need a graphic designer necessarily.
Livingston: Can you remember any moments in ONElist that were harrowing?
Fletcher: Sure. Many times. The first year especially when I was still working
the full-time job at Sun and doing this on the side.
Livingston: You were still working?
Fletcher: Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that? In most aspects of at least my
fiscal life, I’m very conservative. I had a mortgage and didn’t want to take the
leap of faith to do this without a salary, and so I started ONElist while I was still
working full-time at Sun and did that for the first year.
Livingston: Weren’t you worried they would claim they owned the IP?
Fletcher: Yeah, and I talked to a lawyer about that. Because ONElist was not at
all competitive with anything that Sun was doing—and I certainly wasn’t working
on it while I was at Sun—it was thought to be OK. But that is absolutely a
valid concern. But I was, at least in that regard, very much risk-averse, because
I had a mortgage and didn’t have much savings back then. So the first year was
incredibly stressful. The whole thing was stressful, but the first year especially.
For example, it got to be the summertime and we’d take off for the weekend.
I’d come back and have 500 emails to answer for customer support on Sunday
evening. And I’d just curl up into a fetal position . . . and I had to go to work the
next morning, too, and how dare I not answer every single email? That was
crazy.
I remember my birthday that year. I got a phone call because the phone
number registered in the ONElist domain was the second line in my townhouse,
and there was an answering machine on it. I remember getting woken
up on my birthday that year by some guy saying, “I don’t know if you know this,
but your site is down.” So I logged in, and our whole database machine had
died, in Virginia. We were Digital Nation’s biggest customer and they didn’t
really have much experience with these database machines we were using, so
they were trying to figure out what was wrong. I had to call in sick from work. It
was very stressful. We had scaling issues all summer; we had to turn off new
user registrations for 3 months because we couldn’t handle the influx of people
coming in—which is crazy, you’re not supposed to do that.
Livingston: Would you recommend starting a startup on the side while you are
still employed?
Fletcher: It worked out for me. Sometimes that’s the only way you can do it. It
certainly is one way of mitigating the risk significantly, because if you do it on

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