History of Famous Startups. Tickle

Monster has been

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:32:37 -0700

Monster has been fantastic about leaving us alone. We’re just out here doing
our thing. We are very lucky, and I still enjoy and want to build a great legacy
for Monster. But I won’t be here forever. I can’t. I’m a starter.
If Yahoo had acquired us, they would have made us move to Mountain
View, and would have made us a widget on a feature on a division of a department,
and everyone would have left, and the whole thing would have died. And
Wall Street would have applauded roundly.
Whereas Wall Street has been perplexed by Monster’s…

for the softer

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:32:37 -0700

for the softer things in life like your family, friends, or dating life. And when you
are there with them, you’re not really there with them; you’re thinking about
this thing because you’re creating it, and it takes that amount of passion to make
it work.
Livingston: Did this ever hurt any of your relationships?
Currier: I almost didn’t marry my wife. She and I started dating about 2 months
before I came up with the idea, so she hasn’t really known me without it. I
couldn’t figure out if we should get married, but then I hired a new…

And so you

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:32:37 -0700

And so you have to churn people out and be willing to let them go. It was
painful, but I knew from the beginning we were going to have to do that.
Livingston: What was most surprising to you about starting a startup?
Currier: How painful it was. I woke up on October 3, 1999, at around 4 a.m.
with my chest burning from fear and pain about not knowing what to do, and
worrying that I had taken my friends’ and mentors’ money. I had realized that
what I was trying to do was not working, and that I…

we arranged for

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:32:37 -0700

we arranged for a marshal to be ready to create peace once we let this guy go if
he really blew up and went crazy.
Livingston: Could you have recognized that this employee was bad news from
the beginning?
Currier: You might have, but I wasn’t experienced enough at the time, since I
had never done one of these before. I was 30 and I knew a lot about the industry
and the technology, but I was very green on people. And that is a painful way
to start a company.
I also hired a head of HR, and she…

“Do you have

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:32:37 -0700

“Do you have an office?”
James Currier 389
And you go sign a lease somewhere.
“Do you have business cards?”
“No, let me go get business cards.”
“Do you have a website?”
“We just launched it.”
“Well, is anyone coming?”
“No one’s coming yet, but I’ll get back to you when people are coming.”
“When you hit this level, then I’ll be interested.”
Everyone is looking for the next step. And so as you go along with each of
these confidence steps, you can pick up more and more people into what’s
going on.
So then you go talk to…

the back of

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:32:37 -0700

the back of this thing. So I was relatively paranoid about that and only talked to
people that I trusted.
But what I got back was, “I don’t understand what the heck you’re talking
about.” All the people that I had been talking with about digital media, selfhelp,
and psychology with, they still didn’t understand what the hell I was trying
to do. I couldn’t find the words to describe the vision.
Livingston: Why did they not get it? What did they misunderstand?
Currier: I think there are very few people who have a capacity to see the
future. So…

basketball court. I

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:32:37 -0700

basketball court. I watched this and thought, “I’ve never seen anyone talk about
a movie for this long. That’s powerful media. Why?”
So I discussed this with my family, who were involved in psychology, and
asked, “Are we our own favorite subjects?” We’re very concerned about ourselves
and the people we know. I realized that no other technology allowed us
to get media about ourselves. All the other media technologies allow us to learn
only about people we will never know. Tom Cruise, Tom Brokaw—we know a
ton about those people and yet we’ll never know them.
I believed that…

James Currier came

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:32:36 -0700

James Currier came up with the idea for Tickle
(founded in 1999 and originally called Emode) after
taking a personality test in one of his Harvard
Business School classes.
A former venture capitalist with a passion for digital
media and social sciences, Currier believed that
the Internet could be used to help people learn more
about themselves. People could visit www.tickle.com
to take several different kinds of personality and selfassessment
tests, most backed by scientific research,
to understand areas of human behavior (and also to
find out what breed of dog they most closely resembled).
Tickle was acquired by Monster…