Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Chapter 7

Ray Ozzie

Founder, Iris Associates,

Groove Networks

            Ray Ozzie is the one who founded Iris Associates.  Ray Ozzie was formerly best known for his role in creating Lotus Notes. At the University of Illinois, he worked on PLATO notes, one of the earliest collaboration applications. Later he wanted develop collaboration software on his own, but couldn’t fin funding. He worked for Jonathan Sachs. After leaving Data General, Ozzie worked at Software Arts for Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, the creators of VisiCalc, on that product and TK Solver. Shortly thereafter, he was recruited by Sachs and Mitch Kapor to work for Lotus Development to develop what became Lotus Symphony., Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs decided to invest in Ozzie’s idea, which would become Lotus Notes. Instead of working as an employee, Ozzie left Lotus Development. He founded Iris Associates in 1984 to develop the product for Lotus later sold by Lotus as Lotus Notes, a software design & development firm and a worldwide collaboration for large enterprises. It is multifaceted piece of software. It had e-mail, it was used for workspaces for people to do dynamic work together. It was used as a content management system, as an application server.

Lotus Notes was the first widely used collabortion software. The first release shipped in 1989, and Iris was acquired by Lotus in 1994. And Lotus itself was acquired by IBM in 1995. Ozzie worked there for several years before leaving to form Groove Networks in 1997 to create personally-empowering, secure, mobile, ad hoc, decentralized desktop collaboration software for both individuals and enterprises. It was really meant to fulfill just the collaborative workspaces piece.

The common theme to both Iris and Groove was the fact that the ideas were not based on technology, but on a need that the founders saw for users or potential customers for the product and also, there was both technological uncertainty and market uncertainty in both Groove and IrIS.  Co-founders Ken Moore, Jack Ozzie, and Eric Patey  led the development organization and Ozzie was largely in conceptualization and design, and in leading and helping to build the rest of the business.  Groove was acquired by Microsoft in 2005, where Ozzie became one of three Chief Technical Officers.

THREE THINGS I LEARNED

• Learn to appreciate and respect other people’s skill sets, because you are going to need other people if you do start a company.
• In making a startup, it is not about big pay day it is about how you can put impact to the lives of users, partners, and the employees themselves.
• Learn how to be a leader. Learn from others. Always observe the top people around you and try to figure out how they enhanced the company through the use of their characteristics and human interaction.

Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0A

Chapter 8

Evan Williams

Cofounder, Pyra Labs

(Blogger.com)

Evan Williams cofounded Pyra Labs in 1999. He has always been an entrepreneurial. He had started a couple of other companies before he decided to start Pyra in late 1998. He went to college and dropped out because he didn’t need to have a degree because he wasn’t going to try to get a job with anyone. He was just totally self-taught technically. In fact, he thought himself web development.

And he had visions of raising money and building something cool, but originally the idea of Pyra was around web-based project management, or collaboration which was an area he had been interested for a long time. The idea of Pyra was the personal and project information management system: to build projects for clients around their intranets and help them organize their work and personal information. it is a web application where you would put your stuff, things you are thinking about, things you had to do, things you wanted to share with other people. Basically, Williams developed blogger to manage his personal weblog, and it quickly became an important mechanism for sharing ideas internally at Pyra. When Williams was thinking about starting the company, he talked to Meg Hourihan. She was excited to Williams’ idea. She had been a management consultant and was really smart. And she join Williams start the company.

Once launch publicly, the first year was entirely self –funded. HP basically funded Pyra for the first year.  They were the first company to have a blog on their site. Blogger grew rapidly, and Pyra Labs decided to focus on it full-time. But Blogger.com did not generate a lot of revenue at first, and as the Bubble deflated in 2001, Pyra seemed near to death. The problem was they didn’t see a business in a blogger. They were very product driven. They wanted to create cool stuffs and they wanted it to have sustainable business. But they hadn’t raised money and making money was pretty important.

            In 2000, they started raising money.  They hired some people and they decided to focus on blogger. And they built a version with many more features but never felt that we had it to the point where we could feel comfortable charging money for it. It came to a point where Williams decided to post to their blog to get some help from their users. He told them that they will go to buy hardware and many users gave amounts far from what they expect. And because they told people that they were only going to buy a hardware, Williams just used it to buy a hardware and he wasn’t used it to pay people.

Meg and Williams weren’t getting along well at all and Meg decided to leave and everybody else decided to leave too. They have different opinions. Williams thinks that Meg and some other people felt strongly was their best chance of making money was the enterprise thing. That was a really bad time for Williams, the craziest bad time for him. But still the Blogger was still running with no employees. Williams remained as the only employee and managed to bring the company back from the brink. By the end of 200, Williams started rebuilding. By 2002, was a completely different year altogether. It was a ramping-up year again. By 2003, Blogger had one million registered users. That attracted the attention of Google, who made Pyra their first acquisition. Williams left Google in 2004 to co found a podcasting company called Odeo.

THREE THINGS I LEARNED

• Be optimistic. There is always a better tomorrow. Learn from your mistakes.
• Simplicity is powerful. From a simple idea, the ideas will always get too big to implement before they even get off the ground.
• If you have plans and it doesn’t go that way, roll with it. There’s no way to know if it is good or bad until you try it and do anything for it.

Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0A

Chapter 9

Tim Brady

First Non-Founding Employee,

Yahoo

Tim Brady is the first non-founding employee of yahoo. Together with Jerry, Tim Brady was also under graduate at Stanford. They studied electrical engineering together. They were in the same freshman dorm and were good friends throughout college and after. When they were in Japan, they were kept in touch and they were always talked about their dream jobs even they were under graduate.

            At the end of 1994, Jerry call Brady to tell him that he wanted Brady to look after the startup of Jerry and his trailer mate David. And Brady loves to work with Jerry.

            Jerry and Dave were both doing their PhD theses and all the technical papers that they would have to reference were online, so they were trying to keep track of them all. They had this big list and all EE graduates found out about it and send them emails saying “ Can you add this?”. Jerry and Dave did and they kept adding categories and all of a sudden, both of them went from doing their graduate work to adding websites to their list. They did it for 8 hours a day maybe even longer, every day for 8 months. They created this huge list, at the right time and place, so it just started off.

When Brady first talked to Jerry and Dave, he had a ton of momentum. Then after 3 months later, it became so complicated. All of a sudden, the VC community recognized what they were doing. They got lot of calls-the LA times, AOL, Microsoft, wanting them to join their companies. It started getting them to think about their project as a business, not just a hobby. And because of that, they need a business plan to take around on their VC visits so they need Brady.

            They told Brady that they need him now and not by June when he will graduate. Brady hadn’t failed any yet, so he could fail 3 classes. And technically graduate and he was taking five classes at that time so he needs to pass 2 out of five.

            Because the internet was so big the basic business plan format was incorporated with Jerry and Dave’s ideas and added few of Brady’s idea. That was their strategy. So Brady leave business school early and move out to California. They had an office there that they found in Mountain View. They got funding and that allowed them to go to find office space. Sequoia was his VC. They got $1 million and it was a lot of money. They want the company to keep going and to try to bring in money. They got Tim Koogle as their CEO. The connection speeds were so poor. So, they decided to find CEO. It became so tough for them to convince people to join Yahoo, since it was so new. The internet started to take off in July 1995. the press was all over Jerry and Dave so he spent a lot of time handling the press. Brady personally focused on product. He worked for Jeff Mallet, who was essentially COO under Tim Koogle. In terms of competitor, they thought they were going to get crushed by them. They were definitely worried about Excite and also about Microsoft doing anything. They may partner with them or they could do it by themselves. Lycos, WebCrawler, and AOL were also their competitors until Google came along and their strategy was perfect.

            In doing the startup, Brady knew that he liked certain things and he is good at building things specifically, products.

            There were also certainly companies that they missed. And one of that is Hotmail. But the big thing that they did was, they brought Reuters online. Reuters online had rich set of news. Yahoo also ended up removing  all the links connecting to pornography site. Their first foray into news was “Rabin Assassinated” and the purpose was overwhelmingly good. The Gates memo became the proud moment for them. The good thing about Brady was there were times he became upset, but never close to the point where he wanted to quit.