We spent a couple incredible hours with Bill, a special treat since he's normally in Boston and doesn't come out to SF too often. While at our offices, Bill ran us through his Startup From the Heart Workshop. Bill started Avid purely from the heart: he was editing film and wanted to make it easier. He also started Wildfire, which drifted from the original vision and wasn't as successful.
One of the exercises in the workshop is to talk about intent. Bill believes the most successful companies are those where there is clear intent by a strong founder, separate from invention and belief.
My intention for Posterous:
I intend to help people share and communicate with their friends and family.This was my intention before the first line of code was ever written. This was my intention when we got into YC, when we raised $4.4M, and it still drives everything we do today.
Having celebrities use Posterous is exciting. Getting social media pros use us validates our technology and helps spread the word about Posterous. But when I see a baby blog where people are sharing with their family, that's when I get super excited and happy.
Before Posterous, I had a (crappy) blog on Blogger. I probably got 10 or 20 hits per day. But I didn't care about the numbers. I assumed those were my friends and family, and that's all I wanted.
In his presentation, Bill included this was BMW commercial which I had blogged about before:
Embedded media -- click here to see it.
"We realized a long time ago, what you make people feel is just as important as what you make. At BMW, we don't just make cars, we make joy."
I was also reminded of a great Jonathan Ive interview I posted a while back:
"Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products," he explained. "We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we'll make some money."
So startup founders: follow your heart, not your brain. I agree with Bill. If you build your startup from the heart, it will have a greater chance of having success. And besides that, you will be much happier along the way.