the inner workings of the system. And you also have to do a lot of testing.
You have to be good at testing. You have to know what questions to ask people
and what problems to present to them.
The following is not something from my personal experience—it’s a story
told to me by the Mac team—but they said that, when they first did the dialog
boxes for the Lisa, instead of saying “OK,” it said, “Do It.” They found that
people were reluctant to click on that, and they couldn’t figure out why....

the film industry because I thought, “Well, the IBM PC”—which was introduced
in 1982—“is taking over the world. Its graphics display is so poorly architected.
It doesn’t even have square pixels. It has a palette of just eight primary
colors—actually two grays and six colors. Clearly, it’s being driven by business
applications and so on. My dream of where computers would go turns out to be
the wrong one. It’s not going more toward the average person; it’s going more
toward businesses. And that’s OK.” So I figured, “If I can’t do it in...

Then there’s Sand Hill Road with all the VCs and other potential investors,
who are all clustered together. You literally might do two or three presentations
to different VCs all in the cluster of buildings on Sand Hill Road.
The other thing is that there’s kind of an attitude here that people should try
things, and, if they fail, if they understand why they failed, they may actually be
a better investment in the next round than somebody who quickly succeeded
just by sheer luck.
Livingston: Were there any powerful interests who did...

know the other top executives at Microsoft, they were talking about negotiating
this and that funding, and cutting back products to the point where they no
longer made sense. I said, “Look, can’t we all agree on what is the right objective
for the whole company and then fund that? I don’t care if it’s in your group
or my group or whatever, but we should do the right thing.” It didn’t work that
way and, of course, any big company is like this. People have certain things they
control. That’s why there’s politics...

can believe it—and he’s now trying to get television to work through the
Internet, while what we started doing was trying to get the Internet to work
through a television.
Livingston: What has the potential to go most wrong in the first year when a
startup is such a fragile organization?
Perlman: The worst thing that can happen to a startup is if the founding
team—or the people who are leading the thing—do not get along. And it’s
deadly when they don’t get along in front of the troops. I’ve come to realize...