good middle management structure. And not recruiting a board that could help
me build the company. Big mistakes in picking a successor, big mistakes in having
an undisciplined product strategy—I was much more interested in having
distinctive, innovative products and thinking about what would make sense for
a product line for our business overall—and big mistakes in expanding too fast
and not having discipline about what we were doing. So I give myself a C or C–
on all that stuff.
Livingston: You guys grew to 1,000 employees before you went public. Did you
know you were going to go public when you started?
Kapor: I didn’t know when, but this was what I’d learned from my time in
Silicon Valley. To be honest, here’s what I was driven by: I wanted to do really a
great product. Almost from day one I understood that I was passionate about
the applications themselves, that they’d be integrated, easier to use and be
powerful. They’d help make people more productive and I cared a lot about
that. The other thing I wanted was financial independence. I had an enormous
desire not to be dependent on other people, or to have to have a job. I wanted
to dictate the terms. So I knew if you had an IPO, then you had a liquid currency
and you had the ability to cash in and get that.
So I actually pushed for an early IPO, which we did successfully. But that
brought all the usual problems. The main problem we had as a very young public
company was that people did not understand the industry or its dynamics
and therefore they consistently misvalued the stock and misunderstood what it
was about. Because it was new and it was different. Eventually, people figured
it out, but I was very impatient.
I did not set out to build a big company. I actually wanted to be a software
designer. I saw having a company not exactly as being a necessary evil, but there
wasn’t a good alternative. My experience had convinced me that being a program
author and having somebody else publish it wouldn’t give me enough control
over the process. In Hollywood, the very successful directors like Steven
Spielberg quickly understood that they also needed to be producers and have
their own studio in order to retain control. It was a similar thing.
There were some other funny things about it. In the ’60s, when I came of
age, business was not a cool thing. We were all counterculture people with long
hair and sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. It was the ’60s; I have the pictures to prove
it. I don’t remember any of it, but as someone said, if you can remember the

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