They had a lot of confidence in what they were doing.
Livingston: What was one of the funniest moments early on?
Brady: The funniest thing I can remember was when there was a huge storm in
May of ’95, and the power grid went down for a few days. We had to go rent a
power generator and take turns filling it with diesel fuel for 4 days. 24/7. We
were laughing, “How many pages to the gallon today?” It was a crazy storm and
it also started leaking in our building. We had all these meetings scheduled and
couldn’t just shut it down. We had meetings by candlelight with a bunch of
prominent companies. They walk in; there are no lights; there are cords running
everywhere leading to the generator out back; water dripping from the
ceiling. We were trying to convince them, “Oh, yeah, we’re a real business,”
when you say, “Hold on, I gotta go fill up the tank.” So I remember that set of
days pretty vividly.
Livingston: Did you ever have to pull off any tricks to make yourselves seem
bigger than you actually were?
Brady: I don’t have a good story for this, but I remember clearly Jeff Mallett’s
coming on board. I’m working like a dog and he had just started. In addition to
everything else I’m doing, I’m also trying to do all the PR stuff. Even though I
had our PR kits professionally bound, they were a startup’s PR kits. He had just
come from Novell. He looks at me, and he’s just like, “This is C+ work.”
I hadn’t slept for a couple of days, and I felt like taking a swing at him. But
he was absolutely right. “If we’re going to appear big, we’d better act big, and
this is what we hand out? You can’t hand that out.” I remember that very clearly,
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and that was a really good lesson for me—“I know you’re tired, I know you’re
working hard, but it’s not an excuse for putting out something that looks like a
startup.”
When Jeff came in, I’d been working hard for 8 months, and I was already a
little bit tired, and I didn’t think he would keep up. I didn’t know him all that
well, but he had twice as much energy as anyone. We started doing two redeyes
a week to New York for business. “OK, we have to go meet MTV tomorrow.
Red-eye out. Meeting. Come back that same day.” We did that for 3 to 4
months, and I just remember thinking when he walked in the door, that I
couldn’t work any harder. But we worked harder, faster, smarter. That was definitely
a step up in both effort and professionalism.
Being everywhere all the time made us look bigger than we were; “Oh yeah,
we’ll be in New York, we’ll be there.” I’d say, “Jeff, I have all these things on my