Even though I'm not technical—I was a political science major—your role models at Stanford if you're at all entrepreneurial are tech entrepreneurs. You don't have to look very far and you see buildings with names like Hewlett Packard, etc. There were even classes on this stuff that I started taking.

One of the founders was working a part-time job at Oracle, and back in those days, you could take home VT100 terminals to work from home. The way you got them to your car was by going to the supply closet: you took a VT100 and you put it on this $1,000 Herman Miller chair, and you rolled the chair out to your car, put the terminal in your car, and brought the chair back into work. So we thought, "That's a good idea. We could get some VT100s and some chairs all at once." We rolled up a U-Haul and brought down six chairs and six terminals and rolled away.

For example, we had this VP of marketing that I worked to get for about 3 months. He was the former VP of marketing at QVC. He called me literally the day before he was supposed to move out to California and said, "I can't do it." I said, "Well, we're going to have dinner tonight, so I'm coming out to New York." I got on a plane and went to New York and sat down with him. And I got really lucky: we're at the restaurant and we were quiet for a second and you could hear people talking about the Net. They were talking about Hotmail and AOL and the Internet boom going on. So I said, "Look, these people aren't talking about home shopping, they're talking about the Internet. So your choice is, 'Do you want to be part of the past or do you want to be part of the future?'"