History of Famous Startups. Six Apart

be torn apart

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:37:48 -0700

be torn apart or written about. I got a lot of that and that’s kind of why I stopped
blogging—because people were critical of me.
There was one post where I made a joke about wanting a banjo, and it was
like, “Ben, he’s such a tyrant, he won’t let me have a banjo.” I don’t have any
instruments, and why should I buy a $300 banjo?
He was right, but I was trying to make him seem like this villain. The point
of the joke was, “Boy, she’s really stupid about wanting something and he’s
being reasonable.” And I…

person, so if

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:37:48 -0700

person, so if I have a choice of complimenting a person or making a joke, I’ll
make a joke. I’m like that dad that won’t hug. It’s really pathetic.
Livingston: How did it feel to get famous so quickly?
Trott: It’s weird because—and I’m not comparing myself to a celebrity—when
people want to be celebrities or actors and they say that “this is the thing I want
most,” then they get to that point and they realize, “I feel the same way.” I feel
the same way that I really did 4 years ago. I have more confidence now, which…

to them.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:37:48 -0700

to them.
There aren’t that many women in technology and maybe it doesn’t really
matter. I mean, why aren’t there more men in design?
Livingston: Looking back in your whole experience, what would you say is the
most surprising thing?
Trott: There’s the whole, “I can’t believe we have a company that has 100 people.”
The surprising thing is that there’s going to be someone here now that I don’t
know personally. It’s not just to a point where I’m not good friends with them,
like other employees; it’s like, “I don’t know this person’s name.” I feel badly,
and…

other people in

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other people in my class who were class clowns, they weren’t girls. It was me
and a bunch of boys. I think there’s that same sort of personality that makes you
want to do something like start a company, and you can’t do something like that
without wanting to be exposed.
I’ve kind of retreated a bit. I want to be exposed less now. But I’m more
confident in what I’ve done. I’ve always identified more with guys at school and
I’ve always been competitive with them. If you try to figure out the single thing
that made us get…

out of it.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:37:48 -0700

out of it.
I think it’s really important that you have a realization of what’s important.
You can’t stress over things that you can’t necessarily control. Even though we
can control the success of the company to a certain extent, you have to be grateful
for what you’ve got. We were able to buy a house. We never thought we’d be
able to buy a house. That’s a huge thing.
Four years ago, I never thought we’d have the stuff we have now—not
material, but a company and a house and have friends and be respected. Would
I have quit?...

companies that have

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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 to do is get tons of people blogging—hundreds…

money.

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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 not going to make other people suffer…

have only installed

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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 30s. With LiveJournal, 70 percent are
under-21 females....

really start from

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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 was
incredibly stupid because we just wore…

Trott: Because we

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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., or an LLC.” And we were…