things you did?...
things you did?
Graham: Pretty early, we got some funding from our friend Julian, who also
worked with us on Artix. He gave us $10,000. After about 6 weeks or so, it
seemed like it was going to be more work than we thought, so we got Trevor
Blackwell to work on it too.
Livingston: How did you know Trevor?
Graham: Trevor was in grad school with Robert. I asked Robert, “Who’s the
smartest grad student in the computer science program?” and he said “Trevor.”
I couldn’t believe it actually, because at the time I thought Trevor was a total
goofball.
Livingston: But you were soon convinced he was talented?
Graham: Trevor is a prodigy, in the original sense of the word. When we first
recruited him, we asked him to write this little piece of image-manipulating
software, to kind of test him out. For 2 weeks we heard nothing from him, and
I had pretty much written him off. Finally he sent me an email asking me to
come to his office to see what he’d done. I went there expecting to see this new
image software, and instead he’s rewritten our entire system in Smalltalk—
everything I wrote, plus everything Rtm wrote.
I basically said, “OK, you’re hired. Now go and write the damn image software,
because we’re not rewriting everything in Smalltalk.”
Livingston: You and Robert were already good friends, right?
Graham: Oh yeah. We had been friends then for about 10 years—since way
back. In fact, I think in the beginning it was only because he was friends with
me that Robert even did this. In the beginning he was just humoring me. It was
a year before he thought Viaweb had any chance of ever making any money.
Livingston: So you convinced him to spend the summer working on this
project. What happened in the fall?
Graham: Things kind of came to a head with Rtm. We had this angry phone
conversation where he said something like, “We’ve been working on this thing
for a whole month, and it’s still not finished.” It’s funny in retrospect, because
we were still working on it 3 years later. At the time, I was just thinking about
how to get him to keep working on it for another month. But that was the main
reason we got Trevor. Robert basically rebelled, so I thought, “All right, we
need more programmers.”
Livingston: If Robert was so reluctant, why did you start the company with
him?
Paul Graham 207
Graham:Well, first of all he was my best friend, so I really trusted him, but he’s
also one of the best programmers in the world. I’d rather have a quarter of his
brain working on some problem than 100 percent of most other people’s.
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