Founders at Work in Font

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well right away, often. It was a precursor to Windows in the days when the PCs weren t powerful enough to do it. So for all of its advancing the art of things and cool stuff they did, it wasn t its time, and they ended up selling it off to make some money, and they ended up going belly up. It was bad all around. What I do realize is there are advantages to selling at a peak. You don t know when the peak is. I know people who sold their businesses when everybody thought you were crazy. The business is going through the roof; why are you selling now And in hindsight, of course, it turned around. Six months, a year later, the business started crashing. They didn t get the peak, but they came pretty close. There are some people to whom it s worth taking the risk, because you risk going for the big one, and, in a portfolio, that s good. But as they say on Wall Street, the bulls make money, the bears make money, but the pigs get slaughtered. In other words, don t be greedy. Whether you think things are going up or things are going down, you can make money going both ways. But, if you are piggish, are greedy, that s when you have problems; you ll be irrational about that. It is worth it sometimes, if you can do it, to reach for the stars. Microsoft didn t reach for the stars. Microsoft was step by step by step to where they got, and it was profitable all the way to it. So that s the traditional way of doing it. The Google, Netscape way, those things, sometimes it works, and sometimes usually it doesn t. But sometimes it does, and the payoffs are incredible. But, if you re a business person who wants your business to succeed, as a business, because you like that business, you take a different view. So the risk profiles are different. A lot of people make money because they re very good at timing. We were close. If we hadn t been sued, I would have done pretty well financially, because Bob and I owned most of the company at the time. And we would have had an interesting next step, going into what was probably the leading online business at the time. Maybe it would have ended up into the Internet or something, or it would have made the jump better. Who knows But it didn t happen.

Livingston: Do you have any regrets That one was out of your hands. Bricklin: Yeah, it was out of our hands. If we had been able to settle in advance,

the thing would have closed, and we would have made a lot of money, and we d have a bigger house, and whatever. But, you know, as I always tell people, here it is, 25 years later, and you re still interviewing me. There s fame and fortune. I didn t get much fortune out of it, but, on the other hand, the fame has basically given me a meal ticket ever since, and I learned a lot from it, and the rest of my life has been pretty good. All in all, I can t complain. I did a lot better than I ever expected to, in all sorts of ways. So there are no regrets about that. I mean, each thing, you think, Well, if I had put this feature in, it would have been better.

Bricklin: Oh, we had lots of disagreements, all the time. People always thought the company was going to die, because we d yell at each other on all sorts of issues. It was usually over technical stuff. Bob s much more aggressive in many ways than I am, and I m much more conservative. So we re very complementary. While I m disorganized, he s more disorganized, in certain things, so he depends on me for the drive to get things to completion. On the other hand, I depend on him for some of the reaching for the stars. So we were very complementary, but that s tough. It s like having old married couples who spat all the time, always yelling at each other. It wasn t as bad as some businesses, where it actually is a married couple. But our friendship has continued to this day. As people know, in the business like Bill Gates is known for this, about being really tough in meetings, and arguing and stuff like that that s just a way of testing your own understanding of things. By arguing with others about it, that s how you learn. And, if somebody can t take the arguing with it, then maybe they don t really believe in what they re talking about and they don t understand it well enough. We d argue and then we d go out to lunch together, because it wasn t based on animosity. We had enough problems with people outside. Livingston: Do you remember a time someone tried to take advantage of you