History of Famous Startups. ONElist, Bloglines

the side and

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:07:30 -0700

the side and it doesn’t work out, you still have a job. Of course, you absolutely
have to pay attention to the employment issues. You can’t work on your startup
at work. Depending on your employment contract, they may own stuff that you
do on the side, too. You have to be very cognizant of that.
Livingston: I hadn’t realized that you did it on the side.
Fletcher: By the end of the first year, there were five of us, and we were all
working, just nights and weekends.
Livingston: What was the tipping point to make you resign to…

need a graphic

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:07:30 -0700

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…

Fletcher: Sure. It’s

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:07:30 -0700

Fletcher: Sure. It’s very flattering to have some company come up and start
schmoozing you. It comes down to you have to figure out what you want to do
with your startup and your life. With ONElist, it was very easy—I didn’t even
have to make the decision just to keep going as long as I could, because I knew
I was creating all this value from the users. Otherwise it just comes down to the
intangibles I guess. If you like the people you’re talking to, if you think you’re
getting a decent deal. But what is a decent…

been 2 weeks

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:07:30 -0700

been 2 weeks since we’ve been in the Wall Street Journal. When are we going
to be in again?” And she said, “Don’t you dare expect this kind of stuff forever.”
So you have to figure out when is the right time to sell, what you want out of
an acquisition—both in terms of money and whether you want to stay on.
Would you be happy with somebody else running the company? It’s a very personal
decision. And there are better times to sell than others. If nobody is talking
to you, it’s going to be hard to set up…

that they were

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:07:30 -0700

that they were going to come out with something, Yahoo was making rumblings
that they were coming out with something. I tend to be a lot more paranoid
than I probably need to be. We weren’t growing as fast as I wanted us to,
and it came back again to users are really the only thing that you have with
these types of companies that protects you, that makes you valuable. When
somebody buys you, they buy you for the users and to a lesser degree the buzz.
It depends on the acquisition. So it was a combination of factors…

range from a

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:07:30 -0700

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,...

the ’90s. Because

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:07:30 -0700

the ’90s. Because when you do that, you don’t have to worry about buying
switches, racking the damn machines or moving them when you run out of rack
space. Or going down to the colo at 2 a.m. to reboot something because it
crashed—all that gets taken care of. And these types of startups are never
valued on the cap x, so you don’t get any more money in any sort of acquisition
based on the number of machines you own. Unless you’re Google. So we had
40 or 50 machines at Bloglines when we were acquired, and that didn’t…

The whole VC

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:07:30 -0700

The whole VC process in general has been very closed and oftentimes by
design by the VCs. Because they don’t want to be negotiating against other VCs,
they don’t want terms of the deal to get out, so it’s in their best interest to keep
things secret. But it is very nice that things are starting to open up now, whether
they like it or not.
With VCs, it’s all about power. It’s great that that’s changing. It’s changing
because more people are talking about it because it’s so much cheaper to start
companies these days. At least these kinds…

sheets, for example.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:07:30 -0700

sheets, for example. All things considered, I certainly can’t fault the outcome,
but I made mistakes along the way.
The VCs did come in 2 weeks after we took the money and said they wanted
to replace me as CEO, which was interesting. I was pretty wrapped up ego-wise
with the company. When you start a company, it’s your life. So you think you are
the only one that can run it. You think, if you’re not around, it will fall apart—or
at least I did—for all of these things. It was very difficult for me to separate
myself from…

going to repeat

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:07:30 -0700

going to repeat this time”?
Mark Fletcher 237
Fletcher: Well, I didn’t take VC this time; I didn’t have to.
Some of the software design we carried over from ONElist to Bloglines, the
way the website was put together and how we scaled certain things. And certainly
some of the people. Everybody I worked with on Bloglines, I’d worked
with at ONElist before. It felt like ONElist, version two.
Livingston: Can you remember any near disasters from ONElist?
Fletcher: Tons. We were growing so fast with ONElist—a percent-and-a-half a
day for the first year or two. We had a million…