for the softer things in life like your family, friends, or dating life. And when you
are there with them, you’re not really there with them; you’re thinking about
this thing because you’re creating it, and it takes that amount of passion to make
it work.
Livingston: Did this ever hurt any of your relationships?
Currier: I almost didn’t marry my wife. She and I started dating about 2 months
before I came up with the idea, so she hasn’t really known me without it. I
couldn’t figure out if we should get married, but then I hired a new VP of engineering
and he transformed my life. Because I could trust him to do a lot of
important work, he gave me breathing room to actually feel something. Four
months after I hired him, I proposed and we got married. We now have four
great kids. I almost really blew it; the whole haze of the thing made it unclear.
At an HBS reunion, we had a roundtable for all of us who had been entrepreneurs,
and one of our professors asked, “What didn’t HBS teach you about
this?” And I said, “Pain.”
I only remember one class that came close: the professor walked out of the
class with tears in his eyes, having recounted the story of his friend who had
started a cable company, and it destroyed his life, destroyed his family, and
moved him to a place where his life was a waste of time. That was the only indication
I had at HBS about how painful this is.
Having gone through this already, my ability to start another startup is now
much higher. If you could give a student a tenth of that understanding at business
school, it would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and years of
effort to understand that you will sleep for 4 hours a night for 18 straight
months if things are not going well.
Livingston: Would you do it again?
Currier: Oh yeah. But it won’t be nearly as hard this time because I have
money in the bank now, and I know what I’m doing. And I know what the probabilities
of different things working are, and I would know how to do it, so it
would be a lot less painful. You’d still have to be obsessed with it; you’d still not
be present with anything else; but if I thought it could do something important,
then I would do it again.
Livingston: Your company was acquired by Monster. How do you preserve the
startuppyness of Tickle within this big company?
Currier: You try like hell to preserve the startup feel because you are the personality
that likes to start things and you don’t like an environment that’s not
starting. We’ve kept our doors as desks; we refuse to move from our office; and

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• for the softer