Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston  ## Metadata - Author: **Jessica Livingston** - Full Title: Founders at Work - Category: #articles - Tags: #business - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/36787984 ## Highlights - Apparently sprinters 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt8pe8bnb3624eftety01ehn)) - What surprised me most was how unsure the founders seemed to be that they were actually onto something big. Some of these companies got started almost by accident. The world thinks of startup founders as having some kind of superhuman confidence, but a lot of them were uncertain at first about starting a company. What they weren’t uncertain about was making something good— or trying to fix something broken. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt8ptepqx2yq3dm6sb9t6x6p)) - In fact, I’d say determination is the single most important quality in a startup founder. If the founders I spoke with were superhuman in any way, it was in their perseverance. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt8pw0rtxkhd0q7a612kw54j)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt8pxz89hqdddaf0mf9xb85j)) - Tags: #startup #business #ideas - Initially, I wanted to do crypto libraries, since I was a freshly minted academic. “I won’t even need to figure out how to do this commercialization part. I’m just going to build libraries, sell it to somebody who is going to build software, and I can just sit there and make a penny per copy and get mar- velously rich very quickly.” But no one was making the software because there was no demand. So we said, “We’ll make the software.” We went to enterprises and told them we were going to do this and got some positive reception, but then the thing happened again where no one really wants the stuff. It’s really cool, it’s mathematically complex, it’s very secure, but no one really needed it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt8qwmn9c30n2ys7mrj9d93n)) - Then finally we hit on this idea of, “Why don’t we just store money in the handheld devices?” The next iteration was this thing that would do crypto- graphically secure IOU notes. I would say, “I owe you $10,” and put in my passphrase. It wasn’t really packaged at the user interface level as an IOU, but that’s what it effectively was. Then I could beam it to you, using the infrared on a Palm Pilot, which at this point is very quaint and silly since, clearly, what would you rather do, take out $5 and give someone their lunch share, or pull out two Palm Pilots and geek out at the table? But that actually is what moved the needle, because it was so weird and so innovative. The geek crowd was like, “Wow. This is the future. We want to go to the future. Take us there.” So we got all this attention and were able to raise funding on that story. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt8r4ns7pfftbxdwn54rmv8h)) - Our first round of financing was actually transferred to us via Palm Pilot. Our VCs showed up with a $4.5 million preloaded Palm Pilot, and they beamed it to us. The product wasn’t really finished, and about a week before the beaming at Buck’s I realized that we weren’t going to be able to do it, because the code wasn’t done. Obviously it was really simple to mock it up—to sort of go, “Beep! Money is received.” But I was so disgusted with the idea. We have this security company; how could I possibly use a mock-up for something worth $4.5 mil- lion? What if it crashes? What if it shows something? I’ll have to go and commit ritual suicide to avoid any sort of embarrassment. So instead of just getting the mock-up done and getting reasonable rest, my two coders and I coded nonstop for 5 days. I think some people slept; I know I didn’t sleep at all. It was just this insane marathon where we were like, “We have to get this thing working.” It actually wound up working perfectly. The beaming was at 10:00 a.m.; we were done at 9:00 a.m. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt8r6b102pzqvk1tmpbx8xhw)) - PayPal is: a security company pretend- ing to be a financial services company. What PayPal does is judge the risk of a transaction and then occasionally actually take the risk on. You don’t really know the money’s good; you just sort of assess the riskiness of both parties, and you say, “I’ll be the intermediary with the understanding that, on occasion, PayPal will be on the hook for at least part of the loss if the loss occurs.” Which is very tricky; it’s a hard position to be in. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtb9ex2jgvbj28nqh8nb8ecw)) - Every week you go to investors and say, “We’re doing this, exactly this. We’re really focused. We’re going to be huge.” The next week you’re like, “That was a lie.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtb9sbz74hvcnvjs8s4r8wnz)) - “Hi, John. Hi, Pete”—the new VC guys—“We changed our business plan.” And these guys were like, “What?” They just put down $4 million to see something happen, and we said, “Sorry, we’re not going to do that; we’re going to do this.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtb9twas909pvw7gabyzdg9c)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtb9wa2w76htgtv8f31m7m48)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtbbepxzdj6smsnkh88a8t6a)) - 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 did- n’t need that much money. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtbbm88by4ntp0k1tkfvewth)) - And then it occurred to us, “If that would solve our problem, it would solve the problems of many others.” We didn’t know how many others, but email was something that everyone used. To provide ubiquitous access to that email from any web browser from anywhere in the world was the killer idea. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtbbp78t1p73e0k31wy5a1gr)) - Our plan was to use the JavaSoft idea to get money from venture capitalists. But actually the killer arrow in our quiver was always email because we thought that it was even bigger than the original idea. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtbbv2cw83e2hwy58d2dqnt8)) - 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 under- stand 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtbc0y4q7d2kacn439ek04rt)) - Every turn of every chip costs you millions of dollars, so when hardware designers design any piece of software, they normally get it right. They use something called state machines to describe the functioning of the software. When you do that, you are very deterministic: if this is the input, then this will be the output. So you write it in a very deterministic fashion and therefore you tend not to make too many mistakes. Whereas the pure software writers—the way they think and architect software is very creative. They put in lots of bells and whis- tles, but they think, “No big deal. If there is a bug, we’ll fix it. Put in a patch.” You can’t do that in hardware. There’s no patch. Once you ship a chip, it has to work all the time. So in terms of being able to test it out, there is somewhat of a difference, but I just think that hardware designers would be pretty good soft- ware designers as well. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtgg4f38bgc706rb3ja695ec)) - What has happened in the last 10 years is that advertising has grown even more. It’s not just page impressions, but the number of click-throughs. The most monetizable part of advertising (at least online advertising today) is the click-through to another advertiser, which is search. When people search, they’re most likely to click through because that’s when they’re looking for something. Google has proven remarkably well that click-through is a monetizable quantity more than page impressions. You can have 100 page impressions and that has some value, but the click-through has far greater value because that’s how advertisers measure, “Is this advertising working for us or not?” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtk5k5mwjp2yjyxf9jxaqvr6)) - The general piece of advice, which is fairly mundane and oft repeated, is: make sure you write a business plan because it will crystallize your thoughts to communicate your ideas with somebody else. Make sure that once you have written your business plan, you have somebody read and critique it and ask you questions. It doesn’t have to be a cookie-cutter business plan with glossy pages and lots of information. Essentially it’s a plan that says what the company is going to do, what problem it is going to solve, how big the market is, what the sources of revenue for the company are, what your exit strategy is for your investors, what amount of money is required, how you are going to market it, what kind of people you need, what the technology risks are, marketing risks, execution risks. Those are the fundamentals of what goes into a business plan, and many people have it in their heads but don’t write it down. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtnsj8jhk1raxqw43y3w6zch)) - Second is, don’t try to change user behavior dramatically. If you are expect- ing people to dramatically change the way they do things, it’s not going to hap- pen. Try to make it such that it’s a small change, yet an important one. For example, the reason that Hotmail succeeded was because people were accus- tomed to going to different websites. All they had to do was put in their name and password and a little bit of information and they got an email account. So in that regard, it was the ease of use of getting online and having an identity. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtnsnwyebra951d7c6eca3rs)) - A business plan is nothing more than your own communication to a person not sitting in front of you—an imaginary person who will read it. Try to answer every possible question that that person could raise. That’s the description of a business plan, really. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtnsrx2m6exe0rx40s3dye62)) - My skill was that, if I know what I want for the end result—in those days it was a computer, in later days it might be a certain floppy disk that had to read and write some data—but if I knew what my end goal was, I know how to com- bine chips together very efficiently to get that goal done. Even if I’ve never designed anything before ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gttwvfkt2c7sgbrmw91z439a)) - All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I’d never once done that thing in my life. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gttwwprgfpjq7sjb7b8vxmr4)) - my approach in life was to just use my own knowledge. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gttxjtaa384dhe902k8wyavw)) - So we said, “OK, we’ll do Apple Computer.” 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 radios, that a few techie people would get into and really it wasn’t going to go to the masses. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtxd2h2ynb7vyfefac37tkjm)) - In the Homebrew Computer Club, we felt it was going to affect every home in the country. But we felt it for the wrong reasons. We felt that everybody was technical enough to really use it and write their own programs and solve their problems that way. Even when we started Apple, we had very mistaken ideas about where the market was going to be that big. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gtxd37tsb4x8yd7yt8wgpmm6)) - Livingston: What is the key to excellence for an engineer? Wozniak: You have to be very diligent. You have to check every little detail. You have to be so careful that you haven’t left something out. You have to think harder and deeper than you normally would. It’s hard with today’s large, huge programs. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gv011s0j8c050ykp3nttd2nx)) - In the years 1980 to ’83, when the Apple II was the largest-selling computer in the world, we didn’t advertise it once. Everybody else who was making prod- ucts for it was advertising for it. All of our ads were for the Apple III, which never sold in that time frame. Because we were trying to make the Apple III the big business machine instead of IBM. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gv54rcahxjr4vcb55s2z3sr7)) - Entrepreneurs have to keep adjusting to . . . everything’s changing, everything’s dynamic, and you get this idea and you get another idea and this doesn’t work out and you have to replace it with something else. Time is always critical because somebody might beat you to the punch. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gv55xrebxp9dr8ngw86jgqne)) - It’s the whole sausage and sausage factory problem: when you’re outside and you only see the sausage coming out you think, “That’s pretty tasty.” When you’re on the inside and you know how it’s made, it’s terrifying. That’s the feel- ing. You just don’t ever feel like the progress is smooth. It’s never, “We set out this well-orchestrated plan, we’re executing it, it’s going exactly according to plan. We’re getting bigger by the day and it’s just as I thought.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gv8vraex630bzw0dx53ym9rd)) - Microsoft’s CTO, Nathan Myhrvold, yelling at me, “Search is not a business. People are just going to search a few times and then bookmark what they want to go to.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gv8vsgc35f4k4pma2vabj6cs)) - We were too young to realize that existing companies’ biggest problem is legacy. Period. They can’t focus on new businesses because they’ve got to manage their old ones. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gv8vyn1xmk5z9mzbd81rf4gx)) - the negotiator we were working with went back to Gates and said, “I think the number’s going to be $100 million if we want to do this.” And Gates said, “How much would it cost us to do it our- selves?” So the guy went away and built a plan and said it would be about a year and $25 million and 25 people or something like this. And the interesting thing is that they didn’t buy Excite for the $100 million, and they didn’t invest and build it themselves. Instead they did nothing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gv8w0ndn33d02c1z54spyy2j)) - If you are 22 and trying to make these big decisions, it’s great to have a very active guy like Vinod helping you out. And I mean active. I was talking to Vinod twice a day easily. He’s one of the senior partners at Kleiner Perkins and he’s spending multiple hours a day on my business, which you just don’t get. But that’s Vinod’s style. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gv8x4dnrz0tw859d0sd4s2p1)) - It’s so ironic. If you look at the way that a lot of huge companies get built . . . Microsoft built itself off IBM, unwittingly. Excite built itself unwittingly off Netscape. Google built itself unwittingly off Yahoo. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gv8x84pmh4q5trwghzwch6bd)) - I see way too many people give up in the startup world. They just give up too easily ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gva4xymaqjqaxygsext8ncj7)) - Venture capitalists, with the exception of people like Don Valentine, would tell you that they’d rather fund a great team than a great idea. The reason is that if they have a bad idea, great teams can figure out a better one. Mediocre people even with a great idea can screw it up in its execution. Or if they have a bad idea, then they aren’t going to be in a position to think about how to change it. They’re just going to pursue it blindly. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gva5bm48jkxtvtvp0vm0yjjk)) - The one thing we didn’t do that all our competitors were spending a lot of time doing was search. They were crawling the Web and doing full text search, and our strategy was, “Look, that’s a technology game. We’re not a technology company, we’re a media company. Since there are so many of them out there, we’re always going to be able to rent it.” That was the thought back then, and until Google came along that strategy was perfect. Because, as things played out, that’s exactly what happened. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gva6h384mz8dm4097gjgeekz)) - The BlackBerry was one of those innovations that not only became popular, but changed the way organizations operate. Some of the most powerful people in business and politics run their lives with this device. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvctajj6xr0wwgy3ps8yfber)) - Don’t get too caught up with computers, because it’s going to be the person that puts wireless technology and computers together that’s going to make a big difference. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvcv0mhabmcye16rahqw7wg7)) - We had compilers, real-time operating systems—you don’t really see the rele- vance these things are going to have in your life because you’re so caught up in the workload and the social environment. You don’t realize that you’re being trained with state-of-the-art technology, applications, and techniques. As time went on, we started realizing that this stuff was pretty cool—it was pretty advanced technology—and we started getting more and more involved with the various aspects of these different programs and research projects. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvcvf3jx4k7ynacxcnk2k7wk)) - Over the years, I’ve learned that the first idea you have is irrelevant. It’s just a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what’s wrong with it and you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a better idea and the second idea is always the important one. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvfc9cj92zjt22w9s8qqv5tw)) - A lot of the decision-making is very emotional. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvfd1f5x3yvveyqk723zv7n2)) - van Hoff: Marimba is an unfair case because we were willed on like crazy by the investors. We really had an unfair opportunity because when we got fund- ing, the VCs were calling us. They all wanted to invest because they had heard about us and wanted to find out what we were doing. So we got a really good first round of funding—$4 million from Kleiner Perkins ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvfd451gby3711f97wdwp7yz)) - Another story I remember from our first round of funding was when they gave us the checks—the lawyers were there, Kleiner was there, and I said, “Oh great, now I can buy that espresso machine!” and they all jumped me and said, “No, you’re not going to buy an espresso machine with this money. This is to start the company.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvfd5knxgrzjs7ma1zc3sy9f)) - VCs are an interesting bunch; you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them. They are instrumental in your success because they give you money and a really strong endorsement. They have this mafia-like network of connections and they help you with deals and find the right executives. They are really working your case. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvfdq1f7qgca3cesnd7km0e8)) - If you have the energy to do it, then you should try it yourself. But you do need to have the ability to form a team around you with good people. Talent attracts talent. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvfdt9kgf5v081yqbbyrxyyw)) - You have to have an unfair advantage in that you have to be good at something, or you have to have a direction that you’re interested in or a market that you see an opportunity in—but you shouldn’t get stuck too much on the details, because you can’t foresee your future anyway. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvfdvz9xg3sfk05qhzh82exg)) - Eventually, you need to go to VCs and attract money, and at that point you need to be able to put your plan in writing and sell it. That’s something you need to practice a lot. Start with your friends and your parents and eventually go to VCs. If you get good reactions, then keep doing it. If you get bad reac- tions, then stop immediately, because it’s a really bad idea to sell a bad plan. You can screw up once, but it’s hard to screw up multiple times, because the VCs won’t give you the time if you come up with a few bad plans. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvfdwmyeh616rsnrweakqwm6)) - I built the first version of Gmail in 1 day, just using the Groups code, but it only searched my email. I released that to some Googlers and people said it was useful, so it progressed from there. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvhygw44mpa2ddp7y5kk2bt0)) - AdSense, the content-targeted ads, was actually something that, if I recall, I did on a Friday. It was an idea that we had talked about for a long time, but there was this belief that somehow it wouldn’t work. But it seemed like an interesting problem, so one evening I implemented this content-targeting system, just as sort of a side project, not because I was supposed to. And it turned out to work. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvhyqdxqvqhmejb611v2yryj)) - Tags: #serenpidity - Every time we would get irritated by some little problem, or one of the users would say, “I have this problem, it isn’t working for me,” we’d just spend time thinking about it, look- ing at what the underlying problems are and how we can come up with solu- tions to make it better for them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvhzcpdt90ckkkh27vra7khf)) - I didn’t know anything about building these large systems before working at Google. So I’d look at how different parts of Google work and sort of say, “Does that apply to us? Can we reuse that technique?”—since there was already a successful model of how to do these things. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvhzmstj80as5w3ajp2xvxvg)) - I think the people are the biggest resource ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvhzq9fbb4krf1p3gxjx5eph)) - We were pretty nervous about some of our features. The idea of doing the whole thing in JavaScript—internally a lot of people were very unsure about that, but I think that our users loved it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvhzt85x1hmkxexs3kgrmc7z)) - I’m suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people, if they were play- ing Russian roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how much would they have to be paid to play one round? A lot of people were almost offended by the question and they’d say, “I wouldn’t do it at any price.” But, of course, we do that every day. They drive to work in cars to earn money and they are taking risks all the time, but they don’t like to acknowledge that they are taking risks. They want to pretend that everything is risk-free. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvj01qh27r53gh9e6f72syt4)) - I also learned about working with people, because one of the guys I cofounded it with, it just didn’t work out between us. He had his perspective of where he wanted to take the company; I had mine. I realized that these things are like a marriage. When you cofound something, you’ve got to have people that have a similar kind of perspective on where you’re going to take the thing. Otherwise you’re just locking horns all the time. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvmhezf9gvg27z184c0b1cqw)) - I had figured out a way to make existing video games work online—you know, a two-player game like NBA Jam—we hacked it so the software, instead of looking to the second controller, actually would set up a link through the dialup connection to another box, and the two kids were able to play each other. And of course they didn’t have to buy new software because we were working with game software that’s already written. Great way to bootstrap an online game thing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvmhgwyzgqv60ctzh4twv2bf)) - 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 did want. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvmjtn2ykgq5kbms6k70jymw)) - Netscape was doing a big PR campaign for their IPO. They had to convince everyone that the Internet would be economically important ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvq41gnbcwtzye34rht9y73d)) - Robert used to get up early, whereas I stayed up till four and got up at noon. So we would kind of work a 24-hour schedule. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvq4pej8w7zhjn00wrj1mavw)) - Being a sales guy and being a hacker are two very different kinds of work. We were very comfortable dealing with hacking, but dealing with cus- tomers seemed like this terrifying unknown. If it seems strange to you that we were afraid of customers, imagine how the average sales guy would feel about modifying the software running on his laptop. The idea would seem terrifying. Whereas to a hacker, big deal. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvq4tqyfr46sv704468n3ckg)) - We only wanted to raise $50,000, but both of the investors who saw the demos said yes. So we thought, “All right, we’ll raise $100,000 then, since they both said yes.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvq4x510rckh8tdkb3sx84vj)) - We felt like we had to have five or six customers to launch. And for these first customers, we basically would do whatever they said in order to get them as customers. We gave them the software for free for as long as they wanted. We built their sites ourselves. If they needed to have images in them, we would scan the images. We were basically web consultants, because we needed users; you can’t launch a thing like this without having any users. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvq537bsfw6b2mnnz8c1j30h)) - managers at the catalog companies we called up, at that point they just wished the Web would go away. It was just making their lives more complicated. We would call them up and tell them how we could solve all their problems and make an online store for them, and it was kind of like the dentist calling up and saying, “Why don’t you come in for that root canal?” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvq57cmhdka7f95e43f87wna)) - Graham: What Y Combinator prints on our T-shirts: make something people want. If you make something users want, they will be happy, and you can trans- late that happiness into money. That is the basis of a startup. A startup is a com- pany that builds some kind of technology that people want. The mistake that a lot of founders make is to build something they think users want, but that users don’t actually want. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvwa4najxesh02nv3vbpxb9d)) - The biggest entrepreneurial lesson I’ve learned has been that you really do need to follow your instincts. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvwadjknq08k5a2m7sywyn1n)) - Fake: I was talking to another entrepreneur, Judy MacDonald Johnston, and she said that women are much more passionate about their businesses. They’re doing it less for the money and more because they love it. There’s something about that that really rings true to me. Women are able to put their hearts and souls into it in a way that many men cannot—or rather, are not known for doing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvys25mf347x0b0dae9yvjrp)) - The blessing of Thinking Machines and the curse of Thinking Machines was that it had a lot of money. If you have a lot of money, then you can be detached from people that are going to pay you in the future. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvyscbb24v7794bcebj21vsz)) - We worked with both the House of Representatives and the Senate. So we were working with people who had insights into what it is they really wanted. It’s harder to get those customers at first, but they were terrific because they weren’t just trying to catch up. They weren’t trying to be number 2. They were number 1 in their fields, and we could learn from them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvytars2afd6qfxkwwn1dqx5))