Zenter founders and YC grads share their Google acquisition story (audio interview)

http://www.grid7.com/archives/178_podcast-24-founders-of-zenter.html

by scrollinondubs • 19 years ago

36 7 19 years ago

ecuzzillo• 19 years ago

One nitpick: They talked about the "zone-out" button, which students are supposed to press when they've zoned out of a presentation. There are two show-stopper problems with that.

One, having zoned out reasonably much in my undergrad career, I can tell you that zoning out is not something that hits a threshold, and then you realize "I've zoned out." That is, unless you're consciously zoning out, in which case you consciously aren't interested in the material, in which case you would never press the button, since you don't want the professor to get mad.

Two, that assumes that everybody has a laptop (generally, only 20-50% do), AND, even less plausibly, that they're all looking at the professor's presentation with their browsers. (probably 1% of all undergrads would ever do that)

nomoresnow_c• 19 years ago

I like the one point these guys made about putting emphasis on finding co-founders who have previously worked on their own side-projects, before people wanted to pay them to do something.

davidw• 19 years ago

There's an interesting bit at about 28 minutes about working with PG.

pg• 19 years ago

I went and listened to it, and it was quite surprising. I had no idea the Zenters used to leave our meetings disagreeing with all my suggestions, and that they only implemented them to prove me wrong.

I remember them saying at the end of the winter that I always "turned out" to be right about design questions. I should have realized that "turned out" implies they didn't believe me at first.

wcrosby• 19 years ago

Of course we always thought that what we did was right solution. When someone criticized it, it was a natural instinct to defend it.

You have to remember the environment we were in. When you are building a product, everyone wants to give you advice on how to do it. It is often very difficult to tell a good suggestion from bad one when you are in the thick of it. The most effective way we found to filter out good from bad was to mock up the suggestion (no more than 1 hour). We then looked at the before and after and tried to make a decision based on what we observed. The hard part for me was keeping my emotions and ego out of it and allowing myself to think clearly about what is the "right" solution.

parker• 19 years ago

Just finished listening... this clip is worth the time, a lot of good stuff in here. I just wish they touched more on how the Google acquisition unfolded, rather than the "we met some people, yadda yadda" approach. But I'm guessing they're not at liberty to discuss all the details :)

staunch• 19 years ago

They said the important part: Joe Kraus. You get that guy rooting for you inside Google and you're probably 90% of the way there.

Zenter founders and YC grads share their Google acquisition story (audio interview)

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