Nirav Tolia Cofounder, Epinions

Nirav Tolia: I don't know if speed is the one thing I would concentrate on if I were starting Epinions again. But once again, moving back to April, May of 1999 when we founded the company, we felt that first-mover advantage, the concept of being the first person in the market to offer a specific benefit, we felt that was very important as Epinions. So we started, we worked around the clock, we were obsessed with speed, this concept of instant company, this concept of hiring as many people as possible and then putting something up on the market, actually having our website up and live in 12 or 20 weeks after we founded.

So it actually ended up being a great deal of support from our financiers. So we actually were funded by Benchmark Capital and August Capital, two of the top VC firms on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley. They helped us quite a bit, because they already have a lot of infrastructure built out. They know where to go to find office space. They know where to go to get office furniture. They know what legal things you need to do. So there's sort of an operational part of it, which is just setting up the company, and then there's a product piece of it. Believe it or not, the various founders had been thinking about Epinions in different ways for the past couple of months. Even though we hadn't quit our jobs, we had been thinking, "OK, if we did this thing, Epinions, what would it look like?" So it wasn't as if we founded the company, and then we had to start thinking about what we wanted to create. It was really just, "OK, we've got our funding, the money's in the bank, let's just run." And we ran as hard as we could, we worked incredibly hard, and as I mentioned, we were obsessed with speed.

Jeffrey Rayport: People talk about speed as one of the hallmarks of what's new about the new economy. What were some of the downsides to speed?

Tolia: Well, I think the fundamental observation is, it's not just OK to be first mover in any market. It's fundamental to be first mover, done right. So you can actually learn this if you study the history of the Internet. Yahoo was not the first portal. It was not the first website directory.

Rayport: Nor was Amazon.com the first bookstore.

Tolia: Amazon was not the first book site; eBay was not the first auction site. Over and over and over again, you see these examples. And you learn that it's not about just being first, it's about being first, right. So you asked what were some of my regrets, or what I would do differently. I would probably get a few parts of the service that weren't completely right when we launched, I would actually get those perfect before launching. So there are a few things that you need to do, clearly better than anyone else, to get consumers on your side. Because on the Internet, the first time a consumer comes to a website, that's the only experience they've had. And if they have a bad experience, they never have to come back. It's so easy to just click away to another website; that first impression is very important.

So when you're obsessed with speed, you put that first impression up, and if it's not as valuable as your real value proposition, you could run into problems. So I think I would have taken a little more time, I would have taken more time in hiring, because we actually hired about 60 people in the space of three or four months and got really big really fast without knowing, do we need this many people? Is this the right model? And I would have just probably crossed the t's and dotted the i's a little more carefully.