didn’t ship booths around the country or shrink-wrap software. Or license software.
Nobody had. Rumor has it that Lotus thought it was so cool to have the
shrink-wrap machines that, whenever they’d ship a new product, they would
shrink-wrap the head programmer and unwrap him quick before he smothered
to death. I don’t know if that’s fact or fiction.
So for us, it was never stressful because we didn’t feel the cadence of competitors
on us. It was tiring and it was hard, but it was a lot of fun. It was like,
...

Winblad: Oh yeah. Because you see examples all the time. I do personal references
myself. Whenever I’m going to join a board, I will ask people for personal
references. Your friends, your business colleagues, whatever. I’ll address these
references as these are not going to make or break this deal, but I want to
understand this person. How do they work, how do they think? How do they
get themselves in corners? Or twitterpated? What do they need to be surrounded
by to be successful?
You do learn that people get to be...

experience as an investor?
Winblad:Well, if there was a perfect lens on this, it would be easier. Most companies
do not fail because some competitor crushed them. There’s a small
amount of failures where the competition was underestimated. There’s a small
amount in the software category where the technical achievement needed to
bring a high-value product could never be reached. But the majority of companies
fail by self-inflicted wounds by the leadership team. That stuff is all under
your control. We have the biggest challenge in software companies: the core
value is...

handsomely rewarded. The stories are not like, “Hey, we had patrician backgrounds
and silver spoons, and we bought our way into this.” We just “thought”
our way into these industries. The power of thought and math and science and
computing, you’re given that for free—it’s a choice you can make. You take that
choice, and it gives you sort of a magic wand to be a captain of an industry that’s
still fairly young, that’s driving the whole world economy. I don’t know. This is
just a mystery to me. Women running these companies...