Quotes from Jessica Livingston

Livingston: Didn't you also insult them by describing publicly what it was like to have VCs run your company? Greenspun: Only after they sued me. I said it was like watching a kindergarten class get into a Boeing 747 and flip all the switches and try to figure out why it won't take off. That was before I got my pilot's license. Now I know how apt it was.

Livingston: Did you feel that way about Peter when you started? Levchin: We hit it off really quickly. I have this IQ bias—anybody really smart, I will figure out a way to deal with.

you've got to be investing today in what your future's going to be 5 or 10 years out.

The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product.

We had this angry phone conversation where he said something like, "We've been working on this thing for a whole month, and it's still not finished." It's funny in retrospect, because we were still working on it 3 years later.

With marketing, with customer acquisition, with accounting, I first look and say, "Hey, what's taking people's time? What can we automate?" If I can't automate it, do I really need it to be done? If I do need it to be done, all right, then we'll open a req.

As Howard Aiken said, "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

Steve did a prepayment on royalties to make sure we had the resources to stay in business

I think business at all costs is just wrong. I think there are certain things that you just don't do, and that acting with integrity and decency in business to me is just a given. I simply don't compromise on those things.

When I got done, I'm looking at these two floppies that look just the same. And I decided that I might have written onto the good one from the bad, and I did. So I had lost it all. I went back to my hotel room. I slept for a while. I got up about 10:00 a.m. or so. I sat down and, out of my head and my listings, recreated everything, got it working again, and we showed it at the show.

The first business plan is there to make sure you can use Microsoft Word.

Livingston: I know it was your sixth company, but was there anything that you found you were better at? Greenspun: I think I was probably mostly worse at things than I thought. The VCs had a point when they said people remember how you made them feel more than what you said.

It was just a few million bucks to take us out of our misery, to pay off our loans.

First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truthful about things, not hiding. If you have to hide something for company reasons, at least explain what you're doing. Don't mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would.

Even though it seems like it's big business and impersonal, and "they" take care of it, it really isn't. There is no "they." It always comes down to an "I" of somebody, and in many cases, it's a principal.

Why things happen, I just don't know. Maybe somebody has a need and, in our case, we had a need. That's what triggered the idea. Sometimes ideas are born out of necessity: you solve a problem for yourself, and you hopefully solve it for a number of other people too.

It's better to be young because you can spend a lot more nights, very, very late. Because you have to get things done, and there's almost no other way to get around that. When the times come, they are critical.

Wozniak: Well, actually we never did much in the garage. People think we had a garage where we sat down with soldering irons and we designed stuff. No.

The programmers were in the corner doing what they were told. That's one reason they were so easy to outsource. If a programmer really never talks to the customer, never thinks, just solves little puzzles, well, that's a perfect candidate for something to offshore.

In short, I'm nervous about everything. If you're doing a startup and you're relaxed, you should be very worried.

Second is, don't try to change user behavior dramatically. If you are expecting people to dramatically change the way they do things, it's not going to happen. Try to make it such that it's a small change, yet an important one.

You've got to say you are a step ahead of where you actually are to move to the step that you want to be at.

I typed my whole syntax table into memory. I said, "I'll just follow along in memory and, if what he types fits the syntax table, then whenever he hits return, I know all the elements he typed in." I just output a list of little tokens that represented what had been typed in, if it matched the table. This was just an idea I had, not knowing how other people did it. I don't know to this day how compilers are written.

Innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, but at the time it's an uphill battle.