Komisar talks about two failures he has faced throughout his career and the lessons he learned from them. The first was a company called GO Corporation, which failed after four years due to bad technology and planning. The second occurred when Komisar left LucasArts Entertainment prematurely to join another company called Crystal Dynamics. He was unhappy about the move and had no passion for its products.

Transcript



My first "failure" - commercial failure, significant commercial failure, was a company called GO Corporation, which was the precursor to pen computing in the United States. It was ahead of the Palm Pilot and what we then saw, Palm and Handspring were also good friends of mine, Don and Jeff. But we went in a different direction. We were earlier, and we were trying to build a very robust, Windows-killing operating system that was going to be pen initiated and pen navigated. It was very ambitious. It was a Kleiner Perkins investment way before I was a partner at Kleiner Perkins. I was a CFO of this company and the COO of this company. And it was some of the best and brightest in Silicon Valley. We got a tremendous amount of press, a lot of capital for those days. And we went out, and in four short years, failed. The company was sold sideways to AT&T. Nobody made any money. The product never really came to market. And eventually, Palm got it right. What's interesting about that "failure" is, I've never felt the slightest remorse or disappointment about it. That management team of that company turned out to be the pioneers of the Internet. It was an incredible group of people. The esprit de corps and the teamwork and the excellence with which we executed against the bad plan and bad technology was really admirable. We learned a ton. And people like Bill Campbell went off to run Intuit, later to become a very important part of the resurrection of Apple, with Steve Jobs at the board level, and an important factor in the creation of Google. Mike Homer went off to found Netscape. Stratton Sclavos went off to do VeriSign. Robert Carr went off to do Autodesk. Jerry Kaplan, one of the founders, went off to do Onsale, which was a precursor to eBay. I went off to do LucasArts Entertainment, WebTV and TiVo. If you look at what came from the seeds of that failure, it was success after success. And not only that, it would create a new industry. Now let me tell you about another failure, one where the investor made money. This was a company called Crystal Dynamics. I'd come out of LucasArts Entertainment prematurely, in large part because George had decided we were so successful that he wasn't going to spin us out. And I was very unhappy with that decision. I loved my company. I loved our products. We were on a great roll, and I felt like this would be a wonderful standalone public company. We had big plans, and George pulled us back so he could make the next set movies, use it as a financial vehicle for the next set of movies, the prequels. When he did that, I left. And I left to join a Kleiner Perkins start-up called Crystal Dynamics which was in the game space, very similar, in the face of it, to what I'd been doing at LucasArts Entertainment. Within a year, I had lost all of my passion for what I was doing. The company was struggling to get right sized and to set the priorities it needed to for the limited resources and the slow trajectory of the marketplace. And I had no stomach for it. I didn't care about the products we were creating. They were very different from the LucasArts products, when you finally dug into them. They were toys versus story telling. It was a very different set of ambitions. It was about building things for the game consoles versus starting to try to build things for interactive media. It was a very different sensibility. And by the end of it, I had no muse. I couldn't get myself up in the morning to make the hard decisions, because I had no passion for what I was doing. That company was sold, people made money. I left within one year to become what became called the virtual CEO. I sort of invented that on the fly. I did not know what I was going to do. I just knew I wasn't going to do that. That was a true failure.

1. A Venture Capitalist Innovation Process
2. The TiVo Transformation
3. Innovation Advice from George Lucas
4. A Cautionary Word on the Deferred Life Plan
5. Necessity-Driven Entrepreneurship
6. Lessons Learned from Failures
7. A View On Industry Bubbles and Investment Partners
8. Optimizing Career and Life Opportunities
9. Different Entrepreneurs Excel in Various Company Stages
10. Skills Of Great Entrepreneurs
11. The Supportive Silicon Valley Ecosystem

Randy Komisar answer questions on Entrepreneurship for Stanford University students on March 3, 2007. Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and author of the best-selling book The Monk and the Riddle, talks about how innovation occurs at Kleiner Perkins. Instead of giving projects a thumbs up or thumbs down, the firm uses a set of filters to review and improve these projects. Through this process of iteration, innovation and problem solving occurs between investors and entrepreneurs, he notes.