Livingston: What advice would you give to a young programmer who's thinking of starting a startup?
Levchin: Try to have a good co-founder...if you have a good team, you're halfway there.
Livingston: You didn't make any mistakes?
Levchin: There are all sorts of tactical decisions that we made here and there that played out to be wrong, but its not like I dould have predicted it. It's not one of these things that I'm now smarter and therefore I could have done it even better. I think, given the information available at that time, I would have likely chosen the same outcome.
Livingston: Was there anything hat was misunderstood about what you were trying to do?
Levchin: ... I don't think there was ever any clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working...
Interviews Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple:
Livingston: What is the key to excellence for an engineer?
Woz: You have to be very diligent. You have to check every little detail. You have to be so careful that you haven't left anything out. You have to think harder and deeper than you normally would. It's hard with today's large, huge programs.
Livingston: What advice would you give to hackers who are thinking about starting a company or making something of their own?
Woz: ... Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would...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.
Interviews Ray Ozzie, founder of Groove Networks (now with Microsoft):
Livingston: What advice would you give to someone who was thinking or joining a startup?
Ozzie: Learn to respect and appreciate other people's skill sets, because you are going to need other people if you do start a company and you are a technologist. Understand that it's a rare, rare case when a tech enterpreneur is the right one to lead a startup for a long period of time...
That's where I think working for another company [first] and building those relationships is extremely valuable. Frequently, people think just running from school out into doing a startup is the best thing to do. But I think that getting some experience within a number of companies is really positive because you meet people and you start to develop patterns in your mind of the types of people that you need, and the types of people that you can trust, and the types of people you never want to work with.
Interviews Tim Brady, First Non-founding employee at Yahoo:
Livingston: Any advice you'd give to someone who was starting a startup?
Brady: ...you always hear "Don't do business with friends, bad idea." So, one of the things that really helped me was that [Jerry] and I had a conversation before I joined, "OK, here are the ground rules." ..."OK, if this happens, I walk away." We had the conversation in order to preserve our friendship, having no idea what was going to happen, but that conversation got me thinking abou it and why I was involved.
Interviews Charles Geschke, cofounder, Adobe:
Livingston: What were some major turning points?
Geschke: ...The other lesson that we had to learn, though, is that you can't be a one-product company. There's a very high risk...that eventually a combination of changes in the techological and competitive landscapes will eventually cause you to begin losing market share.
Livingston: Is there any other advice you would give to someone who was thinking of starting a startup?
Geschke: If you aren't passionate about what you are going to do, don't do it. Work smart, and not long, because you need to preserve all of your life, not just your work life.
Interviews Joel Spolsky, cofounder, Fog Creek Software:
Livingston: What advice would you give to a programmer who's thinking about starting a company?
Spolsky: ...Don't start a company unless you can convince one other person to go along with you.
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