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about it and if you have any chance of succeeding, you will stop being present for the softer things in life like your family, friends, or dating life. And when you are there with them, you re not really there with them; you re thinking about this thing because you re creating it, and it takes that amount of passion to make it work.

Livingston: Did this ever hurt any of your relationships Currier: I almost didn t marry my wife. She and I started dating about 2 months before I came up with the idea, so she hasn t really known me without it. I couldn t figure out if we should get married, but then I hired a new VP of engineering and he transformed my life. Because I could trust him to do a lot of important work, he gave me breathing room to actually feel something. Four months after I hired him, I proposed and we got married. We now have four great kids. I almost really blew it; the whole haze of the thing made it unclear.

At an HBS reunion, we had a roundtable for all of us who had been entrepreneurs, and one of our professors asked, What didn t HBS teach you about this And I said, Pain. I only remember one class that came close: the professor walked out of the class with tears in his eyes, having recounted the story of his friend who had started a cable company, and it destroyed his life, destroyed his family, and moved him to a place where his life was a waste of time. That was the only indication I had at HBS about how painful this is. Having gone through this already, my ability to start another startup is now much higher. If you could give a student a tenth of that understanding at business school, it would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and years of effort to understand that you will sleep for 4 hours a night for 18 straight months if things are not going well.

Livingston: Would you do it again Currier: Oh yeah. But it won t be nearly as hard this time because I have money in the bank now, and I know what I m doing. And I know what the probabilities of different things working are, and I would know how to do it, so it would be a lot less painful. You d still have to be obsessed with it; you d still not be present with anything else; but if I thought it could do something important, then I would do it again. Livingston: Your company was acquired by Monster. How do you preserve the startuppyness of Tickle within this big company Currier: You try like hell to preserve the startup feel because you are the per-

sonality that likes to start things and you don t like an environment that s not starting. We ve kept our doors as desks; we refuse to move from our office; and Monster has been fantastic about leaving us alone. We re just out here doing our thing. We are very lucky, and I still enjoy and want to build a great legacy for Monster. But I won t be here forever. I can t. I m a starter. If Yahoo had acquired us, they would have made us move to Mountain View, and would have made us a widget on a feature on a division of a department, and everyone would have left, and the whole thing would have died. And Wall Street would have applauded roundly. Whereas Wall Street has been perplexed by Monster s acquisition of Tickle. Yet it s so obvious: we re the largest career testing site in the world, we ve got matchmaking capabilities between people for romance, and we can use the same matchmaking capabilities by measuring different dimensions for jobs. We can take job matching to the next level the next stage for high-end job finding. And Monster gets the value of every person and every product we have here because there was no overlap.