a web browser. If we made email available through the web browser, that would
solve our problem.”
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.
Livingston: This killer idea emerged because you guys were trying to solve the
personal email exchange problem for yourselves?
Bhatia: Absolutely. That...

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.
So I wrote a business plan and didn’t know what to do with it....

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...

much more prominently—and we had all these other ideas that we wanted to
do, which we later on threw out. But we started the board meeting basically
saying, “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.”
To their credit, they were like, “All right, you guys are smart. Let’s do it.”
Usually VCs get freaked out by that, but...

Max Levchin 15
pack up and being replaced by these people that you’d fought all this time with.
The mothership has capitulated, and they’re replacing us with the people we’ve
been fighting against.
Livingston: What can big companies do to preserve a startup culture?
Levchin: I don’t know. Less PowerPoints. I think PayPal—even by the time we
were acquired—still felt really startup in a variety of ways. But not as much as
originally. People were definitely grumbling about how the startup culture was
being lost, even internally. But then, when we got...