!1! COOLIRIS: BUILDING AN A+ TEAM Introduction It was well past 2AM at the Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB) incubator on Sand Hill Road but Josh Schwarzapel, the young and energetic co-founder of Cooliris, wasn’t about to wrap up the night. Across the gray cubicle wall, the technical team, Austin and Kyan, were coding at full steam to finish the next product release. But the team was tired. Three months earlier when his company received its first round of funding from KPCB, Josh had readily accepted the challenge to expand beyond the original founders and build a world-class technical team. How difficult could it be for a young company with the backing of one of the world’s most successful venture capital firms, an incredible technical vision, an early product with great traction, and another product in the pipeline to attract great talent? Yet somehow it had been challenging to build the team, truly challenging. As a student at Stanford studying entrepreneurship, Josh had learned how critical a great team was to the success of a young firm. But now, in the early hours of the morning, Josh realized that his courses hadn’t taught him how to build a great team. Nonetheless, in Cooliris’s high-accountability culture, pointing the finger at the hole in his formal education wouldn’t excuse a failure. Soujanya Bhumkar, the company’s CEO, had been supportive and provided advice along the way, but Josh could sense the pressure: from the investors, from Soujanya, and worst of all from his friends coding late into the night to keep the company’s head above water while they waited for reinforcements. Now, in the early hours of the morning, Josh once again began the soul searching. Why hadn’t he been able to recruit a great team? He had always been successful in his life, both as a student at Stanford and a collegiate volleyball player. What had gone wrong? Inevitably, Josh began to ask himself, “Is it me? Have I failed?” This case was prepared by Nathan Furr while a Ph.D. student at Stanford University’s School of Engineering, with assistance from Josh Schwarzapel, Soujanya Bhumkar, and Professor Thomas Byers, as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. Some facts have been disguised. Copyright © 2009 by Stanford University. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the permission of The Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Revised April, 2009!2!Cooliris Background and History At the time of Cooliris' founding, the Internet was undergoing a fundamental transformation, frequently referred to as Web 2.0. A host of new websites, many of them venture-funded, had sprung up to empower every day users to become content publishers by posting blogs, making profiles, publishing videos, and sharing photos. Social networks such as MySpace and Facebook had become household names and social networking, or the connecting of users to each other in online communities, had become a buzz word for almost any new online venture. However, with the democratization of content creation and publishing, the problem of "too much" became a very real inhibitor for web users. Millions of people were posting billions of new photos, videos, and blogs every day. Narrow search terms returned hundreds of thousands of results, and information coming from your social graph on sites like Facebook and MySpace was becoming too lengthy to consume. In short, sifting through the endless volume of new content to find worthwhile media was becoming more and more difficult. It was in this environment that the seeds of Cooliris were sown. Soujanya, Josh and Austin Shoemaker founded Cooliris in January 2006 with the idea that although the internet has become a fundamental element in the lives of billions of people, the user interaction metaphors had changed very little since the first browsers. Indeed it seemed that the Internet had always been characterized by a clunky, non-intuitive navigation experience. Although flash animations and video content had enriched basic text, the way people interacted with the Internet was still constrained within the 2D framework of the original browsers. The initial idea that led to this insight came about in late 2005 when Soujanya received a phone call from an old friend, Mayank Mehta. As the two talked about how to make the Internet a more rich experience, Mayank suggested the idea of creating a mouse-over preview of any embedded link on a web page. The preview would allow the user to see the content underneath the link in a contextual window without leaving the original page, thereby creating a more multi-dimensional media experience. Soujanya, a former engineer turned serial entrepreneur, was struck by the idea and began tossing it around with some acquaintances. During this period, Josh and Soujanya met for coffee to discuss ideas. Although Josh was still a student at Stanford, he too caught the vision of a better Internet experience and connected Soujanya with Austin, a fellow student with exceptional technical capability. Together they laid the foundation for Cooliris and their first product: Cooliris Previews. The team began working right away, self-funded on Soujanya’s credit card and working part time while Josh and Austin finished school. By September of 2006, the team had released Cooliris Previews as a free browser plug-in. As it turned out, their hunch proved accurate and the product began to get significant traction, becoming a featured plug-in for Firefox and attracting thousands of users who craved a richer online experience. As the original product began to pick up speed, the team came to realize the!3!fundamental value of creating a richer web navigation experience and dreamt up a second product: Piclens. Piclens allowed users to view online photos from photo sharing sites or online image searches as full-screen slideshows rather than as low-quality thumbnail images or larger files that had to be downloaded individually. PicLens felt like a natural next step for the young company, but as the team built the product their vision of the company began to evolve into something bigger. The team realized that the challenge of improving web navigation extended beyond a browser add-in to