about?...
about?
Graham: We worried about different ones for different reasons. Our biggest
competitor was a company called iCat. Fortunately for us, they were not very
good at writing software. They were, however, very good at raising money and
seeming corporate. At one point they did one round of funding that was more
than our entire valuation, in fact probably twice our valuation. But fortunately
they were never a threat technically.
At first they weren’t web-based; they had desktop software. Finally they
came out with a web-based version. Trevor and I were at a trade show when it
launched, and we noticed that the URLs for static pages were something like
“display-file” with a file name for an argument. So we tried replacing the
argument with “/etc/passwd” and sure enough, the server displayed the password
file right in the browser. And there were accounts with no passwords.
I mean, this is programming 101.
There was another competitor called Shopsite that was better technically,
but still not too dangerous. Plus they were out in Utah; they weren’t really connected
to the startup world. Whereas iCat was in Seattle, which was much more
startuppy. For some reason there were no serious competitors in Silicon Valley.
Livingston: Tell me about some of the other major turning points in the first
year or two of Viaweb.
Graham: There were a lot of turning points. Basically Viaweb’s history was one
turning point after another, alternately up and terrifyingly down. A couple days
after we launched came the next turning point, when a giant company called us
up and wanted to buy us, right on schedule. It was just like we thought it was
going to be. We’re these great hackers, we write this clever piece of software,
we launch the thing, and rrring, there goes the phone and it’s some big company
wanting to buy us.
Livingston: What happened?
Graham: There was kind of a clash of cultures. First they came to check us out.
They showed up wearing these Bill Cosby sweaters, like someone in corporate
affairs has told them that when they go and visit startups, they’re supposed to
not wear suits and they’re like, “Uh, what do we wear?” “Wear a sweater that
looks like some macrame class knitted it collectively.” So they show up in their
Bill Cosby sweaters and march up the stairs past all the landlady’s kids’ shoes in
the corridor, and walk in, and this company they’re supposed to be buying is
just a grad student apartment with some computers in it.
But they still wanted to buy us after that, so we arranged to have a meeting
| ← were going to | at Julian’s loft → |