I first met Eric Vishria in 1999 when he interviewed at Loudcloud (later Opsware), the company I co-founded with Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz. We were looking for a smart, fired up young dude to be CEO Ben Horowitz's "mini me." Eric, then 20 years old, fit the bill and showed from the start that he had a ton of potential. He quickly rose through the ranks in various product and marketing roles, ending up running most of the company's marketing for us. We got to know each other well since as co-founder and CTO, my job was to be the technical guy explaining to the marketing guy what we were doing and why it mattered, so marketing could explain it to the world.
When Opsware was sold to HP in September 2007, we spent a year there with Eric running a half-billion dollar BU for HP software while I was CTO. Both great jobs, but within a year we found ourselves missing the startup life. We began percolating new ideas independently, and the natural thing was to bounce ideas off each other.
In summer 2008, we were pitching each other our individual ideas and realized we should really work together. We hadn't nailed down what we wanted to do, but whatever it was, we knew it needed to be together. It had been Eric's dream since the age of eight to be CEO of his own great company. Being CEO was something I thought I might like to try this time around. One of my better decisions was making a bet on eight-year-old Eric's ambition rather than my own mid-life curiosity, paving the way for our collaboration.
Throughout the fall of 2008 we were combing the Internet, making observations, and generating ideas. We would meet at each other's houses or Buck's in Woodside for breakfast, armed with onepagers to talk through. Most of the ideas were terrible, a fact that usually became obvious before the OJ arrived, but a few made it to the next round.
One idea we were both attracted to was reinventing the desktop in the cloud. It was clear virtually all applications were moving from the desktop into the cloud, leaving the desktop a bit of an empty shell. We quickly realized the browser was the new desktop -- why don't we reinvent that? We took the idea seriously enough to move our meetings from the dining table to a whiteboard, and soon hammered out the vision for what RockMelt would become -- a browser reinvented for the way people use the web today, with friends, sharing, and favorite sites built in.
Having worked together for nearly 10 years before founding RockMelt, we felt confident there wouldn't be any surprises; we knew each other's strengths and weaknesses. This worked to our advantage when we began seeking investment since it took away one of the big risks startups face – founders who don't end up getting along or who begin to develop conflicting company visions.
Our first pitch was to Marc Andreessen, our longtime friend and industry visionary, and Ben Horowitz, one of the greatest company builders either of us had ever known. They immediately loved the idea, but in typical Marc and Ben style, put us through the wringer on the details. Several weeks, our first two engineers, a working prototype, and many pitch revisions later, Marc and Ben were on board along with our coach and mentor Bill Campbell, legendary angel investor Ron Conway, and a few other investors -- RockMelt was off to the races!
- Tim Howes
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario