Just before I came to Microsoft I was working fro the internet company. We knew where we wanted to go. The trouble was that this was 1998-1999, in fact we started earlier, we started in 1995-1996. The picture we had painted over future where most people use the internet and where internet advertising is as important as TV-advertising or even more important and where internet companies were able to capitalize on their usage by selling advertising to advertisers. This was very evident and clear picture that we were all moving towards.
As we started moving towards it the world changed. Around 2001-2002 there were a lot of companies that had invested money early on in building internet businesses that had inflated the internet advertising market. So all of us saw this nice road towards our picture that was supposed to be more or less straight. But it turned out not to be so straight.
We went public in 2000. And we actually delivered on the plan that we spelled out in terms of growing profitability and so on but in this case I guess we may not have done enough job to convince everyone of this. A couple of large companies that were our investors wanted to sell the company. And together with a few other employees who still had the confidence that we were on the right track tried to buy the company out but someone else bought the company for more money than we could afford. So I came to Microsoft. This was a good lesson – we didn’t only have to envisage the future which we had done. But we also had to get not only our internal team and our external stakeholders to buy into your future. So I guess the other lesson from that is that you have to sell your vision to other people around you, but then you have to have the resources and the stamina, preferable, the capital to stay on target. We didn’t. But that was a good learning.
