors for doing that to you. Graham: Well, everybody ended up rich, so it's hard to be too displeased. I'd rather have an investor who invested in us and made our lives hell than one who didn't invest in us at all, which is what most investors do to most startups. I mean, we needed their money

Another thing is that luck comes in many forms—and often looks bad at first. I always look back on the deals that we didn't do and the things that didn't work out, and realize what seemed like a bummer at the time was really lucky. Like the early acquisition opportunities. These obviously would have been really bad, as opposed to what happened late