Livingston: Did you...
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
marketing thing for myself than anything.
Livingston: You weren’t trying to say, “Blogs are going to take over—let’s get
into that”?
Fletcher: I wish I could say I was that smart, but no. I was just some idiot who
had a bookmark list 100 sites long and it was taking too much time to go
through. I was addicted to reading these things. That’s all.
Livingston: What were some of the other big moments in Bloglines’s life?
Fletcher: We were around for a year and a half before we were acquired, so it
wasn’t very long. Because I was funding it myself, there was no big funding
event that would be a milestone. It was kind of a gradual buildup throughout
the entire time in terms of interest from the press, interest from venture capitalists,
interest from companies. So it got to the point where all the big companies
were talking to us. But that’s fairly typical of a lot of startups.
Livingston: Did you ever contemplate taking VC money?
Fletcher: I’d done that with ONElist, and I wanted to do it differently this
time. It was kind of, “Let’s see what I can do.” Because I fully believed in the
thesis of “these companies can be really cheap to run if you do it with even just
a little bit of intelligence.”
I took money with ONElist because at that point we were growing so
quickly that we were running out of money, and I couldn’t fund it myself any
longer. ONElist got to be the 150-person company. But you don’t have to do
that these days.
Livingston: When you were developing Bloglines, were you following a
purposeful plan or were you just like, “Let’s build this product and see what
happens.”
Fletcher: My philosophy on these types of companies—consumer-based
Internet companies—is that you don’t need to worry about the business model
initially. If you get users, then everything else follows. Basically any technology
can be copied, any concept can be copied. In my opinion, what makes one of
these companies valuable is the users. That can’t be copied.
Livingston: Did you think about the idea of “democratization” of the media
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