Husband-and-wife cofounders Mena and Ben Trott
started Six Apart (named for the number of days
between their birthdays) in their apartment in 2001.
Trott’s personal blog, Dollarshort, was growing in
popularity, and she was dissatisfied with the blogging
software available at the time. So she and Ben
decided to develop their own and share it with some
friends. Movable Type became popular almost immediately
on its launch in October 2001.
In April 2003, Six Apart received funding from
Joi Ito’s Neoteny. They launched their hosted service,
TypePad, later that...

knows, someone could announce it tomorrow.
Livingston: Are you able to say who you are most nervous about as a competitor?
Ross: I’d say Google or Microsoft. It’s a big enough project that I’m not sure a
startup would be trying to do it, except us because we’re nuts, but it’s possible.
Of the known companies, it would be Google or Microsoft.
Livingston: So right now you are operating on a small amount of seed funding?
Is that to pay your rent, etc.?
Ross: We’re going to take more before we launch, but...

what you are doing. VCs are sharks.” Meanwhile, you hear from the VCs,
“You’re too paranoid.” So it’s hard to find the right balance and be human,
because you don’t know who’s genuine and who’s not.
Livingston: It must be frustrating not to be able to share your idea.
Ross: Incredibly. If you ever want to stop a conversation dead in its tracks, just
use my magic words: “stealth mode.” I’ve also found “programmer” to work
well in many situations. But we’ll have our day.
Livingston: Are there any lessons that you learned...

Livingston: You wanted to take advantage of the rising tide?
Ross: Right. We already had ideas around software, and we said, “This is the
time to do it if we are going to do anything. People are going to listen to us right
now, so we might as well go for it.”
Livingston: Do you have a name?
Ross:We’re calling it Parakey for now, but who knows if it will stick. Firefox was
our fourth name.
Livingston: Can you tell me about any of the challenges you’ve faced?
Ross: One thing is...

even knows what it is, let alone tried it out. Smells like Firefox all over again.
Those kinds of comments are so motivating. I love the challenge.
We talked to plenty of people at the very beginning of Firefox. It was obvious
that people were not happy with their browser, and it was very clear that, if
we could do something better, we might be able to get them to use it.
Livingston: Do you remember people’s reactions when you gave an early demo
of it?
Ross: People loved the simplicity and went...