Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin (Part 3)

SM: Tell me some about how VCs received your concept when you were starting Bridge.

JE: Bridge started in 1981 and we spent six months trying to raise money. We raised $1.8 million, and I remember one VC asking why we needed $1.8 million for a modem. I looked at Bill and said, “He doesn’t get it”. We would just go back over and over and over, refining out pitch until we found someone willing to take a bat.

It is interesting because we talked to Sequoia at the time, and they decided to pass because we did not have enough experience. A year later we were actually doing pretty well and were about to ship our first product. The venture community sensed this was something that was going to take off. At that time Sandy Lerner and Len Bosak walked into Don Valentine’s office. He realized he had missed an opportunity the year before and the situation looked very similar, a husband and wife team and all. He invested in Cisco, and he has told me that part of the motivation for making that investment was realizing he had missed out on Bridge.

SM: That is a unique coincidence that two husband and wife teams would found two preeminent router companies!

JE: It is. We went public in 1985, and were profitable. We decided we needed to embrace PC connectivity and developed a product on our own but were strategically thinking about merging with someone as opposed to going into that PC market by ourselves. We merged with 3Com and that was a real lesson learned.

SM: Before we address the 3Com story, what were the highlights of building Bridge?

JE: Bridge for me is like your first love that you never forget. I think that it was filled with so many learning experiences. I remember when we were raising money and people would tell us that we had no experience. We would say that it didn’t matter because we had the vision and passion. I can look back and see how little we knew and how much we learned.

We created a market and built a culture of a company. Winning those first orders and convincing those first customers that this was something that could solve problems for them. I can still remember a $700,000 RFP that came out from Southwestern Bell. When we won that RFP it was like “OK, we are real”. I was involved with almost every sale because it was an evangelistic market development sale. The day we went public is also very memorable. In those days it was a very different thing. There was a sense of excitement and responsibility. Every day was filled with learning experiences. I would not say that about the follow on companies. We just pulled together an incredible group of people and had a wonderful culture in many ways. It was like a family, and there was commitment and passion to build products that would solve a problem for customers.

We had a very customer-focused culture. One of the things that was very difficult when we merged with 3Com was that they sold through distributors. They did not even know who their customers were, and Bridge had this customer-centric culture.

SM: What did you learn about working with your husband? Today VCs will not fund couples.

JE: We were not married at the time, but we were living together. As my sister used to say, we did not need to get married because we were incorporated! People used to ask me that all the time. You can’t generalize; it is a very individual thing. Bill and I made a great business team. We were very complementary in our styles and worked well together. People were nervous about what would happen if we split up. In the end it was only after, and at the point where Bill had pretty much pulled back and we were not working together as closely, that we chose to go separate ways.

In our case it worked because we had a huge amount of respect for each other’s capabilities and we really partnered in how we built the companies. Couples who are thinking about starting companies together have to think long and hard about it. It puts extra stress on your personal life because you never get away from it. It puts extra stress on the company because people need to understand who the boss is. All of those things have to be worked through and communicated. I think VCs should do extra due diligence and really understand the dynamic.

You can find lots of business partners who are not married and who have started multiple businesses together who are so synergistic as a team that if the team broke apart you wonder if any one of them would do the same job. In essence those teams have the same risk. Team dynamics, strengths and weaknesses, and how dependent the team members are on each other, are important parts of that. We had the benefit that we both lived and breathed it. There was not the issue of coming home and having a spouse ask why we were working so hard.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin
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