Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

Replay probably did us a fabulous favor when they stepped across the line. There's a line in the sand that those media companies think about. You don't know where it is, but if you step over it, they're going to get you. Replay stepped over it by doing automatic commercial skipping. You didn't even have to fast-forward through the commercials. They

I think Yahoo is smarter now about dealing with startups than they were then. We were one of the first companies they bought, and I think the idea was, back then, that what you should do with an acquisition is "integrate" it, in the same way that a sugar cube becomes integrated with your tea. We basically got dissolved within Yahoo, and a

Because I had started a few companies before, I knew it was important to have the right combination of skills and interests amongst the founders.

The idea was that, once they had done two or three projects for customers, they could take on an apprentice and mentor that person. We had younger people, and we had more women than other firms. We had Eve Anderson and Tracy Adams—two of the most senior people at the company were female, which was kind of unusual. We never wanted to have more than

So when I unexpectedly found myself running this high-growth successful software company, the thought of making it be the kind of place that I would want to work at and different from all those other places was incredibly appealing.

Since most humans have a much easier time understanding what is, if you suggest that what they see is wrong, it's very disconcerting and they hate it. Because they are trying to understand their world and predict their future—that's the main function of the cerebrum, to find the patterns and predict what is going to happen next—and insofar as they

Livingston: What advice would you give someone? Williams: I think one of the things that kills great things so often is compromise—letting people talk you out of what your gut is telling you. Not that I don't value people's input, but you have to have the strength to ignore it sometimes, too. If you feel really strongly, there might be something to

Winblad: One of the big mistakes is that, when you form a company, there's a difference between being an inventor and being entrepreneurial to leading a company—being the CEO or, especially, the leader. You're not fending for yourself anymore. You're actually fending for shareholders. They can't be fending for their salary; they can't be fending fo

Part of the reason was that we hired a fabulous PR firm with this money, Schwartz Communications. We told them, "When people talk about e-commerce and they have to mention a few examples of companies, we want to be one of the companies they mention." The most valuable sort of press is not articles about you, it's when people mention you i

Wozniak: Even back in high school I knew I could design computers with half as many chips as the companies were selling them with. I taught myself, but I had taught myself in a way that forced me to learn all sorts of trickiness. Because you try to make valuable what you're good at. I was good at making things with very few parts by using all sorts