at Julian’s loft in New York. One of our investors was a metals trader, so we figured
that he must be a great negotiator and we’d let him handle it. The guys
from the big company said, “We want to buy you for $3 million.” And he said,
“Well, I won’t sell you the company for $3 million, but for $1 million, I’ll sell
you an option to buy the company in 6 months for $20 million.” At that point
the guys from the big company just got up and walked out.
Livingston: How did you feel?
Graham: For the first day or so, it didn’t register with me what had happened.
Then I felt really bad. I realized that if they’d bought us for $3 million, it would
have been more than a million for me personally, so I felt like I’d lost a million
dollars. I’d had a million dollars, and then lost it. I was aghast.
I called up the guy we’d been talking to at the big company and I said, “Do
you still want to buy us?” and he said, “No!” He had lost face, I guess, with his
colleagues for wasting their time on us.
Livingston: So that was a harsh dose of reality about the acquisition process.
Graham: That was my first introduction to something that turns out to be a
very important lesson for startups: it’s never a deal till the money’s in the bank.
Paul Graham 211
So many things can go wrong with deals, and they all do. Before we ultimately
got bought by Yahoo, we probably had nine or ten different acquirers that we
were talking to, and things always went wrong for one reason or another.
Livingston: So then what did you do? Go back to business?
Graham: Yeah. There were always two stories going on simultaneously with
Viaweb. There was the software and the customer story, which just went
smoothly and wonderfully the whole way along. We kept writing great software,
we kept getting more and more customers, the customers loved us, the growth
was this beautiful, smooth upward curve. Simultaneously, there was this story
about the business, which was one disaster after another. So most of the actual
turning points are not software or customer turning points, because everything
went great there. All the turning points are business turning points.
The next one was probably when Robert went off that summer and took a
summer job working for another company. He went to work at DEC SRC out in
California. The problem was, he didn’t tell me he was going to do this until . . .
Well, actually he never told me. A few days before he left, we were having
dinner with some friends and one of them said, “So Robert, are you looking forward

Похожие записи:

• at Julian’s loft