that is, real enough that someone might actually buy us—and this made
us just pathetically eager to sell the company. We must have seemed like such
losers.
So I can understand now when founders want to sell out for a couple million.
Investors say, “No, you should wait,” but it’s easy for them to say. A million
dollars seems just overwhelmingly attractive when you have nothing. You don’t
care if it’s a good deal or not.
I also kind of regret being a zombie for several years straight. I really had no
life during Viaweb. If people are talking about some famous movie and I’ve
never seen it and have no idea what it’s about, it’s usually a movie that came out
220 Founders at Work
between 1995 and 1998, because at that point, I was on Mars. I was not part of
the ordinary world of humans. I was sitting glued to a computer all day long, or
asleep.
Livingston: What did you worry about the most?
Graham: Running out of money. That was the big worry. Running out of
money and having to go and get more funding. Getting funding is very painful.
It’s so much harder than actually making a successful company.
Livingston: What advice can you give about raising money?
Graham: The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as
you can, because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out
of your ass—literally in the sense that it will take stock away from you, but also
the process of raising money is so horrible compared to the other aspects of
business. You can’t work your way out of it like you can with other problems.
You’re at other people’s mercy.
The way not to have to raise money is not to spend money. Do everything
as cheaply as you possibly can. What you want in a startup is this feeling of
cheap and hip. Not miserly cheap, but cool, bohemian cheap. That’s what we
strove for.
Livingston: So investors were your biggest worry?
Graham: Probably, but I worried about all the different things that could kill us
and all the different ways they could kill us. People start startups to get rich, but
what keeps them going day to day is the fear of failure. You’ve said, “OK, I’m
starting this startup and I’m going to get all the users and be successful,” and
once you’ve told everybody that’s what you’re doing, if you fail you’ll look like
a fool.
So when we did sell the thing finally to Yahoo, in the eyes of the world,
because we got bought, we were a success. Arguably we were already a success,
since we had more online stores than anybody else. But getting bought kind of