Sublime

It didn’t take long to see that in Silicon Valley, non-engineers were pressed to prove their value. Hiring the first nontechnical employee was always the end of an era. We bloated payroll; we diluted lunchtime conversation; we created process and bureaucracy; we put in requests for yoga classes and Human Resources. We tended to contribute positivel

How quickly life changes. One minute you’re making $300 a week as a college researcher. You’re sleeping in a basement and your only belongings are two black garbage bags, one full of clean clothes, the other dirty, and your biggest worry in the world is whether the pretty girl with the black curly hair whom you just met at the drum circle will call

While Sir Richard Branson advised executives to focus on employees first, customers second, and investors third, Harrison reversed the priorities: investors came first. For him the game was capitalism, pure and simple. You either played it or you didn’t.

“That’s the biggest risk in the whole thing,” Kagle said. “In fact I can argue with you guys very persuasively that keeping this low profile we’ve had in the company has been absolutely the healthiest thing to do. Absolutely the healthiest thing to do. We’ve already broken the systems a couple times, in spite of that. So we’ve been barely able to m

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there couldn’t be many other cases in human history of a person his age tossing around dollars in the amounts he was tossing them without much adult supervision, or the usual constraints of corporate life. A board of directors, for instance. “It’s unclear if we even have to have an actual board of directors,” said Sam, “but we get suspicious glance