3/15/2004 04:02:00 PM

March 14, 2004
Pud, fuckedcompany
Jeff Dachis - Razorfish Founder
Richard Yoo - Rackspace / ServerBeach
Jim Young - hotornot.com
Evan Williams - Blogger/Google
Web Entrepreneur 2004

How did you decide to become an entrepreneur?

- EV decided when he was 9 or 10 that he would have his own business. It was a bad idea. I could have had more experience. Was freelancing at the time Pyra was started.

- Young has never had a real job. A couple internships where he played mine-sweeper. Retreated to grad school for 10 years. HotorNot came up while he was working on his dissertation.

- Yoo just made the jump.

- Jeff learned at a young age that he was distinctly unemployable. A family of serial-entrepreneurs. Degree in Fine Arts and MA in Non-profit Art something.

- Pud had a lot of jobs, but thought he was going to be a rock star. Saved two month of salary and quit his last job to find freelance work which funded his time to create his portfolio of sites.


How do you evaluate ideas?

- Jeff will only do homeruns.

- Jim - ideas are a dime a dozen. Can you execute on them? The idea is worthless in itself. It is rare to have good ideas that can be acted on. Jim is unprotective of his ideas.

- EV - "How many business end up doing the thing they set out to in the first place?" I start companies because I wanted to build product and didn't want people to tell me how. Tim O'Reilly has an interesting adage: "Business is the context for doing interesting things." Do what excites you.

- Pud, "I went into business because I don't like to wake up early. If I can support myself and not wake up early I am a zillionaire." When the idea becomes obsessive the idea is good. When you don't have a clear path to money, but you can't sleep. "All of my business are user generated."

If a customer contacts us with a question that requires a manual data search it is a rule to create a tool to answer the question and if appropriate to release it to the public site.


A lot of people come up with an idea and they don't do it because it is already being done out there. Where there already people doing one of the major businesses you have started? What about competitors?

- Jim - Yes there were others... they were all executing poorly. There interface didn't work.

- Jeff - Product vs. Company is an important question. You have to create the engine, but once you do it is open source in terms of the idea. Taking the leap from product to company is a huge leap.

- Jim - What matters is were people are--not wether it is perfect.

- Richard - we are a commodity business (hosting) and this is different. we needed to add invisible technology value. the branding and community are the differentiating value in our clients offerings. they shouldn't have to focus on the servers, security patches, firewalls, et al. You have to build a brand and reputation.


How do you get users?

- Pub - went to www.ac.org and launched fuckedcompany by announcing it to 7000 web designers.

- Yoo - people who know people. at the peak of the dot com boom we dropped a million a month on advertising... we are back to word of mouth and getting to know our current customers.

- EV - users. Names are a crucial aspect of the company. All of the names up here are great names.


How long does it take to be break-even?

- Pud - if you can't do it in 6 months you shouldn't do it as a bootstrapper not bringing in VC.

- Young - it was 8 days from us thinking about the idea to launching and 8 days from launching to being profitable with a million users a day. we renamed ourselves 8 Days, Inc.

- Jeff - from customer one we were profitable.

- EV is saying that Google, as it has come to us, could not have been built cash flow positive from day one. Which is very true. Size, ambition and profit margin on revenue per customer varies across models.


Fear is the number one thing that holds back the potential entrepreneur. Tell us about your failures:

- EV - Pyra was my third or fourth company. The early failures are crucial. The old adage is fail fast. You don't know what is a failure or a success at the time. Just do stuff.

- Richard - once your money is in it fear is called commitment. bring in outside advise. there are a lot of small decisions that contribute to the outcome. none of them seem very significant in themselves, but combined are the success or failure of your project.

- EV - i grew up in Nebraska. my dad was a farmer and it didn't occur to me that i would work for anyone else.