
Instant Company (1999) - pdog
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/11/magazine/instant-company.html
======
alphakappa
Fascinating to see where these folks ended up nearly two decades later.

Nirav Tolia: Co-Founder, NextDoor

Naval Ravikant: Founder, AngelList

Ramanathan Guha: VP, Google

~~~
ValG
Also interesting to see how the company ended up. Keep in mind it was started
in '99

from the wiki[1]:

 _By January 2003...all of the founders other than Tolia had left_

and eventually

 _In January 2005 the four cofounders who had left and other Epinions
employee-stockholders filed a lawsuit against Tolia and the two VC firms that
provided seed funding._

Lots of context missing around these quotes (read the wiki), but there was a
lot of conflict (as mentioned in the posted article) between these "bulldogs
and execution machines"

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epinions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epinions)

~~~
theprop
Yes, "Partners at two prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms deceived
four of the five founders of a start-up company, withholding critical
information and thereby cheating them out of tens of millions of dollars,
according to a lawsuit.....The suit named J. William Gurley of Benchmark
Capital and John R. Johnston of August Capital, both original investors in
Epinions and directors of the company, and an Epinions co-founder, Nirav N.
Tolia."

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/technology/founders-of-
web...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/technology/founders-of-web-site-
accuse-backers-of-cheating-them.html)

------
dang
Discussed in 2007:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184).

~~~
pdog
Interestingly, the previous discussion is closer in time to when this article
takes place (1999) than today (2017).

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Somehow I feel that's axiomatic...

OTOH, you could be making a joke that just whooshed over my head.

------
theprop
Despite this formidable team of engineering talent, in eight hours of off-and-
on tinkering they couldn't correctly assemble any desks. Finally they called a
carpenter who had done this before, and he started building two desks an hour.

~~~
Nition
To be fair, it was "build" more than "assemble." Article says they just bought
solid wood doors, pieces of 4x4 for the legs, and metal brackets.

~~~
creeble
Point still stands. Had they bought sawhorses instaed of 4x4s, they would be
done in minutes.

Execution, yeah.

------
theprop
Interesting also how they had what ended up being the basoc idea behind the
much more successful Yelp, also Quora arguably and others.

~~~
landon32
Sounds like they were targeting ecommerce though, and since Amazon added
reviews and was a winner in that space they had no chance with that market.

------
etjossem
You had me at "almost nobody leaves Yahoo"...

