Times that were really interesting? I think working with really great customers. It sort of sounds like a cliche, but to go and learn from Encyclopedia Britannica, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and try to learn how do they view their businesses and their lives was the most fun out of the whole experience.

They gave a presentation about how much they liked the company and this and that, and they said they wanted to buy us and placed an offer of $160 million. I knew that that was the opening shot and I said, "Thank you very much for making an offer. We really, really like your company and like the fact that you like us so much. We'll go back to our

Livingston: What makes a good business partner? Kahle: Compatibility. Mutual respect through hard times. Maybe it's clear lines of differentiation for who does what. But finding a good business partner is a fantastically valuable thing to do. So the second startup, Alexa, I started with a partner as a full cofounder and that worked out really well.

You do learn that people get to be fully formed adults fairly early and it's hard to change people's behavior, although it is easy to cushion how they behave with people that buffer their weaknesses. As you go along, you get more microscopic in understanding people before you invest in them if you are going to sit on the board specifically. You

Livingston: How did you land these contracts as a young undergrad? Lazaridis: When you have access to state-of-the-art education, and you know how to use these machines—and you are comfortable with them—you just have to make that one leap to realize that you can actually help people. There is a need for that kind of experience, but the problem was

But it's the little thing that clicked in my mind: "This is that little tweak that makes it kind of maybe a big deal." Not that the future lit up in my head and I said, "We are doing that." It was just sort of a hint, more in retrospect than at the time.

Experience will come when you face certain problems and live through them. And the best way to do that is to put yourself squarely in the path of those problems.

I'd say do it. There's kind of a backwards logic that says: when you are young, you should learn from people who are experienced, so later on, if you want to do a startup, you can take the risk. And that's a myth that was created from school. You need to learn to get to the next level.

In those days there was no money yet in this microcomputer business, and big experienced companies and investors, analysts—those kind of people, that are trained in business and much smarter than we were—they didn't think that this was going to be a real big market. They thought it was going to be a little hobby thing, like home robots or ham