Mark Fletcher was a senior software engineer for
Sun Microsystems when he started ONElist, a free
Internet email list service, in 1997. He ran ONElist
as a side project until he received venture funding a
year later. Yahoo acquired ONElist (later renamed
eGroups) in June 2000.
In 2003, Fletcher created Bloglines, a web-based
news aggregation service. He originally wrote the
program to manage his own bookmark list, but once
he launched it publicly, Bloglines was fast on its way
to becoming the most popular news aggregator on
the Internet....

Bloglines—which was working at the time, but I was just using it for myself—I
wasn’t even sure was going to be very popular. Nobody really knew about blogs;
aggregators were the next level up, kind of difficult to explain to people. So I
decided, I’d already written it, might as well just throw it out there and see how
it goes. So that was it. I put it out there in June of 2003, and it started getting
coverage pretty quickly after that. I realized that I should probably put some
effort into it,...

it.” I was using the same lawyer that I had used with ONElist, who was a family
friend.
Livingston: So you just did a quick shift into a different product.
Fletcher: Yeah.
Livingston: Does that mean that you were the only shareholder?
Fletcher: No, the people that I brought in who weren’t working full-time were
working for stock. I’m very fortunate that I can bring in people who don’t need
money right away to do this; they can just work for essentially deferred compensation.
So you give them some chunk of stock...

Livingston: Did you think that blogs would someday surpass the mainstream
media as the source of information? Did you know how popular they’d
become?
Fletcher: No, not with the speed that it happened. I mean, we were incredibly
lucky in that we latched onto this trend which kind of developed at about the
same time. But there was no planning. It was just me trying to solve my own
problem.
Livingston: Did you have a blog back then?
Fletcher: Yeah, wingedpig.com. I’ve had that for a few years. It’s more of a...

when you were doing this? Was there a social ambition?
Fletcher: No, I’m not nearly that smart. Just friends and news sites that I
wanted to follow on a regular basis. But I was latching onto trends, of course,
which are [that] the number of websites on the Internet is just growing
exponentially over time. So if I had this problem now and I knew that I was a
very early adopter, other people would probably have the problem eventually. It
was just a question of when. I thought I was just way too...