competitors? And do you have to manage people’s expectations differently?
Ozzie: In a startup, you’re on this mission together. Everyone has to feel that,
and you have to hire people who are willing to believe in something they are
trying to accomplish. And in that era, it was very challenging in two dimensions.
Hiring in the dot-com era, when a lot of these people’s friends were getting
rich, was hard. But the other thing was that the type of software we were building
had many systems software elements to it. A lot of it was lower-level communications,
storage, application framework–type code, and hiring was more
difficult for that type of talent at that time. In an earlier era when DEC was big,
it was easier to hire systems software talent.
But what held people together was the belief that you’re really going to
change the world. I think that’s the nature of many startups. You believe that
what you are doing is going to have a dramatic impact. You might not exactly
know how, but you really have a belief. That keeps you going and going through
many changes and a lot of uncertainty.
Livingston: What about managing your investors’ expectations?
Ozzie: That’s a difficult subject. There are pros and cons to taking money. The
best kind of company is one where you don’t have to take any money.
Livingston: Did you use your own money for Groove?
Ozzie: Yes, I funded the first few years myself. But eventually I took some
money from Mitch Kapor and then others. Not so much because I needed it at
that point, but because I knew that, ultimately, you cannot accomplish something
completely on your own. You really need to develop a network of people
Ray Ozzie 107
who win when you win. Being on the East Coast, I believed that it was very
important to establish a good network in Silicon Valley, where I didn’t have a
presence.
I’d worked with Mitch for many years, and I felt that he could make the
right introductions. So I first took money from Mitch, then he made some
introductions to VCs. One of them was Accel, and I took money from them. I
ended up spending quite a bit of time in the Bay Area, meeting a lot of people,
and ultimately that network helped a lot.
Iris was a corporate partnership with Lotus. I was 27 years old and didn’t
have the money to fund it then. Getting the product built was an amazingly positive
experience. We had structured a great contract that funded the product—
it was a unique partnership, a corporate startup kind of R&D partnership. But
that brings its own challenges. When you have an alliance with a major corporation

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