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...

this solve?” We weren’t giving pitches, it was just conversational, but that’s the
thing that never occurred to us. We were never trying to solve anyone’s problem
other than mine or a few bloggers’.
But there was a big demand for what we were creating, and Movable Type
became really popular. Around July 2002, we were at a fork in the road and we
asked ourselves, “Do we want to become consultants and focus on building out
customizations of Movable Type and doing implementations?” We went that
way for a little bit and...

we did was together. There was probably a 2-year period where we didn’t spend
more than 6 hours apart. The first time I went on a business trip for the company
was the first overnight trip where we were apart longer than 6 hours.
It’s really good that we now have other people, because you can get really
caught up in living with someone and being so part of it. But I think we didn’t
know any better. We could definitely form a company again, but we couldn’t do
it that way, because you...

“Can I have my key? Here’s my money.” Well, you could kind of think that you
are paying for the software, but here’s your key. I actually sent those emails out
with their keys up until probably January of 2004. It was a really long time. I felt
that they were giving money, so I wanted to honor that and thank them.
Livingston: So you’re taking donations, it’s paying the rent and keeping things
moving. Did you then try to seek out VC money?
Mena Trott 407
Trott: No. We never sought out...

that Barak was challenging whether we could do it made us want to do it more.
We also knew that, if they didn’t invest in us, they’d invest in somebody else. At
the time, Blogger hadn’t been bought by Google yet, and we thought, “OK,
Blogger will get the money if we don’t.” (Which was probably true if they hadn’t
been bought.) And we didn’t want that—we wanted a stake in it and didn’t want
to be a footnote.
We always had an ambitious, “we want to win” attitude, but we never had
...