Develops retailing software

Graham and hacker Robert Morris, who know each other from Harvard, begin developing software for retailers.

Netscape was about to do this big IPO, and they had a huge PR campaign. Netscape was saying that people were going to buy and sell a lot of stuff online. So we thought, OK, we’ll write software for people to buy and sell things online.

They borrow $10,000 from lawyer Julian Weber, who is married to one of Graham’s painting teachers, and buy a Web server and started writing code.

It was one scary moment after another. We didn’t know what a term sheet meant or what a valuation was or that companies had boards of directors. All of those things just seemed like words we’d read in a newspaper.