your potential customers...
your potential customers and see what it is that caused them not to buy your
product or would cause them to buy more copies of it. And do that, and then
ship it. That was something we really, really should have focused on, but, you
know, we didn’t know any better.
Livingston: Do you consciously not take any investments?
Spolsky: Yeah, absolutely. We took no investments because there were so many
horror stories about what VCs would do to you. ArsDigita was the most public
one, obviously, of kicking out the founders and then mismanaging the company
and bringing in the so-called professional management.
You can definitely see how, if you’re an investor at a VC stage, when you
look at your investments and you look at the kind of founders you have of companies,
it’s obvious that some of the founders are just hardcore geeks that are
never going to develop into good managers of a large company. Some of them
are founders precisely because they wouldn’t be good managers of a large company.
So in those kinds of companies, you probably do want to bring in better
management, if you can find it. Although I don’t necessarily believe that VCs
really have the ability to do that or that it ever works trying to bring in “professional”
CEOs. There is a justification for saying a lot of founders would not be
good managers, but there are an awful lot of companies being run by founders
that do a pretty good job of running them by themselves.
So we didn’t want that to happen; we didn’t want to be forced to do anything
we didn’t want to do. I find new reasons every day why I’m thankful that we
never took any kind of outside investment. Let me give you a small example.
The board of directors consists of (because we’re private and we can do whatever
we want) me, Michael, and my boyfriend, Jared. Jared had a friend that
had an idea of some way that we could modify FogBugz to be really useful to
the investment community as something—I don’t remember what, but something
that the investment community could really use that’s 5 percent different
than FogBugz. And I kept thinking, “This is a huge distraction, and there’s not
a big enough market. I just want to stick to our core competency, and I’m not
interested in doing software for the financial markets.” He kept saying, “No, no.
You’ve got to talk to this guy. You could make a lot of money off this. It would be
great.”
I kept thinking, “You know what, if it was a real board of directors and the
VCs were bringing you these great ideas, you wouldn’t really have any choice
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