In 1976, Ann Winblad started Open Systems, an accounting software company, with the help of $500 she borrowed from her brother. The advent of the microprocessor and the first affordable PCs created a new opportunity for programmers. Winblad was one of the first generation of entrepreneurs who figured out by trial and error what a software startup was. Six years later, she and her cofounders sold the company for over $15 million. In 1989, she cofounded Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, the first venture firm to focus exclusively on software. In the years since, 45 of its portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public. Now Winblad is probably the most powerful woman in venture capital. Livingston: Tell me a little about your background, how you were first introduced to software, and why you first thought about starting your own company. Winblad: I've always had to figure out ways to make a living and supplement my income, even as a young girl. I grew up the oldest of six kids. My dad was a high school basketball coach and a social studies teacher. My mom was a nurse. She didn't work while I was a young girl because I had four sisters and a brother who were even younger than me. In order to have extra money, we had to find ways to earn it. I was always trying to figure out ways to monetize anything in order to have money to go to the movies or to buy clothes or things that don't come out of a very middle class-income family. I was given an extraordinary opportunity when I started college. They picked students with the top SAT scores and top grades as "experimental" students. As a result, I did not have to take any prerequisites, so it allowed me to take a lot more focused courseware than most students. I could do whatever I wanted. If you wanted to get in a class even though it was not your declared major, they would have to take you. In a liberal arts school at that time it was very hard to double major because, by the time you took all the prerequisites to lay the foundation for your liberal arts education, you only had time for one 297 Ann Winblad Cofounder, Open Systems, Hummer Winblad 22 CHAPTER major. So I was able to double major in mathematics and business administration and also fill in a whole bunch of other classes, like computer science and acting, that most students wouldn't have. In the '70s in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, there were a number of young, but growing, colleges: College of St. Thomas, Macalester College, the College of St. Catherine, Augsburg College, and Hamline College. They had what was called a five-college cooperative. They were all within a couple miles of each other near Summit Avenue in St. Paul. You could take classes at all these colleges. So because I wasn't just cemented to my own college and I was sort of given a hall pass to anything, I said, "Well, I was planning on being a math major, but maybe I'll do this business major thing too. And by the way, maybe I'll take computer science classes." The combination of being a math and science person and then--instead of waiting linearly and taking the business classes, like an MBA, later--seeing how business is applied, that was a magical thing for me. When I went into the accounting classes in the business major and all the guys--I was the only woman there--were sweating bullets, "How to do debits and credits?" and I was taking set theory down the hall in my math major, I thought, "Oh man, I could break into this business field pretty easily." I knew nothing about business. One of my uncles was an architect and had his own firm, but that was it in my family. So there was no sense of how businesses got started, and back then they didn't teach entrepreneurial classes. Because there was so much unknown, you felt like you were so well-equipped--sort of Superwomanish. "I have a business major, I have a math major. I must be really prepared." They didn't have a computer science major, but I took all the classes they had. At the end, I had enough credits to graduate, but I had extra time, so I thought, "OK, how do I get myself to be well-rounded? I'll take some acting classes." I made a real attempt to be well-rounded and totally equipped--having no clue how ill-equipped you are as an undergraduate. You have no experiential knowledge whatsoever. We didn't have internships, which now even all the undergrads have at St. Thomas. We had no international travel, no semesters abroad. So you were really much more naïve as a student graduating in the '70s--even with a double major and a minor and some other good stuff thrown in. But I felt empowered. The early '70s was a big era of affirmative action and companies were forced to go hire women. I was interviewed for some really interesting jobs, and one that I thought sounded really great was this job at the Federal Reserve Bank. It was a brand new building, built by one of I.M. Pei's designers. The president of that Federal Reserve Bank was a really young guy. They had all state-of-the-art hardware, software, and furniture for the time, so it felt like, "Wow, I get to be in this brand new hot place, the Federal Reserve Bank." That sounds like an oxymoron saying it now. The truth was that all these jobs they were recruiting for affirmative action, if you weren't really a competent young woman, you would fail. There was a gap between skills and jobs because they had to hire you and they had to hire you in stretch positions to get women populated. In fact, I 298 Founders at Work got my masters degree at night and Saturdays while at the Federal Reserve Bank, and I was only the second woman in the whole Federal Reserve banking system that had a masters degree. In the whole Fed system! When I went there, it was the first real business experience I had-- although I had had part time jobs. I'd never been in a corporation, and it felt so glamorous to have a cubicle. Minneapolis is a bright city. There's the Nicollet Mall and you were right downtown in the city. It's like getting a job in San Francisco. But it just wasn't inspiring. No one was chomping at the bit. I actually can't remember--I knew I was going to quit, but I can't remember the moment where I thought, "I'll quit and start a company." I still felt very empowered, like, "This isn't this hard a job. This is a big job and I've already gotten promoted once in the first 3 months and I know I can earn money. I can always come back to this, so why don't I break out?" So the three guys from the Federal Reserve that started the company with me--one guy did quit his job and the other two took a year sabbatical, just in case this didn't work. They held on to the safety ring. There were not a bunch of people saying, "Start a company, start a company. Let's do this. Let's build something from scratch." It's so long ago now that I just remember the general feeling that there was very little to risk. I was somehow already fully trained for anything that might confront me. Of course, all that is false; there's a lot of risk and you are never fully equipped to... you just have to be very adaptable. It turned out I was adaptable. I didn't know that until I did that, but it was just a feeling of fearlessness. "What's the risk? What will I have to lose? I'm sure I can do this." It was not cockiness, just that moment you feel in your youthfulness that you are sort of empowered to achieve. I think what does separate some entrepreneurs from other entrepreneurs is we're not handwringers. We don't worry about the unknown. We don't really worry about the risk points ahead. As you get older and you get more experience, you train yourself to think ahead about the risk points versus just to take the next hill. But non-risk-takers and non-entrepreneurs would really have big headaches about this. They would need some level of comfort and safety. That's something that we look for in entrepreneurs--that they have the courage to do the job. That they'll have the ability to judge the business situation. They'll have the ability to lead people. They'll have the ability to interact with the marketplace and to really build confidence into strategy. Livingston: I read that you initially started out as a consulting company and you would do the "real" startup project at night, even though you hadn't figured out exactly what you planned to do. Winblad: Yes. We did that because no one had any money. There wasn't a Y Combinator around to even give us $6000. In fact, I exhausted all of my savings on the incorporation fees and was about $500 short, which I had to borrow from my brother, who was in high school. But he had a job. He was the only one who had $500 to borrow from that I knew. So we had to find a way to cover ourselves. Ann Winblad 299 We see a lot of entrepreneurs that do this. That they actually find a way to earn some money, but they don't... they find a way to separate that from the business itself. Where entrepreneurs try to mush the two together like, "Well, let's compromise the real business to sort of get more money in versus let's find a way to get money to cover the real business and leave it uncompromised." But they have to perform some unnatural acts to get started, which is what we did. We were chosen under a Request for Proposal bid to build a student accounting system for a vocational school in the state of Minnesota, which helped us focus on what we were going to do. We had to really say, "OK, how good's our accounting knowledge?"--which had nothing to do with student accounting; this was grading systems tied to student accounting. It was really a one-off. It also told us how we could underestimate a project, how we would manage a project, how we would manage engineers, how we would manage our own time. And we got paid for learning on the job. All of us owe a lot to the person who took the risk on people who looked like children, who had no work experience other than the... the other three guys had been at the Federal Reserve Bank longer. They were each about 4 years older than me, so they had 3 and 1/2 years of work experience and I had 13 months. We were overly thoughtful about what we would do. When it came down to "what special skills do we have," we went back to that accounting class and in fact opened up my college accounting book and said, "Let's start programming this from scratch and build accounting systems for smaller computers." Livingston: Was this before personal computers were even out there? Winblad: They were coming really fast. Hobbyist computers already started appearing. Now the year is 1975--remember that's the year that Microsoft started and Microsoft was writing Basic for kit computers. We didn't have as good soldering skills as probably Bill and Paul did. And we, of course, weren't working at the systems level writing the operating systems and languages, so we first applied ours to a minicomputer. They were not on commodity processors. They basically were pretty much like a high-end PC would be today. We skipped a whole small era of computers that all got wiped off the planet. Microsoft talks about how their first 80 customers died. Well, we had some of those customers but very, very few. We moved into the PC market as the 8080A--which was the first Intel commodity processor, came out on a computer called CADO. The company was in Torrance, California, and funded by Sequoia. This was about 1978, maybe '77 even. They were using commodity processors--the first Intel processors--but a proprietary operating system. As a result, we had to go find a language vendor because Microsoft's Basic was so weak, we couldn't program a robust accounting system in it. We worked with a language vendor that we OEMed, so we sold our product with an interpreter. A very fast interpreter, so it never had to touch Microsoft's young languages, which was good because there was not a salvageable application software business. The application vendors that started at that time all died as well. That 13 months at the Fed and the 3 years the other guys had really was a lot of computing experience relative to most people who were the first 300 Founders at Work entrepreneurs in the industry. They really were programming on kits--they were hobbyist programmers in their garage. Because it was a new generation of people starting and we just happened to catch the tip--even though we weren't any different in age than these people of the last year of computing--so we got some real computer science knowledge and that really did save our bacon and allow us not to have to restart the company. We were on a steady growth path from the beginning. Livingston: Do you remember any major turning points? Winblad: There were so many things that happened. Sometimes they almost feel like acts of God. We were doing all this work for these CADO computer guys. And there were many things we didn't know--like pricing strategy or how do you collect money from people? So I remember one very unsophisticated thing, in that we had been working with CADO and they said, "We're going to get all of our resellers together. Since you're the big application vendor, come and give a presentation and pitch them." So I get in front of these 60 or 70 guys and these guys are probably all in their 50s and I'm in my 20s, and we had a "blue light special," where we said, "If you give me a check today for $10,000, you can have unlimited rights to one of our modules"--the general ledger or something like that. "But you have to write me a check today." These guys are looking at me like I'm goofy and I'm thinking, "Well, maybe they don't believe this great offer." (This is how naïve I am.) One guy says, "Well, we don't carry our corporate checkbooks around." And I go, "Well, you must have your personal checkbooks?" And they go, "Yeah." And I'm thinking, "Oh yeah, how are they going to pay us?" So I said, "I'm sure your company will reimburse you and, if you want to, put a note not to cash the check until Monday, but I need the check today." And the CADO guys are looking at me like, "OK, what is she doing?" That day I remember very well... it was in the back of a warehouse because they manufactured these computers and it was a big building in Torrance, and it was nice and sunny there. They gave me a crate to stand on because the podium was so large for me. I stood on this crate and started going through the specifications of our product, and George Ryan, the CEO, said, "We're going to take a break now." And he said, "Ann, after the break, you gotta jazz it up a little bit. If you're gonna run with the big dogs, you gotta learn how to lift your leg." That really empowered me to ask for that $10,000. George Ryan was a great sales guy. The fact that he had this young girl there hustling software and so these guys are saying, "Well, we can't write a check." And I say, "Won't your companies reimburse you?" I went home with, I think, like 12 or 15 of these $10,000 checks in my purse. For a young company, it felt like carrying gold around. We now have $120,000--all at one time! So that was pretty seminal... of course today, things like that wouldn't work. It was a very unsophisticated market; we were their only choice. Probably, thinking back, half the guys wrote the check because they just wanted me to be successful. Ann Winblad 301 I think this is something that people underestimate--that there are always people out there rooting for you. That is probably part of what you have to develop. They probably went back to their offices and said the following: "We got a great deal on this software and this great little company--I think those guys might be successful--called Open Systems. And this young woman got up there, and she had the balls--or stupidity--to ask us each to rip out checks for $10,000." It was such a big victory and we didn't have cell phones at that time, so I'm on the pay phone in the airport going, "I've got $120,000 in my handbag!" We did a lot of creative things that in hindsight were very, very thoughtful. I was very fortunate that these three guys--that we all challenged each other quite a bit, that no one thought anybody's idea was better than the other's. So we had to vet our ideas against each other and sort of "win" amongst each other--the best strategy, idea, whatever. You're very lucky if you have an ensemble early on where no one just sort of accepts that you make all the calls. That you are really working in the beginning as an ensemble. When we fund early-stage companies, even though there is a CEO named, in most cases in the ensemble, it is an ensemble. That's sort of what you look for: is there an early ensemble where everyone's rowing the oars and looking at where the boat is going and watching out for each other? That it is not sort of the "Let's get the org chart together and you'll lead us all." We did have an office in an apartment building and the first real vacation I took, I got a phone call that there had been a fire, which, of course, was the indication that we should move out. The fire burned my old cheerleading letters, old yearbooks and memorabilia, but, miraculously, it didn't touch our computers or our software. It was like, OK, you burn up the useless stuff. That stuff's nice to have, but you look at it once every 30 years. Livingston: How did the fire start? Winblad: It was in an air conditioning unit in the back of the building. It was just faulty wiring. The building was built in the '20s and it was a cheap building. It was a five-bedroom apartment I'd rented in a beautiful area of Minneapolis called Kenwood, but it was a dump of a building. It had beautiful wood floors and a bunch of rooms and a big dining room and living room. The dining room was a computer room, and the kitchen was big. So we had four offices, plus my bedroom, which I could use as my own office as long as I straightened it up every day. Then the living room we used as a cubicled area for the rest of the guys, but it was more than time to move out of there. That was another, "It's time to really either fish or cut bait here. Well, I guess we're going to have to move to a real office now." And that does change the real demeanor of the company. Once you start committing to leases, furniture, a capital budget; it does change the cadence of a company for the better. You can only virtualize the company for a very short period of time. 302 Founders at Work Livingston: Do you remember a time when people misunderstood what you were doing because it was so new? Winblad: My parents thought I was pretty much over the top because I had this very prestigious job at the Federal Reserve Bank and went to work every day from my apartment to this beautiful bank and got promoted and made a bunch of money for my age. Why would I quit? It was very hard to communicate to people who weren't in the very small software industry what you were doing. People didn't question you; they couldn't even converse with you. At Thanksgiving: "What do you do again?... OK, thanks, that sounds really interesting." Minnesota was very different back then than out here. People didn't quit their jobs and start these companies. Although, once you become an entrepreneur, it's sort of like becoming an alien. You notice there are other aliens! There they are, they've done that too. How did you do that? It was mostly hard to converse about... you couldn't get wisdom from anyone. Comments like, "What would you do with this software company?" "What's a software company?" It was such a nascent industry, and that's really a gift to join a nascent industry that becomes a real one. If you're in the group grope phase, you can make tons of mistakes. Because there is no one else competing with you or nipping at your legs. It's a completely green field. Livingston: Did you have competitors that you worried about? Winblad: We didn't ever worry about competitors. There were, over time, other companies that started with various different offerings in what was called "accounting software" then. But again, nobody had any market share--100 percent is available for everyone, so we wouldn't get it all anyway. It wasn't a competitive thing. As we got into the '80s, then it was clear that we should try to find leverage points for the business versus just do it on our own, and we should also learn from other players' successes. And we weren't competing head-on for customers, because you could look this way and see different customers and they could look that way. There was the show called Comdex (Computer Dealer Exposition), which doesn't exist anymore, and everybody sold their products through computer resellers and, shortly after that, retail stores like ComputerLand or BusinessLand. Comdex was the best thing that ever occurred for us. You could see everybody there. It was pretty small in the beginning; it was all in the one Hilton Convention Center in Las Vegas. We had some really interesting experiences there because we had to decide whether we should spend a bunch of money on a really nice booth. How do you do a booth for a trade show? Who do you ask? Nobody knows. So we started searching around for someone who has done booths for trade shows, and we find this woman. Her name was Betty. I have no idea what's happened to Betty, because she was probably in her 60s then, so she would be 90 now. Betty was this trooper woman--she was a little woman and very skilled-- and she said, "Oh yeah, I know how to build you a booth." We said, "OK, fine," and we didn't really pay any attention. She built a solid wood booth. It was not Ann Winblad 303 plywood, but like solid oak. It was beautiful, and it had neon signs. So then somebody says, "Well, we have to ship it." Do you know how much it costs to ship a solid wood booth from Minnesota to Las Vegas? Of course we didn't know when you went to Comdex, you had to hire a contractor if you wanted a plant, a contractor if you wanted anything plugged in; if you had neon, you had to hire a separate contractor. So our first big Comdex, I decide to go over early to see how our big, solid wood booth had arrived and how was it looking and how we all were going to interact in the booth. You're walking in the hall and you say, "Well, there's our competitor's booth. Gee, they've got all their material lying out already (the night before); I think I'll just read it." So I went from booth to booth and read all the competitors' offers. I thought, "Well, they could be in here too; I'm not sneaking around. It's fair game." So I thought, "I better hustle over to our booth and say, "Don't put anything out during non-show hours,' because clearly these competitors are not that sharp in just laying this stuff around, but they might get sharper in the daytime." I get near our booth, and there was a medic there and all sorts of lights and I thought, "Oh my God, did Betty have a heart attack?" Because somebody 60 seemed like 100 then. It turns out that we had this big tower--a solid wood tower--and from the wood tower was this neon sign that said "Open Systems." It required one of those small cranes to crane it up and connect it. The guy on the crane, while connecting our neon, had fallen in the tower upside down and was stuck in there. So the medic wanted to saw our tower in half to get him out. Betty was basically hugging the tower saying, "That will ruin our booth!" I was thinking, "Oh God. I've already invested more money than I ever thought in this thing. I shipped this heavy sucker halfway across the planet to get from Minneapolis to Las Vegas. I'm the only person who's got a solid wood booth here--it's beautiful, but, you know, it's solid. And now somebody wants to take a chainsaw to it." I said, "Is the guy dying?" And they said, "He's clearly hurt his collarbone, so he could go into shock and we don't know about his general health." I said, "Can't you just pull him up by his feet?" Of course, as a result of this, all of our neon sign had shattered. So they pulled him up by his feet and got him out of there without sawing our booth in half and now we had no signage. So we had a solid wood booth, with no signage. So Betty says, "I'll just call up and get the neon fixed. We are in Las Vegas." It turns out that back then all the neon work was done in Los Angeles. So we had to have someone build us a new neon sign in real time for thousands of dollars overnight. It was like, "Man, this is booth hell." I could go on and on and on about all these on-the-job training things you learn... We had to shrink-wrap our software to get it into retail stores. Well, how do you shrink-wrap something? I don't know. I now know. We had to buy shrink-wrap machines. Where do you get those? No one knows. So we start looking in industrial classifieds, and we find a pizza company that had gone out of business that's selling a shrink-wrap machine. So we stuck it in a back room, and whenever we had to ship 100 boxes, we'd go back there and shrink-wrap them and our office smelled like burned cheese. It would be like, "OK, let's try 304 Founders at Work to do that after hours so the whole office doesn't smell like burned cheese." Later, we had forklifts and conveyor belts and the whole thing, because we had palettes of software we had to ship around the country. I never had a college class on any of this. Livingston: There were no mentors? People who had gone through it before? Winblad: It was so new. There were many mentors who had gone through business--we had a great lawyer. But he'd never built a software company. He didn't ship booths around the country or shrink-wrap software. Or license software. Nobody had. Rumor has it that Lotus thought it was so cool to have the shrink-wrap machines that, whenever they'd ship a new product, they would shrink-wrap the head programmer and unwrap him quick before he smothered to death. I don't know if that's fact or fiction. So for us, it was never stressful because we didn't feel the cadence of competitors on us. It was tiring and it was hard, but it was a lot of fun. It was like, "OK, now what?" Livingston: Was there ever a time when you wanted to quit? Winblad: No. You also learn how to optimize your time, and you get really good at that. You do it wrong--and I see entrepreneurs do this, "Let's get up earlier and stay up later." I started putting the stuff I needed to read in my bed so, when I'd wake up, it would be there to read, so I'd maximize my time. You're young, and you are really sort of superhuman. But you are not very efficient doing that, so that's where people who become your business colleagues start saying, "That's not going to work." That's stuff that you do get help from friends and advisors. Like, "Hey, you are better off taking a month-long vacation and turning stuff over and getting fully rested and charging at it again than trying to figure out how you might personally live off 4 hours of sleep a night forever." Livingston: Looking back, do you think you were a typical founder? Winblad: Yes. I think that I had all the good parts of a typical founder and all the bad parts of a typical founder. You get good at figuring things out so that you don't just view every problem as if it needs a brand new lens, which, of course, it doesn't. And you learn on the job, so you do a lot of things poorly. Unless you've managed people before, you don't really know how to do that well. So you have to build skills. I think it's really interesting being a venture capitalist because, when you've got 30 years of experience, then your challenge is how to teach and not tell. Because you want people to figure it out. You want to make sure that you can grab them by the coattails if they are falling off a cliff, but you want them to discover the edges by themselves. That's the biggest challenge of moving from being a business leader to being a business investor. Your job is not to tell, but to teach. Livingston: Do you think you are a better judge of good management teams because you were once a startup founder yourself? Ann Winblad 305 Winblad: Oh yeah. Because you see examples all the time. I do personal references myself. Whenever I'm going to join a board, I will ask people for personal references. Your friends, your business colleagues, whatever. I'll address these references as these are not going to make or break this deal, but I want to understand this person. How do they work, how do they think? How do they get themselves in corners? Or twitterpated? What do they need to be surrounded by to be successful? You do learn that people get to be fully formed adults fairly early and it's hard to change people's behavior, although it is easy to cushion how they behave with people that buffer their weaknesses. As you go along, you get more microscopic in understanding people before you invest in them if you are going to sit on the board specifically. You can't fully trust your judgment because some people are good actors, but it's always interesting talking to people's personal references. Livingston: What kind of mistakes do you see new entrepreneurs make? Winblad: One of the big mistakes is that, when you form a company, there's a difference between being an inventor and being entrepreneurial to leading a company--being the CEO or, especially, the leader. You're not fending for yourself anymore. You're actually fending for shareholders. They can't be fending for their salary; they can't be fending for their net worth. They have to really focus on building value in the company for all shareholders. That sounds very sort of lawyerish, but it's true. Some never can make that jump fully. So engagement is never on building the company while someone is watching to help them along. Just like George Ryan, at CADO, which I mentioned earlier--he needed my company to be successful in order for all the software to work for his resellers. He needed me to be successful because I was a core component of the company. So he was not just looking out for me, he was looking out for my company as well and making sure I learned how to look out for my company. And that jump to "It's not about you; it's really about a broader thing, the company, which broadly is the shareholders, which broadly is the customers, which broadly is the employees, which broadly is your mission, which broadly is the values you bring into the company." There are some entrepreneurs that never really fully get out of the "me" thing. And that changes them from being the "inventor" entrepreneur to being the business leader entrepreneur. Livingston: Are you able to predict this better now that you have had so much experience as an investor? Winblad: Well, if there was a perfect lens on this, it would be easier. Most companies do not fail because some competitor crushed them. There's a small amount of failures where the competition was underestimated. There's a small amount in the software category where the technical achievement needed to bring a high-value product could never be reached. But the majority of companies fail by self-inflicted wounds by the leadership team. That stuff is all under your control. We have the biggest challenge in software companies: the core value is the intellectual capital. It's everything. And when there are big flaws in 306 Founders at Work the leadership team that you can't remedy quickly, the company will die of selfinflicted wounds. Livingston: Why don't more women start software startups? Winblad: You know, I don't know the answer to this. I was at an IBM event recently, and Sam Palmisano, in sort of the midst of his extemporaneous presentation at this event, said, "My daughter, who is 13, is a math whiz, and she was just really focused on math and now that she's 13, she's worried about appearing too nerdy." It was sort of like a segue and then he went back onto the speech, "So I don't know if she'll stick with it." I wrote him a thank you note, and I said, "It was really great to be included in this IBM event. It was a great event, and I caught that little sidebar that you said about your 13-year-old daughter, and I hope we can do a better job... some of the successful women in the software industry--myself, Carol Bartz, Heidi Roizen--all of us were math whizzes and we had really fun teenage lives as well as adult lives and have been very successful." It's, first of all, a small number of women and an increasingly small number of any gender being inspired by math and science. It's a big problem. You'd think, "Hey, this week in the news, the richest guy in the world--Bill Gates-- the President of China is spending more time with him than the President. Steve Jobs, with this aspirational product, the iPod. Why don't you want to be those guys?" They have inspirational products, inspirational lives, and it's not like we're under-covered in the media. Something is getting lost in the message here, where it should be really inspiring: "All I have to do is figure out this math-and-science thing, and I'm writing part of my ticket here." Why that is not pulling not only women, but pulling everybody to say, "I want to be like those people," I don't know. You'd think that everybody would want to have our jobs. We've all been handsomely rewarded. The stories are not like, "Hey, we had patrician backgrounds and silver spoons, and we bought our way into this." We just "thought" our way into these industries. The power of thought and math and science and computing, you're given that for free--it's a choice you can make. You take that choice, and it gives you sort of a magic wand to be a captain of an industry that's still fairly young, that's driving the whole world economy. I don't know. This is just a mystery to me. Women running these companies have very rich lives. I don't know. Livingston: What is your top advice that you give to founders starting companies? Winblad: We try not to give too much prescriptive advice. "Think like a big dog and then figure out how you find leverage to get there." You have to have tactics to get to strategies, but you have to have a strategy, and you have to put your strategy up here and then see "Where's my gap" to get to this aspirational goal. You're always going to be short of people, you're always going to be short of money, you're going to be short of source supply value. So you have to find leverage points, versus working your way up through tiny little rungs and seeing if you get there. Think like a big dog, and find leverage to get there.