Part 1: The Quest behind Questia.com and its funding

Tell us how you went from sleeping in your car to being backed by Rod Canion (Founder of Compaq).
Well, I had a job offer from a very large prestigious law firm in New York and I turned it down to start my company. I came down to Houston to start it because of my Rice connection. Four days after I graduated from Harvard, I packed my bags and on June 8, 1998, I arrived in Houston.

I didn't stay in my car for two weeks but when I got here I had a lot of law school debt. I didn't have much cash so I did stay in my car for the first few days. In the Northeast that's not unusual, but in Texas I think it's fairly unusual.

It gets too hot to do it in Texas!
Right! So I had to leave my car running for the air conditioner. Basically, the police in Houston didn't like cars running at 2:00am in McDonald's, so at night I had to keep moving my car. I couldn't lie back in the seat, so I had to sleep sitting up. But after a few days I made a connection with a friend who let me stay in his apartment.

I had already written a preliminary business plan. I just started making pitches to try to get other people involved in the project. I had been down previously. After a couple of weeks, I got an apartment in an area of town where there weren't any Harvard grads. My budget was a place that could rent for less than US$300.00 a month. I bought this white plastic chair from K-mart and I started working around the clock and would just roll off it and sleep on the floor.

Then Justus Baird came on and I got him a green plastic chair. We kept making presentations and then we'd get feedback after every presentation. We would then go back and rewrite parts of our business plan, so basically every three or four days we were rewriting our business plan.

In late March 1999, we made a presentation to a group of potential investors that included Rod Canion, founder of Compaq Computer Corporation. Within hours after the meeting, Rod indicated his interest in financing us with seed capital. On April 8, 1999, ten months to the day after I had arrived in Houston, Rod joined the team and became our Chairman of the Board.

How many times did you have people say, "That's absolutely not going to work." Or "You're never going to get every book online." ?
Every time. And the thing is I've just been supremely confident since the start that we were going to be successful. Now we've launched the service and people will say you're never going to get someone to pay for this service. And we have and I know we will just continue to be successful.

What was the greatest challenge? Getting the funding, writing the business plan or something else?
The greatest challenge was getting up every day in those ten months. Getting up to work again and make another presentation. I had the opportunity to go back to a US$200,000 job in New York any moment, and here I was eating spaghetti noodles every day. And people were telling me all the time my idea was not viable.

I read you couldn't even afford spaghetti sauce, is that true?
Yeah, I would just use a little butter and salt. I was extremely confident but if I had known how difficult it was going to be I don't know if I ever would have done it. The first ten months were just grueling because I had people telling me every day, "There's no way this is going to work. This is a project that Microsoft is going to do in the future, not some small unknown company. You're too young to do this."

Continued...