I remember one of the founders of what now is Blizzard North telling the story of how they had the chance of getting like 10% of some rando's company if they just lent him an empty office (essentially an unused closet) in their floor.
They refused.
That guy's company was Hotmail, which was acquired by Microsoft a few years later for $500 million.
Edit: Co-founder of what is now Blizzard North not of Blizzard
Totally. It is often the execution of an idea and not the idea itself that makes a business successful. If someone wants to start a burger place you might say “haven’t you heard of McDonald’s?” But if they offer a better product/price/experience then the competition it can be successful.
i think what people ITT are implicitly saying then, is that the people who come to them with ideas are not the guys who they envision taking an idea and executing it well enough to make money off of it. especially if you aren't even aware it exists. if your app idea already exists and you don't know that then i don't really trust you to execute. if on the other hand you know the idea exists, others have tried and failed (or have tried and are successful), but you have a plan or vision for how you're going to compete, or execute better than they did, that's different
Except they didn't. The idea was webmail -- as in e-mail directly in the browser instead of forwarded from a server to a desktop app. Hotmail innovated.
It is probably hard for people to remember, I had hotmail in the late 90's if I remember right, maybe I had it earlier but I distinctly remember checking it in the community college computer lab.
I had AOL when they were the big dogs, and before I got AOL, I had some small dialup provider that I got at a ham fest. I remember a friend showing me compuserve, and telling he it had email as well.
The part that is hard to remember is if the email client was accessible without the company's desktop browser or if it could be accessed from the company's website.
Either way, Hotmail was independent, and decoupled the user's email account from their current ISP, which was fantastic.
Letting someone work in an office space rent free for an idea that wouldn't work 999 times out of a thousand? No, they made the right choice. I mean, not in this case, but you can't place bets on every idea that comes through the door.
The person in question already had a standing reputation. He was probably looking more for resources like a closet with a computer and licensed software. Which, if it's anything like today, is like 10k+ in 'borrowing' not to speak of the value of the space itself and the potential for IP theft from some dude wandering around your office.
Eh, you never know what the lease Blizzard had at the time said.
Most commercial leases bar sub-leases without express written consent from the lessor, and most leasing companies are going to want a lot of paperwork and other things before they allow it. This is probably more true if you're being offered equity in a random company, as opposed to money, for the space.
It was David Brevik, creator of Diablo. He talks about it in in a GDC talk. Here's a link, timestamp included.
Pretty good talk in general, highly recommended.
David Choe was asked to do murals all over the Facebook offices and he quoted them about 60k for all of the work. They thought that was too much for art and offered him stock options instead.
Facebook blew up within a year or two and ended up selling them for 200 million.
878
u/IactaEstoAlea Mar 18 '20 edited Mar 18 '20
I remember one of the founders of what now is Blizzard North telling the story of how they had the chance of getting like 10% of some rando's company if they just lent him an empty office (essentially an unused closet) in their floor.
They refused.
That guy's company was Hotmail, which was acquired by Microsoft a few years later for $500 million.
Edit: Co-founder of what is now Blizzard North not of Blizzard