From Medium:
In the summer of 1995, Paul Graham heard a story on the
radio promoting the endless possibilities of online commerce, which at
the time hardly existed. The promotion came from Netscape, which was
trying to drum up interest in its business on the eve of its IPO. The
story sounded so promising, yet so vague. At the time, Graham was at a
bit of a crossroads. After graduating from Harvard with a PhD in
computer science, he had fallen into a pattern: he would find some
part-time consulting job in the software business; then, with enough
money saved, he would quit the job and devote his time to his real
love—art and painting—until the money ran out, and then he would
scramble for another job. Now 30 years old, he was getting tired of the
pattern, and he hated consulting. The prospect of making a lot of money
quickly by developing something for the Internet suddenly seemed very
appealing.
He called up his old programming partner
from Harvard, Robert Morris, and interested him in the idea of
collaborating on their own startup, even though Graham had no clue where
they would start or what they would develop; eventually, they decided
they would try to write software that would enable a business to
generate an online store. Once they were clear about the concept, they
had to confront a very large obstacle in their way. In those days, for a
program to be popular enough it would have to be written for Windows.
As consummate hackers, they loathed everything about Windows and had
never bothered to learn how to develop applications for it. They
preferred to write in Lisp and have the program run on Unix, the
open-source operating system.
They decided to postpone
the inevitable and wrote the program for Unix anyway. To translate this
later into Windows would be easy, but as they contemplated doing this,
they realized the terrible consequences it would lead to—once the
program was launched in Windows, they would have to deal with users and
perfect the program based on their feedback. This would mean they would
be forced to think and program in Windows for months, perhaps years.
This was too awful a prospect, and they seriously considered giving up.
One
morning Graham woke up with the idea that they might be able to control
the software on the server by clicking on links. He suddenly sat bolt
upright, as he realized what these words could mean—the possibility of
creating a program to set up an online store that would run on the web
server itself. People would download and use it through Netscape,
clicking various links on the web page to set it up. This would mean he
and Morris would bypass the usual route of writing a program that users
would download to their desktop. It would cut out the need ever to have
to dabble in Windows. There was nothing out there like this, and yet it
seemed like such an obvious solution. In a state of excitement he
explained his epiphany to Morris, and they agreed to give it a try.
Within a few days they finished the first version, and it functioned
beautifully. Clearly, the concept of a web application would work.
Over
the next few weeks they refined the software, and found their own angel
investor who put up an initial $10,000 for a 10 percent share in the
business. In the beginning, it was quite hard to interest merchants in
the concept. Their application server provider was the very first
Internet-run program for starting a business, at the very frontier of
online commerce. Slowly, however, it began to take off.
As
it panned out, the novelty of their idea, which Graham and Morris had
come upon largely because of their distaste for Windows, proved to have
all kinds of unforeseen advantages. Working directly on the Internet,
they could generate a continuous stream of new releases of the software
and test them right away. They could interact directly with consumers,
getting instant feedback on their program and improving it in days
rather than the months it could take with desktop software. With no
experience running a business, they did not think to hire salespeople to
do the pitching; instead, they made the phone calls to potential
clients themselves. But as they were the de facto salespeople, they were
also the first to hear complaints or suggestions from consumers, and
this gave them a real feel for the program’s weaknesses and how to
improve it. Because it was so unique and came out of left field, they
had no competitors to worry about; nobody could steal the idea because
they were the only ones who were insane enough to attempt it.
Naturally, they made several mistakes along the way, but the idea was too strong to fail (though Graham notes the company
came close several times anyway); and in 1998 they sold their company, named Viaweb, to Yahoo! for $50 million.
As
the years went by and Graham looked back at the experience, he was
struck by the process he and Morris had gone through. It reminded him of
so many other inventions in history, such as microcomputers. The
microprocessors that made the microcomputer possible had originally been
developed to run traffic lights and vending machines. They had never
been intended to power computers. The first entrepreneurs to attempt
this were laughed at; the computers they had created looked hardly
worthy of the name—they were so small and could do so little. But they
caught on with just enough people for whom they saved time, and slowly,
the idea took off. The same story had occurred with transistors, which
in the 1930s and ’40s were developed and used in electronics for the
military. It was not until the early 1950s that several individuals had
the idea of applying this technology to transistor radios for the
public, soon hitting upon what would become the most popular electronic
device in history....
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