chance the deal’s going to fall through. At the point where people say, “We want
to buy you,” the chances of it falling through are like 80 or 90 percent. So you
can’t let yourself believe. If someone wants to make you an offer, fine, but don’t
change your plans based on that. Just keep going.
Livingston: Looking back, what surprised you most in your experience with a
startup?
Graham: One thing that was surprising was that it actually worked. There we
were, in the summer of 1995, thinking, “We don’t know anything about business,
but we’re good programmers. Maybe if we write a really good program,
we’ll make something all these users will want and we’ll get lots of users and
then some big company will buy us.” And 3 years and enormous numbers of ups
and downs later, that’s exactly what happened. We had this theory about how
business might work, and we sort of forced it to conform to our theory.
I know Robert was surprised that we made any money, because I have a real
index of how he was feeling about Viaweb early on. A couple months in, he and
I were having dinner, and I made a bet with him that if he ever made a million
dollars out of Viaweb, he would get his ear pierced. So the day after the Yahoo
deal closed, Trevor and I grabbed him by one arm each and took him down to
the Garage in Harvard Square, where all the teenagers get their nose rings, and
we got his ear pierced. He spent a long time trying to pick out the smallest one.
Livingston: Some aspects of business turned out to be less of a mystery than
you had thought. What did you find you were better at than you thought?
Graham: I found I could actually sell moderately well. I could convince people
of stuff. I learned a trick for doing this: to tell the truth. A lot of people think
that the way to convince people of things is to be eloquent—to have some bag
of tricks for sliding conclusions into their brains. But there’s also a sort of hack
that you can use if you are not a very good salesman, which is simply tell people
the truth. Our strategy for selling our software to people was: make the best
software and then tell them, truthfully, “this is the best software.” And they
could tell we were telling the truth.
Another advantage of telling the truth is that you don’t have to remember
what you’ve said. You don’t have to keep any state in your head. It’s a purely
functional business strategy. (Hackers will get what I mean.)
Livingston: Were there things that nontechnical people misunderstood about
what Viaweb was doing?

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