to your customers. We would have to convince ourselves that you were a good
company.”
“So what? You have to do that with any company.”
“No, with all the other companies, we just look at the names of the venture
capitalists who’ve backed them, and if it’s a big name like Kleiner Perkins, we
just take the company public without doing any research. We have no idea what
these companies do, we have no idea who their customers are or if they’re satisfied.
We don’t do any research. We just take them public...

everywhere. It would be so nice to just be the CTO and have a brilliant management
team installed in my place.” So it was very attractive to me, and our
MBAs said, “Yeah, these Greylock and General Atlantic guys, it’s a bigger name,
and it will really help us.” Slightly worse terms than Summit—actually, with the
deal Summit was offering, I could have sold some of my shares to them, taken
some cash out, and had some money, and in retrospect that would have been a
very smart idea. Especially if you are going...

The VCs found a CEO for the company, and I was like, “OK, great! Finally,
I can relax.” This guy was a very smooth talker. He had been the COO-type at a
software consulting firm, Cambridge Technology Partners, which is a pretty
bad company, actually. They never had a really good product, and I don’t think
their customers were very well served. If you are going to get a manager, it’s
probably better to get somebody from GE Jet Engines because, at the end of
the day, the customer who buys a GE jet...

and he brought in his friend to be CFO. His buddy didn’t have an accounting
degree and he was really bad with numbers. He couldn’t think with numbers,
he couldn’t do a spreadsheet model accurately. That generated a lot of acrimony
at the board meetings. I would say, “Things are going badly.” And he’d
say, “Look at this beautiful spreadsheet. Look at these numbers; it’s going
great.” In 5 minutes I had found ten fundamental errors in the assumptions of
this spreadsheet, so I didn’t think it would be wise to use it to...

about 6 months, because they had no management experience, no P&L experience,
no engineering experience, and no numbers experience, they couldn’t see
that what I was telling them was right and that they were headed for some
serious financial and customer losses. They just thought I was injuring their
self-esteem—that’s what they said.
They basically fired me and all but one of my cofounders. They pushed
them out of the company within a month or two. I’d been fired 2 months after
they came in; I just didn’t know that I’d been fired....