作者：Jessica Livingston
出版社：Penguin Group
发行时间：2009
来源：下载的 mobi 版本

昨天好友丢了我一篇文章，是 Paul Graham 介绍 YC 的联合创始人（也是他的夫人） Jessica Livingston 的文字《Jessica Livingston》，读了以后搜索到她在很早之前写过这本书，就顺手读了一下，本书是 Jessica Livingston 对33位硅谷早期创业者的访谈，非常有含金量，可以算是浓缩的硅谷互联网发展史

我挑选了几个我感兴趣的人物，读下来收获很大，正如 Jessica Livingston 自己说的：

I wrote in the Introduction that my biggest hope for the book was that it would inspire people to start their own startups, by showing how uncertain successful founders were themselves at first. And that seems to be happening. My favorite email came from a programmer who quit his job at a big company to become the first employee at a startup. The founders had been working for a while to convince him to join the company. “I quit my job the day after I finished reading Founders at Work,” he said in an email. “Without your book, I may not have had the courage to.”

I’m especially hoping this book inspires people who want to start startups. The fame that comes with success makes startup founders seem like they’re a breed apart. Perhaps if people can see how these companies actually started, it will be less daunting for them to envision starting something of their own. I hope a lot of the people who read these stories will think, “Hey, these guys were once just like me. Maybe I could do it too.”

为了围绕这个目标，他采访的人主要是团队的 Geek，而不是 CEO，因为在她看来，技术是这个世界的根本驱动力，这里列一下所有被采访的人物：

1. Max Levchin - Cofounder, PayPa
2. Sabeer Bhatia - Cofounder, Hotmail
3. Steve Wozniak - Cofounder, Apple Computer
4. Joe Kraus - Cofounder, Excite
5. Dan Bricklin - Cofounder, Software Arts
6. Mitchell Kapor - Cofounder, Lotus Development
7. Ray Ozzie - Founder, Iris Associates, Groove Networks
8. Evan Williams - Cofounder, Pyra Labs (Blogger.com)
9. Tim Brady - First Non-Founding Employee, Yahoo
10. Mike Lazaridis - Cofounder, Research In Motion
11. Arthur van Hoff - Cofounder, Marimba
12. Paul Buchheit - Creator, Gmail
13. Steve Perlman - Cofounder, WebTV
14. Mike Ramsay - Cofounder, TiVo
15. Paul Graham - Cofounder, Viaweb
16. Joshua Schachter - Founder, del.icio.us
17. Mark Fletcher - Founder, ONElist, Bloglines
18. Craig Newmark - Founder, craigslist
19. Caterina Fake - Cofounder, Flickr
20. Brewster Kahle - Founder, WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet
21. Charles Geschke - Cofounder, Adobe Systems
22. Ann Winblad - Cofounder, Open Systems, Hummer Winblad
23. David Heinemeier Hansson - Partner, 37signals
24. Philip Greenspun - Cofounder, ArsDigita
25. Joel Spolsky - Cofounder, Fog Creek Software
26. Stephen Kaufer - Cofounder, TripAdvisor
27. James Hong - Cofounder, HOT or NOT
28. James Currier - Founder, Tickle
29. Blake Ross - Creator, Firefox
30. Mena Trott - Cofounder, Six Apart
31. Bob Davis - Founder, Lycos
32. Ron Gruner - Cofounder, Alliant Computer Systems; Founder, 33. Shareholder.com
33. Jessica Livingston - Cofounder, Y Combinator

摘录：

Sprinters apparently reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It’s that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That’s when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100 percent of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.
The striking thing about this phase is that it’s completely different from most people’s idea of what business is like. If you looked in people’s heads (or stock photo collections) for images representing “business,” you’d get images of people dressed up in suits, groups sitting around conference tables looking serious, PowerPoint presentations, and people producing thick reports for one another to read. Early-stage startups are the exact opposite of this. And yet they’re probably the most productive part of the whole economy.
Why the disconnect? I think there’s a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not, the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago, I read an article in which a car magazine modified the sports model of some production car to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it look fast.
Business is broken the same way that car was. The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes organizations less productive. Suits, for example, do not help people to think better. I bet most executives at big companies do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go downstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee. That’s when you have ideas. Just imagine what a company would be like if people could think that well at work. People do in startups, at least some of the time. (Half the time they’re in a panic because their servers are on fire, but the other half they’re thinking as deeply as most people only get to sitting alone on a Sunday morning.)
Ditto for most of the other differences between startups and what passes for productivity in big companies. And yet conventional ideas of “professionalism” have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit, we tried hard to seem “professional.” We’d clean up our offices, wear better clothes, and try to arrange a lot of people to be there during conventional office hours. In fact, programming didn’t get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for programming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2:00 in the morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by the conventional wisdom. We thought of ourselves as impostors, succeeding despite being totally unprofessional. It was as if we’d created a Formula 1 car but felt sheepish because it didn’t look like a car was supposed to look.

I wrote in the Introduction that my biggest hope for the book was that it would inspire people to start their own startups, by showing how uncertain successful founders were themselves at first. And that seems to be happening. My favorite email came from a programmer who quit his job at a big company to become the first employee at a startup. The founders had been working for a while to convince him to join the company. “I quit my job the day after I finished reading Founders at Work,” he said in an email. “Without your book, I may not have had the courage to.”

In addition to having perseverance, founders need to be adaptable. Not only because it takes a certain level of mental flexibility to understand what users want, but because the plan will probably change. People think startups grow out of some brilliant initial idea like a plant from a seed. But almost all the founders I interviewed changed their ideas as they developed them. PayPal started out writing encryption software, Excite started as a database search company, and Flickr grew out of an online game.

I’m especially hoping this book inspires people who want to start startups. The fame that comes with success makes startup founders seem like they’re a breed apart. Perhaps if people can see how these companies actually started, it will be less daunting for them to envision starting something of their own. I hope a lot of the people who read these stories will think, “Hey, these guys were once just like me. Maybe I could do it too.”

Livingston: Tell me a little about how PayPal got started.
Levchin: The company was really not founded to do payments at all. My focus in college was security. I wanted to do crypto and stuff like that. I had already founded three different companies during college and the year after, which I spent in Champaign-Urbana, where I went to school. Then, in favor of not doing graduate school, I decided to move out to Silicon Valley and try to start another company.
So I was hanging around Silicon Valley in the summer of ’98 and was not really sure what I was going to do with my life. I was living in Palo Alto, squatting on the floor of a friend. I went to see this random lecture at Stanford—given by a guy named Peter, who I had heard about, but never met before.
The lecture turned out to have only six people in it. It was in the heat of the summer, so nobody showed up. This guy was like, “There are only six of you, OK.” Afterwards I walked up to talk to him. He was this really intense guy, and he said, “We should get breakfast sometime.” So we met up the next week.
I had two different ideas that I was considering starting companies around, and I pitched him on both evenly. Peter was running a hedge fund at the time. For a few weeks we kept talking, and eventually he said, “Take this idea, because this one is better, and you go start a company around it, and then I can have my hedge fund invest a little bit of money in it”—like a couple hundred thousand dollars. That was a good thing, since I was starting to run out of money.
I had just moved from Champaign; most of my contacts and friends were in Chicago. One of them I was trying to convince to be the CEO. He wasn’t really available, so I wound up being without a CEO. I called Peter and said, “This investment is a great thing, but I have no one to run the company. I’m just going to write the code and recruit the coders.” And he said, “Maybe I could be your CEO.” So I said, “That’s a really good idea.” The next 2 weeks we were sort of playing with the idea, and by 1/1/99 we agreed that he would be the CEO and I would be the CTO.

Livingston: When did you first notice fraudulent behavior?
Levchin: From day one. It was pretty funny because we met with all these people in the banking and credit card processing industry, and they said, “Fraud is going to eat you for lunch.” We said, “What fraud?” They said, “You’ll see, you’ll see.”
I actually had an advisor or two from the financial industry, and they said, “Get ready for chargebacks. You need to have some processing in place.” We said, “Uh huh.” They said, “You don’t know what a chargeback is, do you?”
Livingston: So you didn’t foresee this fraud?
Levchin: I had no idea what was going to happen.
Livingston: But you weren’t too surprised?
Levchin: We tried to attack the system for ourselves, like a good security person would. How can you cheat and steal money and do whatever? We made some provisions from day one to prevent fraud. We prevented all the obvious fraud, and then, I think 6 months into it, we saw the first chargeback and were like, “Ah, one per week. OK.” Then it was like an avalanche of losses; 2000 was basically the year of fraud, where we were just losing more and more and more money every month. At one point we were losing over $10 million per month in fraud. It was crazy.
That was when I decided that that was going to be my next challenge. I started researching it, figuring out what could be done and attacking the problem.

Livingston: Did you patent this technique?
Levchin: I didn’t really want to patent it because, for one, I don’t like software patents, and, two, if you patent it, you make it public. Even if you don’t know someone’s infringing, they will still be getting the benefit. Instead, we just chose to keep it a trade secret and not show it to anyone.
After a while, IGOR became well known to the company, like all the other tools that we had built early on. We had patented some of it, and some of it we said, “OK, it’s open for wide use now.” There’s still a whole bunch of tools that they are using today that are not public. They don’t talk about it much at all, and I think that’s a good thing.

Levchin: No, because I think we didn’t know what we were doing. I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is that you’re not really going to build one specific company. The goal—at least the way I think about entrepreneurship—is you realize one day that you can’t really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn’t matter what that thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.

When coworkers Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith began working on their first startup idea—a web-based personal database they called JavaSoft—they were frustrated because their employer’s firewall prevented them from accessing their personal email accounts.
To solve their problem, they came up with the idea of email accounts that could be accessed anonymously through a web browser. This idea became the startup. In 1996, the first web-based email was born, offering people free email accounts that could be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection.
Less than 2 years later, they had grown Hotmail’s user base faster than any media company in history. On New Year’s Eve, 1997, Microsoft acquired Hotmail for $400 million.

Livingston: Take me back to how the idea got started and evolved into Hotmail. How did you know Jack?
Bhatia: I met Jack Smith when I joined Apple Computer. We were working on the same project building PowerBook portables. Our manager left the company to join a startup in the Valley called FirePower Systems. Jack and I knew Apple would have given us steady, stable employment, but it wasn’t with grand stock options. So we decided to leave Apple and join this startup.

The Internet was just unfolding, so I started spending more and more time on it, and it was interesting. It was exciting to see these little companies get started. Two of my colleagues from Stanford had gone on to start Yahoo, and I thought, “Wow. This is just a list, a directory which tells you what is where. And somebody put $1 million in them.” I mean, that was huge. So I thought, “This Internet thing is here to stay,” and I started playing around with it and came up with the idea to do a simple-to-install database at the back end. Then you’d use the browser as the front end. It could store any piece of information at the back, but the browser would be used to display it. So people could just look for it and be able to create a personal database of anything: contact information, phone numbers, special files, or whatever it is that you would do on a local PC.

Livingston: Had you quit your jobs?
Bhatia: No, we were actually both working, so we decided to spend all of the time on the weekends and evenings building this product. Then it came to a point that one of us had to quit our job to focus full-time on it, so I told Jack, “I’m single and don’t have a family. Why don’t you quit and start working on this and I’ll give you half of my salary?” So at least he could support his family. I didn’t need that much money.
We started building the product and then started looking around for funding. We went to a number of VCs and many of them turned us down because they were like, “How are you going to make money if you are going to give it away for free? What’s the revenue mechanism?” We said we would capture detailed demographic information about people and that detailed quality of information on individuals would help us advertise to them. But of course advertising was not a proven revenue model at that time.

Livingston: You finally pitched Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and they passed the test. Tell me about getting funding.
Bhatia: They liked the idea right off the bat. They said, “We’re going to get one of our partners to come in and take a look at this because it could be big.” So Tim Draper came in the following week and he liked the idea. After another meeting he said, “OK, we’re ready to fund you. We like this very much. How much do you want?”
I did some calculations on the back of an envelope and asked for $3 million, which was our plan based on hiring a few engineers.
They said, “No, that’s too much. How much money do you need just to prove to us that you can do this—that it’s even possible to make email available on the web?” So I asked for half a million and he said, “I’ll give you $300,000.” I said, “Alright, I’ll take it.”
They wanted 30 percent of the company, which would value us at $1 million. It was an intense negotiation; I threatened to go to the other VCs if they didn’t pony up the money. We finally settled on a 15 percent split with them and they valued the company at $2 million post money. But they’d put in a right of first refusal. Since I was a young entrepreneur at the time, I didn’t understand that this basically meant that you couldn’t go to any other VC. So even though they didn’t get their chunk in the first piece, in any subsequent round they would have the ability to take up the entire round.
Livingston: Your lawyer didn’t point out that clause?
Bhatia: We didn’t have a very good lawyer back then. Of course it was touted to us as “We love you so much that we want to have the right to buy the next round. You can go to other people too.”
But that’s the one that got us. It impeded our ability to go to another VC. What ended up happening was that we could not get a higher valuation because DFJ wanted to put more money in the company themselves. So any time we would talk to another VC, they would talk him out of it: “This is not a good company, don’t worry about it.” So we were really stuck with DFJ for the next round.
Livingston: They put you down to other VCs?
Bhatia: They did. Of course, that was very early on and now everything is all fine and dandy, but at that point in time . . . we had a term sheet for a much higher valuation. But when we would talk to any other VC, the other VC would call the guys at DFJ and they’d say, “No, don’t invest in them.”
Livingston: Were they helpful at all?
Bhatia: Yes. Steve Jurvetson was very helpful; he introduced us to a lot of people and, on the whole, they’re a good VC firm in the sense that they try to put deals together. But sometimes they don’t play by the rules.

Livingston: Was there ever a time when you thought you were in trouble?
Bhatia: The only time was when we had to go in for the second round of financing. We didn’t have any money and Tim was at the Olympics in Atlanta and he refused to fund us because we wanted a slightly higher valuation. This was what all the other VCs were telling us, but he wanted to invest at a lower valuation. We had only a couple of weeks worth of money left and I would not have been able to meet the next payroll. So as soon as he came back, we literally had to accept his terms and move on.

Livingston: Web-based email was so new to the world. What did consumers misunderstand?
Bhatia: We had a sales guy who signed up his mom, and his mom said, “Yes, I can see that there’s an email from you, but how do I read it?” And he said, “Mom, go and click on it.” She didn’t know you had to click on it!
I heard another story from a man who said his sister would get into the Hotmail account not directly by going to http://hotmail.com, but by going to Yahoo, typing in the word “hotmail,” and then it would bring up the Hotmail page and then she’d log in. And he’d say, “Why do you do it that way?” and the sister would say, “My friend taught me this is how you get to Hotmail, so that’s what I’ve been doing.” The usage patterns of how people used the Internet were baffling to us.

Livingston: Tell me about the negotiation process.
Bhatia: They called us to meet with Bill on October 13, 1997, and we were shown the Microsoft campus, headquarters, the whole works. We were taken to Bill’s office, met with him, and then we were taken to a room with a gigantic table, and there were about 15 Microsoft negotiators sitting on the other side: business development people, lawyers, accountants, all of them.
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 board and discuss this and get back to you.”
And the CFO said, “C’mon, is that in the right ballpark?” He wanted me to open my mouth, but I was told beforehand that if I opened my mouth, there was no way I could negotiate with so many people. It was just the three of us: Jack Smith, myself, and our VP of marketing.
Livingston: The VCs gave you the liberty to negotiate, right? That surprises me.
Bhatia: Luckily it was very early on; had we been burning through a lot of cash, had we been around for a while, they probably would have put pressure on us. But we were under no pressure at that point in time.
Livingston: What drove you to keep on negotiating until you got the $400 million?
Bhatia: Once you’ve got a lead in terms of a subscriber base, that is unassailable. It can’t be replicated easily. So I knew even if they started developing the product—I have no doubt in my mind that they could have developed it, so many engineers and smart people in Microsoft. At that time they had something like 16,000 engineers, and I had a total of 60 people in the company, only 14 engineers, so it would have been easy to pick 15 guys from 16,000 and build this product. But I knew we had that momentum behind us and that is very hard to replicate.
Livingston: You arrived in this country with only $250 in your pocket. Wasn’t it tempting for you to agree to sell for, say, $300 million?
Bhatia: Once you have tasted this kind of success, once you’ve tasted that it works, that you’ve got subscribers who are telling you it’s good, you know you are going to get there. In fact, that’s exactly what’s happened. That 6-month lead that we had already over any of our competitors today has translated into about a 50 to 100 million–user lead.
Seeing how they did a lousy job of providing email to their 2.5 million subscribers, I also knew that they didn’t have the technology in house. Because if they did, they wouldn’t have been asking to license this from us. If we had gone the licensing route, I think we would have been as big as Google. Because that’s what Google did, right? Initially, they said, “We’ve got search. Why don’t we license search to everyone else?” That was their original business model. They licensed it to Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL and grew big based on their subscribers.

When did you start Y Combinator?
Livingston: We started Y Combinator in March 2005. Around that same time, I had gotten a book deal for Founders at Work, so I had planned to quit my job doing marketing at an investment bank and work full-time for a little while on the book. But we started Y Combinator simultaneously, so I didn’t really get to spend much time on the book.
What was the process when Y Combinator got started?
Livingston: That would assume that we had a process. There was no process. Remember, Y Combinator started off as an experiment. Paul had wanted to do angel investing. He wanted to help people start companies. But he didn’t really want all the requirements that come with being an angel investor, so he thought he should start an organization that could handle all of this for him. I said, “That sounds interesting. I’d love to work with entrepreneurs.” So we sort of hatched this idea for Y Combinator, and I was the one in charge of doing a lot of the business stuff.
We decided to do a batch of investments at once, so that we could learn how to be investors. We decided, “OK, we’ll invest in a group of startups, and we’ll do it over the summer since a lot of people are free over the summertime.”

What was the point when you quit?
Livingston: If I remember correctly, it was the Monday after we conducted the interviews. We got a lot of applications, more than we thought we would. And then we chose about 20 groups to come to Cambridge to interview—over a Saturday and Sunday, all day long. On Sunday night we called everyone.
We chose eight that we had wanted to fund, and all of them but one said yes. I give the founders a lot of credit, because this was a brand new concept and Y Combinator had no track record. The deal was: move to Cambridge for the summer and get $12,000 or $18,000, depending on whether you were two or three founders. We based the amount of money on the MIT graduate student stipend, which was a couple grand a month. We said, “Come to Cambridge and we’ll work with you, and we’ll get together for dinner and hear from guest speakers every week.” (Unfortunately for Paul, we hijacked his personal office to use for Y Combinator.) So seven of them said yes, and I went into work on Monday thinking “Y Combinator is real now”—even though we didn’t even have Y Combinator legally set up at this point. I gave my notice that day, I think.
But that day something else very memorable happened. There had been one group, two guys from UVA, who were still seniors and were graduating that spring—Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman. They came to us with an idea that we just thought was wrong for two young guys with no connections in the fast food industry. Their idea was ordering fast food through your cell phone. And we didn’t fund them. We told them, “Sorry, we really liked you guys, but we just think your idea would be a bit too challenging.” But that morning when I was at work, Paul called them and said, “We like you guys. Would you be willing to work on another idea?” They were on an Amtrak train heading back to Virginia.
I remember Paul emailed me and the subject line was “muffins saved.” I had nicknamed them “the muffins,” because I just loved them. It was just sort of an affectionate name. I remember thinking, “This is so exciting.” They had gotten off the train in Hartford or something and headed back to Boston to go meet with Paul to brainstorm new ideas. I thought, “These are the kind of people I want to fund—people who would get off the train and go back and make it happen.” So we wound up funding eight companies that summer

Paul Buchheit was Google’s 23rd employee. He was the creator and lead developer of Gmail, Google’s web-based email system, which anticipated most aspects of what is now called Web 2.0. As part of his work on Gmail, Buchheit developed the first prototype of AdSense, Google’s program for running ads on other websites. He also suggested the company’s now-famous motto, “Don’t be evil,” at a 2000 meeting on company values.
Although not a founder, Buchheit probably contributed more to Google than many founders do their startups. Gmail was in effect a startup within Google—a dramatically novel project on the margins of the company, initiated by a small group and brought to fruition against a good deal of resistance.

Livingston: What number employee were you?
Buchheit: 23.
Livingston: How did you join Google?
Buchheit: I was working at Intel in the area and was kind of bored. I was looking around for something more interesting and I emailed Google my résumé. Interestingly enough, the first time I emailed my résumé, it bounced because their mail server was down. But I emailed it again the next day and it got through and they called me up. I came in and took a job.
It worked out well, but it wasn’t like I saw this company and said, “Oh wow, this is going to succeed!” I just thought it would be fun. It looked like there were some smart people and it was kind of interesting work—that it would be more fun than my old job.
Livingston: Did you get any compensation for doing this project that was such a big success within the company?
Buchheit: It’s hard for me to know even, because, even after the initial stock grants, throughout the history of the company they’ve given follow-on grants. So I don’t know what mine would have been if I wasn’t working on Gmail.
Livingston: I heard you came up with the famous “Don’t be evil” principle. Can you give me the background?
Buchheit: I believe that it was sometime in early 2000, and there was a meeting to decide on the company’s values. They invited a collection of people who had been there for a while. I had just come from Intel, so the whole thing with corporate values seemed a little bit funny to me. I was sitting there trying to think of something that would be really different and not one of these usual “strive for excellence” type of statements. I also wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out.
It just sort of occurred to me that “Don’t be evil” is kind of funny. It’s also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent. They were tricking them selling search results—which we considered a questionable thing to do because people didn’t realize that they were ads.
Livingston: The users didn’t know?
Buchheit: Companies would just mix the ads in with the regular search results so people would think it was a search result. It’s kind of like fake news or something. In a newspaper, they’re usually pretty good about separating out which things are advertisements and which aren’t. But the search engines at the time were all selling search results and mixing them in with the real ones, so it was a little bit of a differentiator that we always said that we would never do that— and haven’t.
So it was all those inspirations, and I just thought it was a catchy little phrase. But the real fun of it was that people get a little uncomfortable with anything different, so throughout the meeting, the person running it kept trying to push “Don’t be evil” to the bottom of the list. But this other guy, Amit Patel, and I kept kind of forcing them to put it up there. And because we wouldn’t let it fall off the list, it made it onto the final set and took on a life of its own from there. Amit started writing it down all over the building, on whiteboards everywhere. It’s the only value that anyone is aware of, right? It’s not the typical meaningless corporate statement or platitude.

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