History of Famous Startups. WebTV

together, the whole

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:23:02 -0700

together, the whole company would have failed. And through those really difficult
things that I told you about, where we were running out of money, when
we got the certified letter of rejection from Sony—all those different things I
think would have easily knocked over a weaker triad. We persevered through all
of it, and we never stopped. None of us ever doubted that we were going to succeed.
And none of us ever stopped to question whether or not we trusted the
other. We never had to look at our back. And that is what allowed WebTV to
persevere.

this stuff happen

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:23:02 -0700

this stuff happen at different places, and these companies—no surprise—have
not prospered.
But, then again, I’ve seen companies that really have a lot of execution
problems. General Magic is a good example of that. They really did not execute
well in what they were doing. The product was very expensive; it was over
$1,000. It was heavy. The battery didn’t last long. The screen was not very
bright. And it was loaded with all sorts of features that were not really needed
by a mobile professional, which is what a PDA—this was 1990—was targeted
for. Palm, on the other hand,...

can believe it—and

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:23:02 -0700

can believe it—and he’s now trying to get television to work through the
Internet, while what we started doing was trying to get the Internet to work
through a television.
Livingston: What has the potential to go most wrong in the first year when a
startup is such a fragile organization?
Perlman: The worst thing that can happen to a startup is if the founding
team—or the people who are leading the thing—do not get along. And it’s
deadly when they don’t get along in front of the troops. I’ve come to realize
over the years that companies are just…

know the other

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:23:02 -0700

know the other top executives at Microsoft, they were talking about negotiating
this and that funding, and cutting back products to the point where they no
longer made sense. I said, “Look, can’t we all agree on what is the right objective
for the whole company and then fund that? I don’t care if it’s in your group
or my group or whatever, but we should do the right thing.” It didn’t work that
way and, of course, any big company is like this. People have certain things they
control. That’s why there’s politics in large companies.
I can’t operate…

Then there’s Sand

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:23:02 -0700

Then there’s Sand Hill Road with all the VCs and other potential investors,
who are all clustered together. You literally might do two or three presentations
to different VCs all in the cluster of buildings on Sand Hill Road.
The other thing is that there’s kind of an attitude here that people should try
things, and, if they fail, if they understand why they failed, they may actually be
a better investment in the next round than somebody who quickly succeeded
just by sheer luck.
Livingston: Were there any powerful interests who did not like what you were
doing and…

the film industry

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:20:37 -0700

the film industry because I thought, “Well, the IBM PC”—which was introduced
in 1982—“is taking over the world. Its graphics display is so poorly architected.
It doesn’t even have square pixels. It has a palette of just eight primary
colors—actually two grays and six colors. Clearly, it’s being driven by business
applications and so on. My dream of where computers would go turns out to be
the wrong one. It’s not going more toward the average person; it’s going more
toward businesses. And that’s OK.” So I figured, “If I can’t do it in people’s
homes, at least I want…

the inner workings

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:20:37 -0700

the inner workings of the system. And you also have to do a lot of testing.
You have to be good at testing. You have to know what questions to ask people
and what problems to present to them.
The following is not something from my personal experience—it’s a story
told to me by the Mac team—but they said that, when they first did the dialog
boxes for the Lisa, instead of saying “OK,” it said, “Do It.” They found that
people were reluctant to click on that, and they couldn’t figure out why. Then,
once they had a test…

interested in the

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:20:37 -0700

interested in the subject area. We expanded the board then, so the board was
now the three cofounders; we had Randy Komisar as an outside director, and
we had representatives from Brentwood, Vulcan, and I think that was it. Maybe
we had one other guy.
Then we cranked. We introduced the product in July of 1996—one year
almost to the day after I got that first check from Marvin Davis to fund the company.
It had custom hardware, a browser from the ground up, proxy servers,
and so forth. The whole network was supported, and I was true to my…

working from Japan.

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:20:37 -0700

working from Japan. He married a Japanese woman, so he lived there, and he
had an ISDN line to a house in the middle of a rice paddy, literally. He was
picking up a little bit of Japanese. When we went to Japan, we got to the Tokyo
Hyatt, and I remember Bruce had a development system there—we had
hauled these big computers with us. Mark had a development system at his
place in the rice paddy. And the night before our demo with Sony, they went
and did another build. They didn’t tell me about this, but Bruce stayed…

really crashing all

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:20:37 -0700

really crashing all the time at that stage. So I went back and talked to Bruce and
Phil and said, “Look, we have one last chance with Sony. Their CTO is coming
here in 2 and 1/2 hours.”
Phil said, “Well, we do have a build that’s compiling now”—it took a long
time to compile all the source and then we had to release and test it—”and it’s
going to be done in about 2 and 1/2 hours.” I said, “How do we know it’s going
to work?” He said, “Well, it probably won’t.” So I said, “What do you…