IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 30

TURNABOUT: Eric Hahn
helped C. Gordon Bell realize
his dream of building the
Computer History Museum in
Silicon Valley: he and his wife,
Elaine, donated more than
US $10 million to the effort.
The museum's collection
includes this IBM 1620 from
the 1960s.

tImOthy ArchIbAld

ence is still fresh; he started the company in early 2006 to help
people back up their computers, using free disk space on friends'
computers. Hahn, three engineers, and a marketing executive
worked feverishly for nine months to develop the product, but
by the fall of 2006, Hahn recalls, "it became painfully clear that
our thinking was flawed." People just wouldn't trust their friends'
PCs with their data. In early 2007 he admitted defeat and returned
the investors' capital, consoling himself that "with start-ups, if
you don't have a few failures you're not taking enough risk."
Because in his current role he can do just about whatever he
wants, Hahn's coding again. "I see the same aesthetic in code
as I do in music or art or poetry," he says. "For me, coding has
always been a creative and aesthetic joy, not just a technical joy.
That creative outlet has always been the draw." Lookout, one
of the companies that was sold, started as a personal project
in 2002, when Hahn was looking for an excuse to program. He
decided he could really use a search engine for his e-mail, and
so he wrote one in C# for Microsoft's popular Outlook e-mail
package. Today desktop search engines built into operating systems search e-mail as well as standard documents, but in 2002
that wasn't the case.
From the moment Lookout sprang to life, Hahn says, he
"could no longer imagine not having it." He posted it on the
Web for his friends to download and use. The software spread
rapidly, with thousands and then tens of thousands and soon
hundreds of thousands of users. And they all were turning to
Hahn for support.
"I'd get bug reports from Norway saying, 'Hey, this weird thing
happens when I run it in the Norwegian character set,' " Hahn
recalls. "And I'm thinking, Norwegian character set? Huh?"
And then Hahn would stay up late trying to fix the bugs or
adding features users requested. "When there's end-user passion,
it's intoxicating," he says. "Franz from somewhere would send me
a message, and I would find I really wanted to make him happy."
Hahn ran into Lookout users everywhere. On a family trip
to Panama, visiting a coffee plantation that got power only a
few hours a day, he spotted Lookout software running on the
plantation's single PC. Within a year, though, it got to be too
much. "I was hemorrhaging under the love," Hahn says. He
hired Mike Belshe to work on the project full time; other friends
helped when they could. He had no business plan. There was no
income-he paid Belshe and the others out of his own pocket.
But for Hahn it was still emotionally rewarding. And more
important, it made him a programmer again. "It was all about
the code," he says. "I wrote 60 000 lines of code, and it was a
product, and people liked it."
In 2004 Microsoft offered to buy Lookout, making, says Hahn,
a generous offer for "what was basically two guys and a dog."
Hahn and Belshe, who was by then a partner, sold it.
But once coding was back in his life, he wasn't going to give
it up again. These days, though busy with Zimbra, he's still
trying to solve the computer backup problem that he tackled
with Bing.
"I wonder," he says, "how many programmers are trapped in
the bodies of Silicon Valley executives. We tend to leave programming jobs because they just don't pay enough to support
kids and mortgages here in Silicon Valley. But increasingly, when
people have some material independence, they revert.
"It's a lot better than buying a football team," he says.
n

technology," he says. He also decided against doing a start-up as a
CEO, realizing that would be all-consuming. He looked into angel
investing but decided that was too hands-off a relationship.
So he did something pretty interesting: he began "mentor
investing." Hahn finds people who have an idea for a company
and have started to pitch it to venture capitalists but are still
trying to fill in the nitty-gritty. He writes a check, typically
between $100 000 and $1 million, which buys him a piece of the
eventual company and the right to be involved with developing
the idea, hiring people, figuring out the marketplace-and even
writing code. He often gets an office at the company and spends
time there on a regular schedule. He holds the company retreats
and holiday parties at his house.
Bill Lee, who founded one of Hahn's investments-RemarQ,
a company that developed and operated Web-based discussion
boards for companies including Amazon, eBay, and Novell-
recalls that Hahn committed to spending a certain amount of
time each month at the company but always exceeded that. "He
got down to the level of critiquing the code," Lee says.
So far, more than 10 of his dozen-plus investments (a few
are not public knowledge) are successful or on track. "I think of
myself as the blue-haired lady in Atlantic City sitting at the slot
machine with a box of quarters," Hahn says. "Success for me is
simply not running out of quarters so I can keep playing."
Besides Red Hat and the recently sold Opsware, his hits
include Good, which builds technology to keep travelers continuously connected wirelessly to corporate computers; Proofpoint,
which makes an e-mail security product; and RemarQ. Four of
his investments have already been sold; three others have gone tO prObE furthEr
public. And he's had two blatant failures: Disappearing Inc., an to find out more about Eric hahn's mentor investing efforts
e-mail add-on, and Bing, a peer-to-peer project. The Bing experi- or to submit a business plan, see http://www.ingroup.com.

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October 2007 | IEEE Spectrum | NA 41

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum October, 2007