A Note About Sabeer Bhatia's Interview in Founders at Work | Hacker News Reader

A Note About Sabeer Bhatia's Interview in Founders at Work

foundersatwork.com

37 pointsjl13 comments

Googling down Internet memory lane for HoTMaiL. Hallucinogenic optimism. Great phrase.

> Jurvetson remembers: "He brought in these revenue estimates showing that he was going to grow the company faster than any in history. We dismissed the projections outright, but he insisted, 'You don't believe we're going to do that?' He had hallucinogenic optimism. He had an unquenchable sense of destiny. But he was right. He grew the subscriber base faster than any company in the history of the world."

Wired 6.12 "HotMale" December 1998

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.12/hotmale.html?pg=2...

Why is this needed? JL just interviewed people, and they subjectively stated their opinions, however true or false. I would think the burden of independently verifying every claim (esp regarding fuzzy details of what people said in private) would be too great.

For the same reason any journalist wants to be told the truth, to know when they are not told the truth, and to call people out when it happens. As a proxy for absolute truth, good journalism requires complete reportage even years after publication. Rep and goodwill are your most valuable assets.

I don't know JL well but I imagine that she would not do this over of a simple he said / she said disagreement. On the other hand I don't think this deserves to be front-page news -- she is only making sure she has the record straight.

Slightly OT here, but F@W is one of my all-time favorites. I found it very inspiring and informative.

I remember reading somewhere that Jessica Livingston might be working on a sequel. Does anyone know if there's any truth to this?

I believe she announced she was working on a sequel during the talk she gave at the 2008 Business of Software conference.

I found Sabeer Bhatia's interview one of the less useful ones in the book, though it was still worth reading. He sounded too negative about VCs, became a Google fanboy for no reason multiple times during the conversation, and gave too much importance to the notion of the 'killer idea'. Compare this to (say) Mitch Kapor's interview, and you see two completely different personalities, only one of which I would enjoy working with.

I really liked the fact that there were some seriously different people interviewed. For instance, the Excite guy, fresh out of college, compared with the RIM guy, who chose between the Blackberry and some project for the space shuttle. And yet they both got rich out of their respective startups. I liked seeing that variety.

My favorite is Steve Wozniak's interview. I love how he described the pure passion and drive he had for hacking (e.g. he had no money to buy hardware so he had to hack the hardware in his mind)

Has he responded to this? Are there any more errata in F@W?

Sabeer approved the interview before publication, but after the book was published he asked me to remove those parts if there was a second edition. He didn't say specifically that the things he said were false, just that they hurt people's feelings. (Many people in the book cut stuff out of their interviews, but usually because the material was controversial or confidential, not false.) But once I got evidence that what he said was actually false, it seemed appropriate to post a statement about it immediately.

None of the other things people said in interviews were false that I’m aware of.

Five words: Passwords in the browser cache

To be more concise: When using Hotmail in 1997 on a college machine, I found that the cache contained people's Hotmail passwords. That's not a sign of genius.

If you're able to make 400 million bucks with that, it definitely is! (a business genius, at least - which by itself is a lot, no?)

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