

Achieving overnight success: Tom Preston-Werner  - sekm
http://joel.is/post/27696148578/achieving-overnight-success-tom-preston-werner

======
luckystrike
This reminded me of Chris Wanstrath's (GitHub Co-founder) talk/post where he
said:

    
    
      But it wasn't an overnight eureka, and it wasn't intentional. 
      I didn't just walk out of high school, pick up a Ruby book, meet Tom and PJ, 
      then launch the site GitHub. 
    
      Before GitHub came, in chronological order, Spyc, Ozimodo, my ozmm.org, tumblelog, 
      ftpd.rb, Choice, Err the Blog, acts_as_textiled, Cheat!, acts_as_cached, Mofo, 
      Subtlety, cache_fu, Sexy Migrations, Gibberish, nginx_config_generator, 
      fixture scenarios builder, Sake, Ambition, and Facebox.
    
      And that's just the stuff I released.
    

Source: <https://gist.github.com/6443>

Discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282158>

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Smerity
I'm impressed with the premise of these articles and want to see more of them
-- removing the glitz and glamour added by the media to entrepreneurial
stories is an important service.

I must have been out of the loop -- I never knew that Tom Preston-Werner
founded Gravatar[1] or that he worked at Powerset.

He mentioned in his blog post[2], as he was labelled a "flight risk", he was
offered quite a sum of money to stay at Powerset/Microsoft. Money is quite
sticky and to pull away from it requires both guts and determination. Even
though I'm early in my career I've already come across the "flight risk" pot
of gold and avoided it -- though as opposed to Tom I don't yet know if I made
the right decision or not ;)

[1]: [http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-
sel...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-selling-
gravatar-to-automattic.html)

[2]: [http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-
down-3...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-
down-300k.html)

~~~
apl

      > though as opposed to Tom I don't yet know if I made the
      > right decision or not ;)
    

The interesting thing is -- it was probably the wrong call, and I'm saying
this without having the faintest idea who you are or what you do. An abundance
of news on IPOs, start-up millionaires, and other "over night" success stories
has the unfortunate effect of grossly distorting our perception of the actual
success/failure distribution.

NB, this doesn't mean one shouldn't _try_. But you know what I'd be interested
in? A series on utter failures. People leaving safe jobs for a half-baked idea
that simply doesn't take off. Companies folding after a couple of months
without much publicity. Desperate hunts for "acquihires" that go nowhere.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
I agree, the survivor bias in the startup world is intense. We're always
focusing on the success stories and replicating what they did. But, like you
say, for every "toiled away and finally made it" story, there are probably 5?
10? 100? "toiled away and still got nowhere" stories.

As someone who has written a little about trying and failing[1][2], I'll say
that the community doesn't exactly embrace such stories. Instead, everyone
piles on to armchair quarterback and tell you what you did wrong.

But, to anyone who is serious about succeeding, you need to listen and learn
from both the successes and the failures. Otherwise, you're operating on far
less than half the story.

[1] [http://blog.aisleten.com/2009/04/06/what-we-did-to-not-
get-i...](http://blog.aisleten.com/2009/04/06/what-we-did-to-not-get-into-
techstars/)

[2] [http://peachshake.com/2011/07/20/entrepreneurship-
stumbling-...](http://peachshake.com/2011/07/20/entrepreneurship-stumbling-my-
way-through/) (go about 10 minutes in to hear about failure)

------
philip1209
The praise for Github bootstrapping to over 100 employees always strikes me as
odd. I have the impression that using venture capital to accelerate a company
marks a more modern approach to business, relative to the last ~30 years.
Along these lines, Github's seeming delay in accepting venture capital signals
to me that its core business plan strongly builds value without a "warp-
tunnel" of venture capital, and that its current valuation comes from patience
rather than a VC's gamble. Therefore, I see such public investments of VC more
as a mark of impatience caused by a society that thrives so much on near-
instant communication.

Is my impression off?

~~~
Smerity
Whilst VC can certainly accelerate a company's growth, it can also be risky.

When you take on funding you also take on obligations. One could imagine that
VC partners early on may take issue with the idea of Github offering free
services for open source projects for example. Before the network effect steps
in, it'd just look like a foolish and idealistic idea. Essentially, VC funding
may well accelerate your company but it's so early you have no clue if you're
accelerating in the right direction.

By bootstrapping to such a successful point and then taking VC funding they're
in far more control over how much money they receive and what percentage of
equity they give up. The worst position to be bargaining from is a position of
weakness -- having a self sufficient company puts them in control.

Bootstrapping lead to what appears to be very competitive terms from well
known and respected VC partners[1]. Whilst they could have raised funding
earlier, they would have been parting with much more equity.

[1]: [http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2012-07-09-github-
takes-1...](http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2012-07-09-github-
takes-100m-in-largest-investment-by-andreessen-horowitz/)

~~~
vidarh
It's not just obligations.

I'll take an example from my own career: One of my first startups was a vanity
domain hosted e-mail service. We bought about 60.000 domain names. Originally
this came out of the realization that myself and one of my co-founders were in
effect both "blocking" a surname for everyone else with our own domains - him
for a fairly common one. We figured we'd add some services and value and
create the opportunity for effectively sharing domains. We figured since we,
and quite a few other people) as we found out by checking which common last
names where available on .com) were willing to pay for a domain, chances were
a decent number of people would be willing to pay for a service like this as
well - particularly non-technical users. And anyway, it was possible to buy
ourselves artificial scarcity fairly cheaply.

Then came the discussion of bringing in VC's, and as this was '99, once the
discussion turned to what a VC might be interested in, switching to a free, ad
supported model to boost user numbers came up early on the basis of the
ridiculous per-user valuations of the time. And the VC's took that bait hook
line and sinker.

So it's not just _obligations_ : Deciding to targeting the VC's when you're
starting from a weak position (not existing, profitable product) has the
potential of warping your thinking as you try to make your idea into something
that is attractive to _them_. I'm not going to blame the VC's here - we did
this entirely voluntarily, and of course were also seduced by the potential
for a much larger exit (but didn't think through the increased risks that came
with growing the company so rapidly)

The problem is that since the VC's want out fast and have diversified their
risks significantly, they are willing to 1) take significant risks on building
businesses where there's no known long term prospect if there's decent shots
at exits. In this case, there was a steady stream of acquisitions based
largely on per-user valuations without much revenue. In this case it was
openly acknowledged that while everything thought it was possible to break
even, the hope for a big exit lay in this. 2) they're willing to make some
really high risk bets if the potential payout is a large enough multiple.

These makes sense for them, but much less so for founders that has a much
lower limit on how many shots we effectively have at a successful startup
through our careers. And so it is important to keep that in mind when
considering what changes are acceptable to make in order to get VC funding -
some changes might get you lots of money, but might severely impact your odds
of getting an exit that _you_ might be perfectly happy with.

In the end we acquired a decent number of users (1.5 million or so) in very
little time, didn't see a way of getting the money, the bubble had burst and
the investors got skittish, and so we pivoted. Twice. In the end the company
survived, at least. But the assets of the e-mail service was sold off, and the
new owner made a profit on that acquisition in no-time by returning to our
original idea (and were later acquired - I don't know what valuation they got,
but I'm willing to bet their ROI was substantially better than ours...).

I'm all for taking VC cash for the right opportunity, but anyone going that
route should think long and hard about if and how changing the business to
"fit".

------
carlsednaoui
The site seems to be down due to traffic overload - here is a cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7f0lqf7...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7f0lqf7g9s8J:joel.is/post/27696148578/achieving-
overnight-success-tom-preston-werner)

------
sirbrad
Wow, never knew Tom created Gravatar. Really like these sort of posts but
maybe the title of 'overnight success' is wrong? Great article though!

------
Raphael
Why does this site always take 10 attempts to load?

~~~
PStamatiou
I wrote this post for that exact reason [http://blog.picplum.com/startups-
dont-host-your-blog-on-tumb...](http://blog.picplum.com/startups-dont-host-
your-blog-on-tumblr/)

edit: re link not loading - anyone else having Zerigo DNS issues right now?

edit2: yeah, lots <https://twitter.com/#!/search/zerigo>

~~~
mmackh
My connection to Tumblr is always being interrupted. I brushed it off as an
edge case, since I live in a pretty remote area in Europe. This makes me think
the issue more wide spread.

