se, the experience served as a valuable lesson, which
made me cautious about the whole New Economy thing. Something that I
was quick to observe (at least after Megasoft's financial problem was
revealed to the developers; maybe I didn't notice it before) was that
many companies were confusing VC and revenue. The lessons have been
valuable; Interhack probably would not have survived if we had
followed what lots of folks were telling us we should do to turn the
group into a company in 1999-2000, or if we had pursued any of the
interest that the capital guys were showing us at the time.
Bootstrapping a company is hard if you don't have a bunch of money to
throw at it. It is possible, but requires serious financial
discipline, throughout the company. People who expect to walk into a
job with super deluxe office space, a big support staff, and a huge
salary just aren't going to find a place in a company that's getting
itself off the ground. Scott McNealy makes a lot of money now, but if
that's what he demanded from Day One, he wouldn't be at Sun.
We've got a lot of people out there who have never seen work at any
other time, so their expectations got all skewed. Part of the
correction of the weirdness presently at work in high tech will be the
expectations that managers, marketers, and engineers have about
themselves and each other.
Managers think they're gods because they're running the company.
Marketers think they're gods because they convince people that they
need the products. Sales guys think they're gods because they close
the deals that keep the companies in business. Engineers think that
they're gods because if they didn't build the stuff, there'd be
nothing to sell. The truth is that all are correct about what they
do, but none is a god. Having something to contribute to a larger
effort, that requires many different backgrounds and skills, merely
makes one employable. Get on with a good team, doing a good thing,
finding a good market, and you can get rich in the process.
But if you go to work so that you can retire in five years, never
having to think about money again, you're probably going to have some
trouble.
> To close on a less bleak note, this is a fine time for people to
> "get back to basics."
Crypto still has serious problems to solve. Key management is still a
big problem. User interfaces are a big problem. Integration with
non-hacker tools is a big problem.
In theory we know how to do all of these things, but bringing it to
market isn't all about engineering. It's about marketing (showing
people there is the need), selling (getting people to plonk down money
for it), and managing (keeping everyone able to do their jobs so that
the company will make more than it spends in the course of delivering
the product to satisfied customers).
It's not the technology that matters, /per se/. It's the value that
the technology provides to the people who ultimately must see a reason
to pay for it.
--
Matt Curtin Interhack Corporation +1 614 545 HACK http://web.interhack.com/
ObPlug: Author, /Developing Trust: Online Privacy and Security/ (Apress, 2001)
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary and those who don't.
