History of Famous Startups. ArsDigita

wasn’t going to

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:23:13 -0700

wasn’t going to launch. They hadn’t understood the tradeoffs. A couple weeks
later they launched.
Livingston:Was there anything that you think people misunderstood about the
demise of ArsDigita?
Greenspun: I haven’t written that much. I’d like to write some reusable lessons.
We have some uniquely clever things that we did, like making websites
that were multilingual. Just engineering stuff. I just haven’t had the time or the
energy for some reason.
People focus a lot on the bust-up phase. It upsets me that they remember
the wrong things like, “This Greenspun guy sued the venture capitalists.” This
is not true,...

want to pay

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want to pay their bill, and they were upset with us. There was a meeting about
this, and I was with the new CEO and one of the MBA guys that worked for
him, talking about this customer. It was out in the Los Angeles office. The managers
said, “This customer’s upset with us. How do we get him to pay us more
money?” I said, “How much do they pay us?” They said, “$700,000.” I said, “Is
their site launched?” They said, “No.” I said, “How much did we tell the customer
that it would cost them until their…

growth.

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growth.
Livingston: I know it was your sixth company, but was there anything that you
found you were better at?
Greenspun: I think I was probably mostly worse at things than I thought. The
VCs had a point when they said people remember how you made them feel
more than what you said.
Managing programmers is tough. That’s one reason I don’t miss IT, because
programmers are very unlikable people. They’re not pleasant to manage. In aviation,
for example, people who greatly overestimate their level of skill are all
dead. You don’t see them as employees. J.F.K., Jr., is not…

agreeable personality. They

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agreeable personality. They picked people who were pretty junior, who didn’t
have much experience with real-world customer projects, and they basically
killed the company. Once you have a product that nobody wants, it doesn’t
matter how good your management team is.
So 4 or 5 months after our shareholder meeting, they came in and fired the
CEO—demoted him to COO or something. They put in one of their own partners
as the CEO. He hung out there for a while. They put in more money, I
think another $10 million, and he gradually figured out that the numbers that
the…

had gotten rid

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had gotten rid of some of the senior people.
The question-and-answer forum, which was one of the most heavily used
parts of the site, was literally a thousand times slower than on the old system.
As far as upgrades, they said, “We’re going to have this abstraction layer, and
you’ll never have to actually interact with the database; you’ll just talk to this
abstraction layer.” Sure enough, the first time people tried to build a real system
for a customer list, they found that the abstractions weren’t the right ones,
and they had to go underneath and deal directly with…

solved this problem,

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solved this problem, so we’re not going to attack it either. Not until we have
infinite money. We’ll just leave it, and, if customers have to spend 2 weeks of
hard programming upgrading the server, then that’s the cost. So that was one of
the biggest things.
The second thing we didn’t like about it was that it wasn’t the full Java 2,
Enterprise Edition. At the time, some of these people thought that it would be
cool if they had multiple layers of Java in there. They said it was a little too slow;
they had all these criticisms…

online community and

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online community and e-commerce site. We had all these modules do different
things. We had two versions: one was in Java Server Pages, very straightforward,
JSP talking to the Oracle data model, and the other one was an AOLserver Tcl,
which is kind of an obscure web server used by America Online for most of
their web services—very efficient. That was what we had started with in 1995.
It was state of the art in ’95; today you could do just as well with Microsoft
Internet Information Server and Active Server Pages. Anyway, it was the first
web server to…

you only got

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you only got to drive the Ferrari for as long as you worked at the company. I
figured, “Well, programmers only stay in the job 4 years, 5 years tops. It takes
them 3 or 4 years to recruit their ten friends, they’d drive the car for a year or
Philip Greenspun 337
two, and then they’d want to go back to grad school or go work somewhere else;
they’ll quit and then the Ferrari would go back in the pool.” I had set it up so
it looked extravagant, but didn’t actually cost anything. But the VCs and
employees…

education and “we’re

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education and “we’re going to have fun, we’re going to have the beach house
and a Ferrari.” We did lots of things for free—we had a foundation, we did programs
for high school kids, and we did a one-year intensive computer science
program for people who wanted to transition from being a poet or whatever
into being a programmer. So people thought of me as a hippie. In reality,
ArsDigita was my sixth company, and I knew how to make money, and I was the
investor.
So while I publicly had a persona of doing all this fun stuff and…

they had a

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they had a case that really couldn’t be won, since they were minority shareholders.
Let’s say you have one share of IBM and you go to the Delaware court
and you say, “I want to control IBM; I feel like I’m entitled.” There’s really
nothing holy left in America: religion’s not holy, the family isn’t holy, marriage
isn’t holy, but the only thing that’s really left that is holy to Americans is ownership.
And that’s what the courts are there for. They are there to preserve the
rights of owners of things. So when you go to court and say,...