with the IRS for hiring people as 1099 employees and having the IRS say that
they should have been W2s. They said, “Look, we’re not hiring anybody to be a
1099 employee, so either work for us on the payroll (and we don’t want to hire
you guys full-time) or form a corporation that we can hire.”
So we had to trundle down to a law office and set up an LLC for the company.
Right around that time, the Technology Square office complex, which
housed the MIT computer science lab, decided to ban dogs from the building.
So I thought to myself, “I’m making $1,300 a month as a grad student, and I
can’t bring my dog to work. This isn’t worth it. Where can we go?”
Philip Greenspun 319
Right around the same time a friend of mine, Elsa Dorfman, the photographer,
asked if I knew anyone who would rent her house. I said, “How would
you feel about renting it to a little group of programmers, and we’ll use it as a
company office?” She agreed.
So we moved into Elsa’s house, and once you’ve gotten an office and you
have customers, things kind of take on a life of their own. The toolkit got more
and more popular, and we amazed the customers. Most computer programmers
don’t listen to what the customer wants. They have their own ideas of
what would be cool, so they spend a lot of time building stuff that the customer
doesn’t want. They don’t have an investment in the user experience.
A friend of mine was just telling me the other day that his company offshored
a product design to India, and said, “These programmers in India, they
did exactly what we told them, no matter how ridiculous!” Most programmers
don’t think about the user experience. They get a spec book, and they say,
“Well, I’m going to meet this spec to make the customer happy.” That’s not
really enough; you have to make something good for the user if you want to call
yourself an engineer.
The third element is just meeting the deadlines. If we’d said we were going
to do something by a certain date, we did it, and the customers were stunned.
Livingston: How many of you were there when you first started?
Greenspun: About five, and then we grew pretty quickly to ten. There was so
much repeat business because customers would be amazed that we delivered
on time and that it was more or less what they wanted and actually usable for
the end user.
Livingston: When you started, it sort of grew out of your own interest in
the Web?
Greenspun: Well, in response to people downloading the software. They
weren’t really interested in photo.net, but they had decided to adopt our software