Excite.com ‘un kurucularından Joe Kraus ise, kitapta benden şimdiye kadar en çok takdiri almış, en samimi kişi. Kendisinin aşağıdaki soruya verdiği cevabı paylaşmadan edemedim, zira aynı soruya aynı cevabı verirdim sanırım, tabii bana yöneltilmiş olsaydı. “Sosis fabrikası” benzetmesi ise tek kelime ile muhteşem!

Livingston: What about your first version? Did it seem like you were onto something huge?

Kraus: No, it was never clear that we were on to something huge. You never know anything. The hardest part in a startup is that you wake up one morning, and you feel great about the day, and you think, “We’re kicking ass.” And then you wake up the next morning, and you think “We’re dead.” And literally nothing’s changed. You haven’t made some big deal, you haven’t sold something new. Maybe you wrote a few lines of code over the course of that last day. Maybe you had some conversations with people, but nothing’s really moved. It’s completely irrational, but it’s exactly what you go through. The thing is, you never know. I am certainly sort of a paranoid competitor. I was always worried about who was going to kill us and what they were going to do. I’d feel like “We’re going out of business any day and anything could upset the applecart.” I really wanted it to get to a point where I’d say, “OK, I know we’re on to something huge.”

Even up to the time when Excite was several hundred people and we were the fourth largest website in the world, it didn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel like you’re really doing something huge. On some level it feels like you’re fooling people—like, are we really doing this? It’s the whole sausage and sausage factory problem: when you’re outside and you only see the sausage coming out you think, “That’s pretty tasty.” When you’re on the inside and you know how it’s made, it’s terrifying. That’s the feeling. You just don’t ever feel like the progress is smooth. It’s never, “We set out this well-orchestrated plan, we’re executing it, it’s going exactly according to plan. We’re getting bigger by the day and it’s just as I thought.”

It’s never been that, ever, for me. It’s always been, “I know this can be huge, I believe it in my heart. How on Earth do we make this happen? Why don’t other people think it’s huge yet?” It’s just this complete, everyday banging your head against the wall trying to figure out how to convince other people that this thing is the biggest thing in the world.