Trott: Because we read that LLCs can’t take investments. So we figured, if we
formed an LLC, we couldn’t have stockholders. But then, you can always
change from an LLC to a C corp. It’s a funny kind of stupid thing that we did,
like, “Let’s form a company that can’t take investors,” not realizing that you can
just change the structure of your company. We were looking at the California
incorporation book, and we said, “We have to figure out if we’re going to be a
partnership, a sole proprietary, a C corp.,...

really start from scratch.
If it wasn’t for Barak, I don’t know where we would be now. We knew what
we knew, which was the product. But there were all these little things that you
just have no clue about. It was incredibly overwhelming. But if you think about
it too much, then you don’t do it. You almost have to not know what you’re getting
into to actually do it.
Livingston: Tell me about other things that went wrong.
Trott: Ben and I were still trying to do everything ourselves, and that...

have only installed one web application.
So we wanted to have a service that anybody could use. That’s why we
started developing TypePad. It’s a lot more like WYSIWYG, and you can drag
and drop items into your templates, and you don’t have to know any coding. It’s
a very different product than Movable Type.
Livingston: You have distinct audiences?
Trott: Movable Type and TypePad are kind of the same audience, and then
there’s LiveJournal. Movable Type and TypePad are both about 50/50 gender
split and it skews toward people in their...

money.
Some people say that’s not a good attitude, but it was the attitude that kept
us functioning as a business. That’s some advice for people: don’t apologize for
wanting to be a company. You see so many people who say, “Oh, we won’t
charge; things should be free.” It’s like you don’t think you’re worth being paid
for your time. I feel even more strongly about this when it’s an entire company
rather than just me and Ben. We can be kind of the fools that will work for free,
but I’m...

companies that have entered the market and still haven’t done anything really
to innovate.”
At Six Apart, we’re a little bit behind what our vision is because we’ve been
talking about this stuff that we’re finally getting to start to trickle out and shipping
just now, even though we’ve been working on it for a year or two—like the
Comet stuff we’ve been working on since day one of the founding of the company.
Other than that, there’s the open source software, the free software that
competes with us.
What we want...