it’s how they know if they’ve won or not. And I think a lot of what drives entrepreneurs
is the kind of legacy they are going to leave. They want to make a mark
in the world and feel like their life mattered. Entrepreneurs are the kind of
people who love ideas and want to build things, and add value to the world.
Part of that is to quench their ego’s thirst and say, “I matter.” That’s why
people like Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla spend a lot of time doing nonprofit
things. It was never about the money. Carnegie dedicated the latter part of his
life to giving all his money away. He was trying to convince people to give your
money away once you make it. Because that’s when it can start doing real
good, too.
Livingston: What else do entrepreneurs have in common?
Hong: The hardest decision you make as an entrepreneur is not one that you
make while you’re building the company. For me, the hardest decision was not
about solving the hosting issues and all that. It was the one I made years before
HOT or NOT even existed. When I said, “I’m going to be an entrepreneur,”
what I was really saying was, “I’m going to forgo the normal, safe route, where
there’s a clear path. I’m going to take a higher risk and go for a higher reward.”
It’s like Hewlett-Packard. Do you know what their first product was? A
bowling foul line indicator. The point is, they decided that they were going to
be entrepreneurs before they knew exactly what they were going to do, and
that’s very common.
All these things come out of new ideas. If you’re not in school and you’re
not an entrepreneur, you’re not working on new ideas. You are just a cog in
someone else’s wheel, and you’ll never make anything new. So the hardest thing
is to say, “I’m going to put myself in the position of being an entrepreneur by
having ideas and trying things, and not giving up when I fail.”
You never know unless you try, and we live in a world where building websites
and other small things doesn’t take that much time and effort to try, so why
not just try different things?
Livingston: What other advice would you give to someone starting a startup?
Hong: You need the early team to be savvy in everything. And you have to have
people who understand the users and the product. If you do, then you’ll
have users.
And nothing ever goes according to plan. You can’t dwell on the fact that
your plan didn’t work. In our case, we didn’t even have a plan, but it would have
been worthless to have one anyway, since we just kept moving as fast as we