Bill Gross on starting Goto and Picasa, and why timing matters more than you think. He argues that survival until the market is ready beats being first or having the best product.
One of the most impactful companies we had was a company called Goto. I told you, our first company was citysearch. Goto is a really great company that we started Pay Per Click. We created Pay per click in 1998. People thought that was a terrible idea. In fact, one particular quote when we first came out with it in the Wall Street Journal, I think interviewed by Don Clark, someone from Yahoo said, that is the most awful company I've ever seen. We would never do that in our search results. And five years later they bought the. But we really thought it was a good idea and we stuck with it, even despite some people not liking the idea at the very beginning. Turned out to be a very big success for us. Another company that we started way too early, a lot of companies we started way too early, but at the right time, the market grew. In 1999, digital cameras were just starting to really make an impact. They were really, really early. But we really felt there was going to be a day when people were going to have a challenge managing all their photos, managing all their images. We started a company called Picasa and it was way too early and we really struggled at the beginning, but we stuck with it and stuck with it and built it and then eventually Google saw it and Google bought it in 2000. And I'm so thrilled. One of the reasons we sold it to Google is they said they would keep it up. They weren't going to buy it to kill it. They were going to buy it to grow it and really build on it. And we're so happy they did. They've done a great job with it. Still. The program that I use today and some of the ideas we started were way too early and they were just way too early. And we couldn't survive until the market came and the market was ready for it. We started some companies in 1999 that were really, really great companies in new media and entertainment, but they were so early because there was too small broadband penetration and too many of our customers were using dial up and it was too slow and the products and offer were great. And the companies decided to spend their money too fast to try and grow market share. And when you're spending your money against the will of what the customer wants, you can't convince them to come if they don't have the right equipment or the right mentality. And the companies went out of business. That was a really big lesson I learned is to try and take your cash if you have something that's really great and survive until the market is ready for you. Because almost by definition, if you're coming up with something that's novel or breakthrough or ahead of the competition, it's too early. And sometimes you could be early enough that they're just not ready for you yet. Now you could give up, too, and decide to wait. You could shelve it and wait, or you can stick it out. There are some companies that seem like overnight successes, but they really stuck it out until the market was really ready for them. And that was a very painful lesson we learned with a lot of companies.
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