Paul Graham and his friend Robert Morris started
Viaweb in 1995 to make software for building online
stores. A few days into writing the first prototype,
they had a crazy idea: why not have the software run
on the server and let the user control it through their
browser?
Within weeks, they had a web-based online store
builder they could demo to investors. They launched
at the beginning of 1996.
Viaweb was one of the first companies to deliver
on the Web’s promise of creating a level playing field.
...

version in a couple days.
One of the unusual things about Viaweb was that it worked over the Web.
That’s where the name came from. It was a web-based application—as far as I
know, the first one. But in the very beginning, it wasn’t web-based. At first it
was going to be software that you would use on your desktop computer to build
a website that you would then upload to a server. Then in the first couple days
of working on it, we had this idea, “Hey, maybe we could make this run...

things you did?
Graham: Pretty early, we got some funding from our friend Julian, who also
worked with us on Artix. He gave us $10,000. After about 6 weeks or so, it
seemed like it was going to be more work than we thought, so we got Trevor
Blackwell to work on it too.
Livingston: How did you know Trevor?
Graham: Trevor was in grad school with Robert. I asked Robert, “Who’s the
smartest grad student in the computer science program?” and he said “Trevor.”
I couldn’t believe it actually, because at...

Livingston: Where did you work?
Graham: In Robert’s apartment. His housemate was away that summer, and I
moved into his room.
Robert used to get up early, whereas I stayed up till four and got up at noon.
So we would kind of work a 24-hour schedule. I would write some new code
during the night and send Rtm an email saying, “OK, we’ve got all these new
features in my part of the code.” Then he would write the corresponding stuff
in his part. So we got code written very fast.
...

competitor and us as we could.
By that fall, we probably had a better online store builder than any of our
competitors ever had, even 3 years later. In October or November I went down
to New York and did demos for some angel investors and we got $100,000
more, which seemed to us more money than we could ever possibly spend. (We
were wrong.)
Livingston: So what happened next?
Graham: We were very encouraged that the angel investors wanted to invest.
We gave demos to two investors. We only wanted to...