I’m two weeks into readings from @phils Silicon Valley Canon book course, its great. here are some select takeaways.
The story of great v0s being built in a couple days is laughably common.
- Gmail - “1 day”
- Viaweb – “a couple days”
- Ebay - “one long weekend”
And they were simple too: Paul Graham’s viaweb, an e-commerce platform, launched without the ability to process payments. You couldn’t process a credit card transaction until 2 years after launch.
eBay launched without the ability facilitate payments, it couldn’t even guarantee the buyers paid the sellers, just list and bid. Reviews were in a forum, separate from the bidding experience.
Many founders in the dotcom era allowed professional CEOs to come in around IPO time. For example: netscape, yahoo, ebay, google to name a few. That’s a big cultural difference given how essential the role of founder CEO is now.
I wonder what changed this so strongly, maybe Scully, Jobs and Apple?
The Manhattan project was yet another example of how effective it is to get folks of different disciplines in a single space to collaborate from zero to one. I’ve found the same repeatedly throughout my career that specialization and silos don’t lend well to innovation.
Growing up there were AOL free trial discs in random drawers and piles all over my house. I knew it was a common shared experience of that era but I understand why now. Their direct mail campaign was insanely successful: 10% of people received the disk, put it in their computer, signed up, and entered their credit card number. This is pre web too where I would have expected many to be cautious with their credit card information.
Based bill gates to Steve Case of America Online: “I can buy 2% of you. I can buy all of you. Or I can go into this business myself and bury you”.
A lot of CEOs have these aggressive streaks earlier in their careers. In my brief time at Microsoft, elders spoke of famous “bill reviews” where they’d get absolutely wrecked by a well prepared and sharp Gates. Jeff Lawson had the same reputation at early Twilio and so did Jobs (relatively speaking) but it seems those days are numbered.
Maybe they get older and have less energy for conflict, maybe they find better strategies or whatever else but my corporate experience has mostly lacked high conviction, intelligent people willing to speak their mind directly without fear of hurting other’s feelings. Instead it optimized more for consensus building, harmony, and not offending people.
How Netscape making the Web easy to use and rich with images was controversial as it would let the non technical “riff raff” in and degrade discourse. The pattern of early adopters resisting expansion and change is old as time but reminded me much of the crypto space and some of the cultural tendency to cling to overly technical UIs and concepts like networks and bridging.
“What got us here won’t get us where we need to go.”
“The computer will never be as important to society as the copier.”
Said by a Xerox higher up about Xerox PARC’s revolutionary personal computer, the Alto. Both funny and bizarre to read now as a millennial. I’m impressed a company as large and successful as Xerox could thrive and depend so much on copying physical paper. I can imagine the quarterly earnings reports discussing the proliferation of business and paper and how Xerox was at the center of it all. The idea that all this would be digitized must have felt so far fetched and idealistic. Technology is unforgiving.