competitors? And do you have to manage people’s expectations differently?
Ozzie: In a startup, you’re on this mission together. Everyone has to feel that,
and you have to hire people who are willing to believe in something they are
trying to accomplish. And in that era, it was very challenging in two dimensions.
Hiring in the dot-com era, when a lot of these people’s friends were getting
rich, was hard. But the other thing was that the type of software we were building
had many systems software elements to it. A lot of it...

from an early stage, what you build really has to relate to the other, larger
goals of that corporation. You may not be completely tied up, you still can
accomplish your vision, but it would make no sense to be funded by a company
and be completely aligning yourself with their competitors’ offerings.
In a startup environment, it’s much rougher in terms of making your numbers.
There’s much less patience. Once you start down the treadmill of taking
venture capital, it’s “how many rounds before people give up on you or you have
...

stealth and then embrace them at the right time, when you believe it can be to
your advantage to embrace them. In the case of Groove, we were having distribution
challenges, we needed money, we were raising a round. One of the
biggest questions we were encountering with our enterprise customers was
“Why isn’t Microsoft just going to crush you tomorrow?”
And although I brought some credibility to the table because of my background
at IBM, having Microsoft as a backer only helped us within those enterprise
accounts.
Livingston: Back to Lotus...

difficult to hire someone on the marketing and sales side because they’re so different
than technologists and you don’t know who to trust. It takes about a year
Ray Ozzie 109
to really understand whether the people who you are partnering with trust you
and know they will rely upon you just as much as you know you will rely upon
them.
That’s where I think working for another company and building those relationships
is extremely valuable. Frequently, people think just running from
school out into doing a startup is the best...

Everyone knows that one reason you go to work and do what you do is the
hope that ultimately you’ll be compensated. But you don’t have to say it, and it
doesn’t have to come through. It should be about the mission. It should be
about changing the world. It should be about how you can impact the lives of
users, partners, and the employees themselves. It’s not just about this big payday.
The more you focus on the things that matter when you are talking to people
who want to believe in you,...