going to repeat this time”?
Mark Fletcher 237
Fletcher: Well, I didn’t take VC this time; I didn’t have to.
Some of the software design we carried over from ONElist to Bloglines, the
way the website was put together and how we scaled certain things. And certainly
some of the people. Everybody I worked with on Bloglines, I’d worked
with at ONElist before. It felt like ONElist, version two.
Livingston: Can you remember any near disasters from ONElist?
Fletcher: Tons. We were growing so fast with ONElist—a percent-and-a-half a
day for...

sheets, for example. All things considered, I certainly can’t fault the outcome,
but I made mistakes along the way.
The VCs did come in 2 weeks after we took the money and said they wanted
to replace me as CEO, which was interesting. I was pretty wrapped up ego-wise
with the company. When you start a company, it’s your life. So you think you are
the only one that can run it. You think, if you’re not around, it will fall apart—or
at least I did—for all of these things. It was very difficult...

The whole VC process in general has been very closed and oftentimes by
design by the VCs. Because they don’t want to be negotiating against other VCs,
they don’t want terms of the deal to get out, so it’s in their best interest to keep
things secret. But it is very nice that things are starting to open up now, whether
they like it or not.
With VCs, it’s all about power. It’s great that that’s changing. It’s changing
because more people are talking about it because it’s so much cheaper to start
...

the ’90s. Because when you do that, you don’t have to worry about buying
switches, racking the damn machines or moving them when you run out of rack
space. Or going down to the colo at 2 a.m. to reboot something because it
crashed—all that gets taken care of. And these types of startups are never
valued on the cap x, so you don’t get any more money in any sort of acquisition
based on the number of machines you own. Unless you’re Google. So we had
40 or 50 machines at Bloglines when...

range from a hardcore nerd to somebody who has some product knowledge as
well. I like to think I have a little bit of product knowledge, which helps me
develop these websites. A lot of engineers don’t necessarily have that skill set,
but they are better engineers than I am, so for those people, if they were to
partner up with somebody who was a product designer, I think that probably
helps out a lot.
But in terms of MBAs, these user-focused Internet companies aren’t very
complicated business-wise, so until you actually build...