BrownHEN Interviewed Josh Silverman,
Brown '91, CEO of Skype, London, UK.
This interviewed took place while Josh was CEO of Shopping.com in 2007. Josh was also co-founder of Evite.com.
1. Josh, please describe how you co-founded Evite.
Late 1998, I was brainstorming with my friend and colleague Javier, with whom I had worked at Netscape and came up with ToGather.com. The Internet was exploding. I was working 90 hours a week in medical imaging. I had no time left for ToGather so I had to quit my job to write the business plan. It was scary, but the great thing about it was that it forced me to succeed. If I had stayed with a cushy income, it would have been too easy to decide not to take risks.
I was doing market research while writing the business plan, and had a healthy dose of luck. I came across a company with three people: two talented engineers who had five products, including using Evite to go after the online calendaring space. I had the business expertise; they had two fantastic engineers who were Stanford grads and a Haas b-school grad. So Al Lieb, Selina Tobbacowala, John Bracken, and I got together.
The first six months, we did not raise outside capital. We focused on the business model and put our product in front of users. We lived on Rice-a-roni; by the time we raised money, we had already given the company a lot of soul and substance.
2. What were some of the lessons you learned from running a start-up?
We had to perform all the basic operational tasks that you take for granted; we had to go and prove to a landlord, a law firm, and a PR firm our potential worth, which took a lot of energy and time. We had to figure out how to create noise in the press—how to get our company to stand out amongst hundreds of new startups.
3. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs regarding raising money?
The ideal situation is never. Otherwise, take as little money as you need. If you can get to revenues quickly, that would be optimal. Figure out what the customers are willing to pay, build your company and keep operating costs low while generating customer value. Also, recognize that raising money from a top-tier VC may be perceived as a sign of success, but is not necessarily a true indicator. The hardest people to get money from are customers, not a VC.
4. Recently, you were CEO of Shopping.com. How did Shopping.com gain such as impressive market share in Europe?
We had a business model, a playbook for running an operation; it took us several years to refine that in the U.S. market and export that to Europe and Australia. Fortunately, it has translated very well from market to market. eBay acquired Shopping.com for $635M; it was publicly traded in NASDAQ and has grown quite nicely since acquisition.
5. Conventional wisdom is that eBay is an example of "winner takes all.” Do you worry that a competitor could dislodge eBay from its supremacy?
I think eBay would argue that it competes in segments such as auto dealers, apparel dealers, etc. It is more apparent in the past few years that with the onslaught of competitors, those who exclusively sell through eBay are now multi-channel e-tailers. The competition has much gotten fiercer and eBay’s roles as well as its competitors are disrupted by technology, and I imagine they will continue to evolve.
6. How can an aspiring entrepreneur gain the knowledge and experience required to work effectively outside the United States?
I think it is hard enough to be an entrepreneur in one’s home market. Going to a foreign market adds new levels of challenges and complexities. I believe it is important to show curiosity and interest in the culture. Even though the business language is English, I learned enough Dutch to facilitate my interaction with the locals.
I found wonderful talent in my Netherlands team and I had great opportunities to acquire some great startups in Europe. I noticed some common traits amongst U.S. and European entrepreneurs:
• Tenacity
• Vision and ability to sell one’s vision well
• Attention to customers
• Expertise
• Ability to attract great talent
Differences include:
• Regulations
• Market conditions
• Environments for raising capital
• Tax structure
In general, although the European economy was well structured to encourage entrepreneurship, the culture has not favored entrepreneurial efforts as Silicon Valley has. Entrepreneurs have garnered more respect that they did five or 10 years ago, but when I was in Holland, it was still harder to access capital.
7. How valid are the ideas you learned about Public Policy at Brown in the environment you work in now? How about what you learned in your MBA?
Public Policy was great training, surprisingly relevant. After Brown, I worked for a senator and this served me well in leading large organizations. I learned to articulate extremely complex ideas in two sentences or less. I also learned a lot in the classrooms during b-school at Stanford and have found value in the alumni network.
8. Would you speak about fear as a motivation or hindrance toward accomplishment? How has that played a factor in your path, if any?
When I quit my full-time job to go work for Evite, I was terrified. My biggest fear was my fear of failure. That said, I also recognized that as an entrepreneur, I had more control over my own destiny. I chose to use my fear as a motivator; I told everyone what I was doing. I was very open about what I was doing: starting a company. This forced me to commit in a public way and pushed me toward achieving success in ways that I would not have had I stayed with an established company.
What else did you learn?
I learned to manage very stressful situations and to remain calm. I also learned entrepreneurs need to stick with their vision in the face of strong adversity and yet possess enough judgment to know when to adapt or when to quit.
I thought that Evite was about saving time—a utility similar to email or a calendar. When we talked with our users, we learned that they were passionate about the sense of community that was created around the event before the event. So Evite was more about marketing a community device: we had gotten the core value proposition wrong. We were smart enough to listen, adapt, and build our service based on what our consumers wanted. As a result, Evite continues to be a great brand.
9. Did you live in The Netherlands when you were responsible for that market? What did you enjoy during your stay and what do you miss?
My wife Shirin and I enjoyed a very high quality of life in Amsterdam, which is a very nice and walkable city. We would ride our bikes home from dinner at 11PM. Our daughter Leila was born at home, in the traditional Dutch way. We enjoyed and missed being in the center of Europe; I had a wonderful opportunity to run one of the great European Internet brands—Marktplaats—a true blue Dutch brand.
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© BrownHEN.org – 2008
