is come up with ideas, how do you know if they are any good? You don’t really
know if it’s a good idea until you’ve executed it. You need to understand the cost
of execution and so on.
Also, where I worked at Morgan, they were not hyper-trustful of MBAs. All
my coworkers were PhDs in computer science, mathematics, or physics.
Livingston: New York City doesn’t seem to be a place where too many startups
flourish.
Schachter: There’s a great deal of technology going on in New York City. In
financial places, there is lots of high-end, high-speed transactional technology.
There are a lot of good problems in finance. The technical problems faced
there are hard. One issue is that there is a lot of money to be made there and
the companies that are doing that pay. Some of the big brokerages pay a lot of
money annually for their technology.
Livingston: Why aren’t there more good hackers living in New York City then?
Schachter: There are. They work at banks and stuff and have side projects.
Livingston: So the smart hackers . . .
Schachter: They’re around. They just know when to be quiet and when not
to be.
Livingston: Who did you learn things from?
Schachter: Albert, the guy I mentioned. I learned a lot from Fred Wilson of
Union Square, certainly. I learned a great deal from my Morgan folks. I learned
a hell of a lot about how to understand problems. It was rough sometimes, but
they pushed me far. My coworkers at Morgan were smart people. One of the
people we worked with won the Nobel Prize for economics while I was there. It
was a fast, smart environment.
I remember when I interviewed at Google the first time around and they
were making derogatory comments about where I worked: “Well, here you’ll
get to work with PhDs and computer scientists.” And I’m like, “I already do.”
Livingston: So it didn’t work out when you interviewed for a job at Google?
Schachter: I went out there once and was rejected because I didn’t know C++.
Livingston: Was there ever a time when anyone tried to trick you or take
advantage of you?
Schachter: Yes, but it would not be polite to talk about it. There were several
cases of people wanting to get equity in advance of other people, or weird deals.
Livingston: As a new startup founder who has never done a deal or negotiated,
do you think you need to be careful of getting taken advantage of?
Schachter: In general, I found VCs to be significantly politer than the folks I
worked with. The worst they did was not call me back. I’d never hear from
them again. Brad Feld does a nice blog talking about how the VC process