or an e-commerce site and say, ‘OK, I’ve looked at your business and your goals;
here are some ideas that we can bring in from these 10 other sites that I built,
these 100 other sites that I’ve used.’ And be an equal partner in the design, not
just a coder.”
I wanted to grow people into being able to do that, and I thought, “Let’s try
to make these people true professionals in the sense that lawyers and doctors
and real engineers like civil engineers are professionals.”
Livingston: What would that mean?...

biology grad school.
When they’re young, people need to work pretty long hours to build experience
and get things done. But the benefit was that then they get a big chunk of
the project, and they are able to say, “I built half of the site for the customer.”
They put their name on something, instead of their r?sum? just saying that they
were part of a 20-person team.
You never really know what most programmers have accomplished. There
are a handful of people that you can say that about. Linus Torvalds built...

Greenspun: Yeah, but they didn’t appreciate it that much. Some of the early
people did, but the later arrivals, when the venture capitalists came in and said,
“Oh, you guys should just clock out at 5 p.m. and you shouldn’t write, because
programmers shouldn’t have to do more than code,” they were so happy that
they didn’t have to work hard anymore. “We don’t have people like Philip and
Jin reviewing our code and telling us to redo it to be cleaner and simpler.” They
were so happy to be relieved of those strictures...

of us in the higher ed biz; this guy never had much of it, but he was apparently
very effective.) They could have hired anybody in the world—they have all this
cash—and they hired this guy. You want somebody who’s a really good manager.
Managing your company might be harder than managing Microsoft because
Microsoft has $40 billion in cash, so they can recover from mistakes that you
won’t be able to recover from. So you need a guy like that.
But entrepreneurs love their babies and never ask themselves, “Why would
a...

Because we were not GE or Microsoft, we were not a place where a
great businessman rationally would have wanted to work.
We did get one good guy, Cesar Brea, who had done a lot of software consulting
at Bain. He came by the house to check us out because he had heard
about us from a friend of a friend and was looking to work at a company instead
of being a consultant. What sold him on us was that, when he came to talk,
there was a check for $500,000 from HP...