of us in the higher ed biz; this guy never had much of it, but he was apparently
very effective.) They could have hired anybody in the world—they have all this
cash—and they hired this guy. You want somebody who’s a really good manager.
Managing your company might be harder than managing Microsoft because
Microsoft has $40 billion in cash, so they can recover from mistakes that you
won’t be able to recover from. So you need a guy like that.
But entrepreneurs love their babies and never ask themselves, “Why would
a guy like that want to work for me? I have no resources to manage. That same
person could work at Microsoft and have tens of thousands of good employees
to deploy on projects, tens of billions of dollars to invest in interesting projects.
Philip Greenspun 327
Why would they want to come work at my company where everything is constrained?”
So it’s not as simple as hanging out a shingle and saying, “Here’s our
small company; we have $15 million a year in revenue and we’re profitable; now
we need a manager.” The people you are likely to attract, by definition, are
people who couldn’t get a job at General Electric.
We were having trouble because the handful of good people who wanted to
work at startups were all dazzled by the names of the venture capitalists. They’d
say, “If you don’t have backing from Kleiner Perkins, we don’t want to work
for you.”
We talked to a headhunting firm, and the guy was candid with me and said,
“Look, we can’t recruit a COO for you because anybody who is capable of doing
that job for a company at your level would demand to be the CEO.” And I
thought, “That’s kind of crazy. How could they be the CEO? They don’t know
the business or the customers. How could we just plunk them down?” In retrospect,
that was pretty good thinking; look at Microsoft: it took them 20 years to
hand off from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer. He needed 20 years of training to
take that job. Jack Welch was at GE for 20 years before he became CEO.
Sometimes it does work, but I think for these fragile little companies, just putting
a generic manager at the top is oftentimes disastrous.
There was no way we could have hired first-rank businesspeople in that
environment. There were too many companies that were low-risk and had
more assets that were hiring the best people. All we were going to get were the
second-raters. We’d get first-rate programmers because we had a company
where programmers were the stars and we already had great colleagues for
them, so we were going to attract great programmers, just not great businesspeople.