Livingston: You wanted...
Livingston: You wanted to take advantage of the rising tide?
Ross: Right. We already had ideas around software, and we said, “This is the
time to do it if we are going to do anything. People are going to listen to us right
now, so we might as well go for it.”
Livingston: Do you have a name?
Ross:We’re calling it Parakey for now, but who knows if it will stick. Firefox was
our fourth name.
Livingston: Can you tell me about any of the challenges you’ve faced?
Ross: One thing is just time. Whenever I’m doing something now, I feel like I
should be doing something else instead. If I got married tomorrow, I’d probably
be worrying about a code issue during the ceremony and deliver my vows in
Python. It’s a nonstop state of stress. The first couple months we did the startup
and all these venture capitalists were emailing us, we felt like we had to meet
with all of them. We thought, “Oh my God, we have to say yes; we can’t say no
to these people.” Now we realize that time is our most valuable resource, and
every minute we spend in one of these meetings just sitting there is time
wasted.
Things are getting better. We’re starting to push people away to give us
space to work, but in some respects it would be so much easier if the Firefox
thing hadn’t happened. We should be setting our own timeline, but people are
already waiting for what we’re going to do next, so it’s hard to relax under these
kinds of circumstances. It’s a lot of pressure.
Livingston: Who are your mentors? Is this Joe’s first startup, too?
Ross: Yes. That’s kind of the problem. We don’t have that one person who has
done this a thousand times who can advise us. We have a good lawyer. We’re
looking for a mentor who doesn’t have ulterior motives and who is aligned with
our interests.
Livingston: Which also must be a problem since you are so well known. Some
people must think, “This is my ticket!”
Ross: I can’t tell you how many times I get an email from someone who just
wants to have dinner. So we’ll have dinner, and we’ll chat about politics, the
weather, whatever. Then we’ll have dinner again, and slowly it comes out that
they want something. Eventually you find out that they want to come work for
you, or they want to . . . sometimes they don’t even know what they want, but
they know they want something. It’s hard to see what people’s intentions are at
the beginning.
We’re also overly paranoid because the first thing we did when we started
the company was talk to a bunch of entrepreneurs who told us, “Don’t tell anyone
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