Founders at Work

Founders at Work

Stories of Startups' Early Days

Jessica Livingston

Name Game

The hunt for words that stick

Ross: It started off as Phoenix, and we quickly encountered trademark issues. ... We renamed it Firebird, because it's the same imagery, but there was an open source database already called Firebird. So we renamed it again. At that point, it was fairly popular0though not nearly as popular as it is now0so we wanted to keep the "Fire" part of the name. We just went through Fire0anything names for a couple of months, and somebody came up with Firefox, which is actually the Chinese name for a red panda.
Ejection Seat

Founders ousted through political power dynamics.

Basically, with their CEO that they brought in, they had a three-to-two board majority no matter what. And they said, "We're going to run this company. We're going to make all the decisions, and you're just going to be a figurehead."
Trust Networks

Large coordination emerges from small-scale trust.

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.
Desperate Pivots

Desperation, not genius, drove transformative pivots.

So for a while we were fighting, tooth and nail, crazy eBay people: "Go away, we don't want you." Eventually we realized that these guys were begging to be our users. We had the moment of epiphany, and for the next 12 months just iterated like crazy on the website version of the product, which is today's PayPal.
Information Edge

Knowing what others don't creates competitive advantage.

Levchin: We kept the stuff under wraps for a very long time. We never really showed IGOR to anyone. We never talked about it in the press. I was definitely very paranoid.
Perfectionist's Trap

Pursuit of perfection prevents completion.

And the people doing the second system are just too naïve; they haven't worked on this problem before, and they're young, maybe, and they just don't realize that it was hard. Fred Brooks said that the second system is always late; sometimes years later than you expect. And in fact, because of the ambition, usually it won't solve any of the problems.