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 something that’s got users
and has momentum, it’s not like you’re going to be doing biz dev deals or anything
like that. Actually, I don’t have the greatest opinion of biz dev people for
these companies because they’re just not needed, I don’t think. You either
stand on your own or fail on your own, initially. If you build momentum, if you
get users, then deals may come your way, but a lot of times most deals don’t
make sense, so you don’t need hardcore MBAs. It’s more focusing on the product
and engineering side.
Livingston: Do you think that the technical founders can tell if the deal doesn’t
make sense? A lot of technical founders might think, “Oh my god, get bought
for $5 million dollars? This is amazing!”
Fletcher: Yeah, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you are two guys in a
garage and if you’ve been doing something for 6 months or a year and somebody
offers you $5 million, it doesn’t sound very dumb to me. You can hire help
for acquisitions, so with the Yahoo acquisition of eGroups, we had a board
member, Mike Moritz, who was also on the board of Yahoo, so he was involved
in that. With Bloglines, Ask was interested in us. We had talked with Google
and Yahoo and some of the others, and things were getting interesting with Ask.
I knew that I needed help negotiating any sort of deal. So at that point I
brought in an investment banker.
Mark Fletcher 241
What an investment banker does—and especially boutique investment
bankers ([who] are guys that deal with smaller deals, up to $100 million)—what
they’ll do is serve as the middleman, essentially creating an auction and [trying]
to drive up any price. They’ll help you negotiate the deal; they’ll do all of that
for you and then just take 2 or 3 percent of the purchase price. I had a pretty
good experience with that with Bloglines.
Livingston: How did you know that the time was right that you should be seriously
considering selling Bloglines?
Fletcher: Because there was a lot of interest and Google was making rumblings

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