ASK PG: What were your first thoughts knowing for sure Viaweb would be acquired?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=525159

by eprogrrrr11 • 17 years ago

70 30 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Just finished reading Founders At Work. Amazing book! I am curious, Paul, what were the first feelings you had when you knew for sure the Yahoo acquisition was for real? What did it feel like? Was it a big relief? Becoming rich? What were you first immediate thoughts?

Thank you for sharing with us.

critic2• 17 years ago

Hamburger... I hate Ramen.

kwamenum86• 17 years ago

Is this an allusion to the Ramen-profitable thread or just non-sense? I want to be in on the joke :)

anatoli• 17 years ago

As in, "No more Ramen, I can now afford a Hamburger." (Which totally makes it not funny... oh well.)

critic2• 17 years ago

also LOLcats and Homer Simpson. I usually go for 3 allusions per joke.

wheels• 17 years ago

At first when cutting over to The Cheap Founder Life I found that I ate worse -- cheap frozen stuff, canned stuff and so on. Now I'm pretty sure that I eat better than before since I've gotten even cheaper and started cooking everything.

Fried rice (with veggies and egg), vegetarian jambalaya, pasta with a bunch of stuff added to generic sauce (beans, carrots, peppers), chicken noodle soup or gumbo (you can make enough to eat for 3 days in one go). It's seriously pretty easy to get your food costs south of $3 a day and to eat actual good food. You get fast at it too -- I can do most of the kitchen time on those things in about 20-ish minutes.

gcheong3• 17 years ago

When both I and my wife were working full-time, we routinely ate frozen dinners not wanting to spend our precious free time cooking. Since I've been laid-off, I started cooking dinners for us soon afterward and haven't looked back. I don't know how much money we are saving, if any, but the quality is just so much better (at least I think so). This just feels closer to the way life ought to be.

pg3• 17 years ago

The main thing I felt at first was relief. For the whole three years we'd endured one disaster after another. There was literally some new mortal threat every few months. When the deal finally closed, the feeling of finally being able to relax was so strong (and so unfamiliar) that I was practically high for several months on it.

When I was in grad school I once had a kidney stone so bad that I ended up in an emergency room on Thanksgiving Day. They gave me some fairly strong opiate intravenously. If you've ever had something like this, you understand the appeal of heroin. Especially coming after a week of being curled up into a ball with pain. The feeling when we sold was a less intense but longer lasting version of this.

In retrospect, we could have made Viaweb a lot less painful by spending/raising less money. That was what made it so stressful. But startups were more expensive then. Or at least, everyone thought they had to be.

eprogrrrr11• 17 years ago

Thank you.

I am wondering that it must have been such a magical moment

- suddenly knowing that the "stress" is gone forever...

I am sure it must change everybody.

Also, I really liked a lot your essay about stuff - this is probably one of my favorites. Also explains why you used to keep using your old powerbook :-)

9oliYQjP• 17 years ago

One day I would love to hear about these disasters. In my own experience I have literally faced utter failure in the face only to somehow manage to bounce back stronger than before.

I've told people that running your own business is a lot like playing one of those racing games where you get 30 seconds to get to the next checkpoint at which point you'll earn yourself more time. On several occasions it has felt like I have literally ran out of time only to coast through a checkpoint and be gifted more time.

aaronblohowiak2• 17 years ago

"One day I would love to hear about these disasters." - Have you read F@W?

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

My favorite description of entrepreneurship is jumping out of a plane and trying to build a parachute before you hit the ground.

Note: I know it's not a perfect analogy. I'm comfortable with that.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

I haven't managed to sell a business, yet, but when I decided to give up and get a job last year, I got a less intense (and probably less long lasting, though it's still going on to some extent now) version of this. The lack of stress after 7 years of never knowing if there was going to be enough money next month was palpable.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

I don't think it's necessarily a money thing, because I experienced the same effect when I folded up my startup and got a job. And I still had enough cash in the bank to do one, maybe two more startups, and was never in any danger of running out of money.

I think it comes from the sudden lack of responsibility. When you're in a startup, everything you do matters: if you succeed, it's because you rocked, and if you fail, it's because you screwed up. This makes you feel incredibly alive, but it's also incredibly stressful. When you go back to collecting a paycheck and have to grotesquely screw up to get fired, all that stress just evaporates, and it's like coming down off a massive high.

I still wanna try it again, and hopefully end up with a success instead of a failure next time. But I felt like I'd reached the end of my endurance when I gave up: I'd given it my 110% and it still wasn't enough given my current experience level. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything though.

timr• 17 years ago

"When I was in grad school I once had a kidney stone so bad that I ended up in an emergency room on Thanksgiving Day. They gave me some fairly strong opiate intravenously. If you've ever had something like this, you understand the appeal of heroin. Especially coming after a week of being curled up into a ball with pain."

How weird to use that metaphor. I passed a stone during college, and simply being rid of the pain was an amazing high, without the need for drugs. For a week afterward, I felt as though I had just been born. (Coincidentally, the next time I felt anything close to that euphoria was when I turned in the final draft of my dissertation.)

I suppose that once you've grown accustomed to severe pain, having it removed is a revolution.

ASK PG: What were your first thoughts knowing for sure Viaweb would be acquired?

Related Stories