about 6 months,...
about 6 months, because they had no management experience, no P&L experience,
no engineering experience, and no numbers experience, they couldn’t see
that what I was telling them was right and that they were headed for some
serious financial and customer losses. They just thought I was injuring their
self-esteem—that’s what they said.
They basically fired me and all but one of my cofounders. They pushed
them out of the company within a month or two. I’d been fired 2 months after
they came in; I just didn’t know that I’d been fired. I was still getting a paycheck,
but nobody was listening to me. They were telling people, “Don’t listen
to him; he doesn’t have any power.”
I was chairman of the board. I’d been fired probably within a month and
half, but it took me 6 months to realize it. They finally said, “OK, you’re fired
now, but you can still be on the board.” I initially thought, “Maybe this is good.”
I was sitting in my bathtub reading the New Yorker magazine, and I realized
that I’d been psychotic. That I’d thought, “If I don’t write software, people
won’t have any software. If I don’t write books on how to do things, nobody will
learn how to do things. If I don’t teach at MIT, these students will never learn
anything.” It hit me: I could sit here in this bathtub for the rest of my life reading
the New Yorker magazine, and Microsoft will eventually write all the software
that people need, and maybe it will be clunky and expensive, but so what?
It’s not my problem. They’ll get the software they need, eventually. If I don’t
teach at MIT, they have $5 billion in assets, and they’ll be able to hire somebody
much better than I am to teach these kids.
That was an epiphany; I didn’t have to work 7 days a week anymore, doing
stuff that was repetitive in a lot of cases. I’d been building multiuser Internet
applications for 20 years, with a lot of excursions into the CAD computer and
engineering world as well, but basically 10 years exclusively in Internet apps. So
I thought, “I can be doing something else. I’m an investor in this company. Let
them build this company. Let them deal with all these issues. I’ll just collect my
dividends.” I thought maybe this was a good thing, that I could do new stuff—
new research projects that were interesting to me.
Meanwhile, because these people didn’t know anything about the business,
they were continuing to lose a lot of money. They hired a vice president of marketing
who would come in at 10 a.m., leave at 3 p.m. to play basketball, and had
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