experience as an investor?
Winblad:Well, if there was a perfect lens on this, it would be easier. Most companies
do not fail because some competitor crushed them. There’s a small
amount of failures where the competition was underestimated. There’s a small
amount in the software category where the technical achievement needed to
bring a high-value product could never be reached. But the majority of companies
fail by self-inflicted wounds by the leadership team. That stuff is all under
your control. We have the biggest challenge in software companies: the core
value is the intellectual capital. It’s everything. And when there are big flaws in
the leadership team that you can’t remedy quickly, the company will die of selfinflicted
wounds.
Livingston: Why don’t more women start software startups?
Winblad: You know, I don’t know the answer to this. I was at an IBM event
recently, and Sam Palmisano, in sort of the midst of his extemporaneous presentation
at this event, said, “My daughter, who is 13, is a math whiz, and she was
just really focused on math and now that she’s 13, she’s worried about appearing
too nerdy.” It was sort of like a segue and then he went back onto the speech,
“So I don’t know if she’ll stick with it.” I wrote him a thank you note, and I said,
“It was really great to be included in this IBM event. It was a great event, and I
caught that little sidebar that you said about your 13-year-old daughter, and
I hope we can do a better job . . . some of the successful women in the software
industry—myself, Carol Bartz, Heidi Roizen—all of us were math whizzes and
we had really fun teenage lives as well as adult lives and have been very
successful.”
It’s, first of all, a small number of women and an increasingly small number
of any gender being inspired by math and science. It’s a big problem. You’d
think, “Hey, this week in the news, the richest guy in the world—Bill Gates—
the President of China is spending more time with him than the President.
Steve Jobs, with this aspirational product, the iPod. Why don’t you want to be
those guys?” They have inspirational products, inspirational lives, and it’s not
like we’re under-covered in the media. Something is getting lost in the message
here, where it should be really inspiring: “All I have to do is figure out this
math-and-science thing, and I’m writing part of my ticket here.” Why that is not
pulling not only women, but pulling everybody to say, “I want to be like those
people,” I don’t know.
You’d think that everybody would want to have our jobs. We’ve all been

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