Wingedpig.com - Mark Fletcher's Blog

I talk about how I launched the site in the (woefully incomplete and unmaintained) ONElist files:

I wanted to start things slowly, so I decided to try to get one person to start a list. I'd be able to shake out any remaining bugs and get feedback. So I did a search of USENET looking for people who wanted to start mailing lists but didn't know how. I found one person, who happened to be in Norway, and spammed him about the service. Then I went to bed. Little did I know that this would be the last night of (non-alcohol induced) restful sleep for the next couple of years.

The next morning, I was hoping that there'd be one new list created. Or at least I hoped the guy from Norway didn't complain about me spamming him. Instead, to my surprise, there were about 20 lists created. The guy from Norway had created his list and then told all his friends about it. And that's how it grew. You create a list and of course you want subscribers. So you tell your friends. It snowballs. Viral marketing, the VCs call it.

So what was the first list? Discourse about Shakespearean influence in modern playwrights? Talk about rising tensions in the Middle East? In depth political discussion about globalization and free trade? No, no, no. It was about lizards. Not just any kind of lizard, but Anole lizards. From a guy in Norway. It's still there, even: Discussion list for all Anole species. And most of the other new lists were lizard lists. I suddenly had visions in my head about our first press release. "Leaping lists of lizards!," it would shout. Herpetologists rejoice!

From that, there was little stopping it. I occasionally posted announcements to USENET groups about ONElist, but the growth really came from word of mouth. In hindsight, I guess it's obvious that mailing lists are viral. But at the time, I had no idea. I just wanted to create a service that made finding and managing mailing lists easier.

I have a tendency to get caught up in things and not fully appreciate what's going on in my life at a given moment, whether it's a relationship, a vacation, or, in this case, a life-changing startup experience. It all went so fast. But I am extremely fortunate that I remain friends with many of the people I worked with during that time.

ONElist was an amazing 3 years of my life. To this day, I still occasionally hear stories about how one or another of the mailing lists has changed someone's life. As an engineer, it's incredibly gratifying to have been involved in the creation of something that so many people use on a daily basis. And to think, when I started it, I had no idea if anyone would use it.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Recently I answered a posted issue on the Techdirt Insight Community service. As I blogged previously, the Insight Community system is a way for companies to ask questions and gain insight from a group of experts. I'm an investor and board member of Techdirt.

After registering for the service, I started receiving issue notifications. When one came up asking about designing a mobile RSS strategy, I jumped. Given my background with Bloglines, I had a definite point of view and very relevant experience in the area. I wrote up my thoughts and submitted my response. A couple weeks later, I was notified that my response had been accepted and that I would receive $500 for my work.

This is a great use of the Internet. The company was able to quickly get detailed, expert responses to a question it had. I was able to utilize my experience in a field and get paid doing so, from the comfort of my home.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 08:04 AM | Permalink

Congrats to Marc and Jason and the rest of the gang. They announced today that Wesabe has raised $4M in a Series A round, led by Union Square Ventures. I was privileged to be able to participate in the seed round, and it's been fun watching them grow so far.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 05:22 PM | Permalink

It turns out that the rumors are true, Google has acquired Feedburner. Sounds like a great outcome for all involved. Congrats to the guys at Feedburner, they worked hard and created a great company. They're good people.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 01:26 PM | Permalink

Techdirt, a company I'm an investor in and board member of, today launched a new version of their web site and more importantly, launched the public beta of the Techdirt Insight Community. From the announcement:

The Techdirt Insight Community is a network of expert bloggers, who we've brought together to collaboratively help companies get the insight and analysis they need in order to make important decisions. Over the last few months, we've grown the network of expert bloggers in the program, while having them work on all sorts of interesting challenges and issues raised by our corporate customers -- from designing a strategy for developing a mobile application to understanding the potential for Google to enter the CRM space to understanding how the enterprise software world is changing. Today we move the Techdirt Insight Community into public beta, and open it up to a much wider audience.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 10:33 PM | Permalink

Marc Hedlund has a great post up talking about how many Internet startups are just rehashes of old UNIX commands. Marc's absolutely right; in fact he's just given away my secret to success! Damn you Marc Hedlund, damn you to hell! :)

Ahem. Anyways, ONElist was LISTSERV reincarnated, and Bloglines was rn re-imagined. And while Marc was kind enough to point to my latest venture, Startupping, he doesn't draw the obvious parallel with that service. As a web forum/wiki/blog site dedicated to Internet entrepreneurs, Startupping is, like numerous other web forums, the modern day equivalent of a BBS. Which means that I've come full circle in my computing career.

From the first day I played with a computer, I knew it was my future. Back in 1982, when I was in seventh grade, my parents bought me an original IBM PC. My friend down the street had had an Apple IIe for about six months before that, and I had taken some summer school classes to learn BASIC programming. But when I got my PC, it was over. I spent countless hours every day on that machine, through junior High and High School, coding up all sorts of BASIC programs and games. Soon after they got me the PC, they got me a modem, a Racal Vadic 1200 Baud modem (it could only talk to other, non-Racal Vadic modems at 300 Baud, however). It was this massive, flattened brick. With that, the new world of computer bulletin boards opened up to me, and I was hooked. My parents were never pleased with the phone bills I'd ring up calling boards in Walnut Creek and other, non-local places. But, like any addict, I couldn't help myself.

Soon after, I decided it'd be even more fun to run a BBS. So, I wrote one, in BASIC (I think I later compiled it using Microsoft's first BASIC compiler for the PC). I don't remember the name of the BBS, and I can't find any traces of it at the excellent TextFiles site. The heart of the BBS was the message board. The other aspect of the BBS was the chat with the SYSOP feature. I didn't have a hard drive, so I didn't really have any space to store downloads. I watched and tweaked that board all the time, trying to build my own little community. I didn't run the board for very long, so it didn't become very popular. But it was great training for my later, community-based efforts. (For years after I stopped running the board, the phone line I had used would get calls at random times from computers.)

So now, 24 years later, I find myself running a BBS again. I've gone full circle. But at least now I don't get woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of a modem screech.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today, Wesabe announced the closing of their first round of financing. I'm one of the investors, along with O'Reilly's AlphaTech Ventures, who was the lead. Wesabe, after launching only a few months ago, is currently tracking $300M in transactions, over 135,000 merchants in the system, and has over 1M tags applied to those merchants. Marc and Jason are great guys, and I really like the team and culture they've built. I believe that Wesabe fills an important roll in financial planning, something that has been unmet until now. If you haven't checked out Wesabe, I urge you to do so.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This Google stock registration statement is being talked about today. It lists many (all?) of the YouTube stock holders and how many shares of resulting Google stock they wish to register. There's a total of 4,204,215 shares listed, and the 3 YouTube founders are registering a combined 1,525,617 shares, or 36% of the total. This roughly matches what has been reported in the past as their percentage of the company, which was founded almost exactly 2 years ago.

Typically, when a startup first raises venture capital, the founders agree to subject part of their stock to a repurchase agreement. The amount of stock that can be repurchased by the company decreases over a period of time (3 to 5 years, typically). This means that if a founder were to leave after a couple months, they'd end up losing some chunk of their stock in the company. Investors do this as one way of protecting their investment.

What I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is whether the YouTube founders (at least the two still working at YouTube/Google) were subject to such an agreement, and if so, did it carry over after the acquisition by Google. My guess is that the answer is yes to both statements. Assuming a 4 year vest, they would only be able to sell about half their holdings right now. Which of course is not bad, any way you look at it. But budding entrepreneurs should keep in mind that when you hear about these exits, what's not often mentioned are the continuing lockups, and the resulting risks (what if Google's stock fell to $10/share before they had a chance to sell any more stock, for example?).

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I just received from Amazon a copy of Founders at Work, a collection of interviews with entrepreneurs. It's by Jessica Livingston, one of the Y Combinator folks.

Here's the list of interviewees, which includes myself. In the interview, I talk about the early days of both ONElist, which became Yahoo Groups, and Bloglines. I haven't had a chance to read the book yet (hey, I just got it a couple hours ago!), but I've got to believe that this is a great resource for people interested in starting their own Internet companies. And if nothing else, it's got a picture of me with a shaved head in it.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 08:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Today, Techdirt announced the closing of an angel round of funding. I led the round and will be joining their board of directors. The money will go towards building out and promoting their new Insight Community system, which I wrote about here. They've had an amazing response since announcing the Insight Community service; if you're a blogger I suggest you check it out.

I originally met Mike Masnick, Techdirt's CEO in 2003. He was one of the first users of Bloglines and had several great suggestions for improving the service. Since then, I've watched Techdirt continue to grow, in terms of readership, reputation, and actual paying customers of their Corporate Intelligence service. When Mike told me they were thinking of raising money to build out and promote their new Insight Community service, I immediately asked if I could participate. The combination of an innovative new web service along with the excellent team that Mike has assembled made the decision a no-brainer.

As many of you know, I worked at several startups before taking the plunge and starting two of my own companies: ONElist, which was sold to Yahoo in 2000 and is now Yahoo Groups, and Bloglines, which I sold to Ask Jeeves in 2005. Since that time I have been focusing more of my time and energies on helping other entrepreneurs. A year ago I became an angel investor in One True Media and joined their board of directors (the company recently raised a round from Kleiner Perkins) and I am now doing the same with Techdirt -- angel investing and becoming a board member. I love the energy surrounding startups and feel fortunate to be able to lend perspective based on my experience starting and growing web service companies and I hope to do more of the same in the future.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 11:06 AM | Permalink

My friend Marc Hedlund's startup Wesabe launched today. It's a web-based social light-weight financial management system. I had a chance to preview it before they launched, and I was very impressed with everything they've done. They've really thought through things, including having a very funny panic button for when things become overwhelming (it's pictures of kittens, for those who don't have an account). Marc's a great guy and I hope Wesabe is a huge success.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My friends at Techdirt today announced the Techdirt Insight Community. The idea is to create a marketplace and enabling technology for companies to consult with bloggers. I think it's a great idea that has the potential to disrupt several markets (Gartner, I'm looking at you). And hey, it's a (non-advertising based) way for bloggers to get paid.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today, One True Media announced that they've raised $5MM from top-tier venture firm Kleiner Perkins. In addition, Randy Komisar will be joining the board. I became an investor and board member of OTM last year; as part of this funding I will be moving from the board of directors to the advisory board. This funding is a great next step for OTM and I couldn't be happier for Mark, John and the rest of the team!

For a good overview of OTM, see this article on TechCrunch.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 07:50 AM | Permalink

Tonight, my friends at Plaxo announced the acquisition of HipCal, an on-line calendar. I think this makes a huge amount of sense for Plaxo and it's great to see them continue to do well. While I'm very flattered that I'm quoted in the blog post, I do feel the need to correct one error. The quote should be:

"Whenever you have more than zero funded companies in the calendar space, you know you are in the bubble."

A simple off-by-one error, nothing more. :-)

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 11:40 PM | Permalink

Last Thursday, I attended the final dinner for Y! Combinator's Winter Founders Program. When I first heard about Y! Combinator, it was one of those ideas that just seemed forehead-slappingly obvious. Good ideas often do, in retrospect. Anyways, I had a chance to talk with several of the entrepreneurs, and every one was smart and full of energy. Talk about a great atmosphere. I'd like to thank Paul, Jessica and Trevor for the invite; I had a great time.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 03:13 PM | Permalink

Echoing many of the things I've been saying, Joe Kraus has a great piece on how cheap it is to start a web company. I can provide a couple of additional data points. I started ONElist with $5K. That lasted from January 1998 to June 1998 (it was cheap even back then to launch a start-up). I then raised $50K from a friend and that carried us through the rest of 1998, at which point we had 1M users and raised VC. I started Bloglines with $50K. That lasted the first year.

You don't pay salaries at these levels of funding. Everyone works for stock. The main costs end up being hardware and hosting (and possibly development if you outsource some stuff to eLance or another service). I took different approaches to hardware with ONElist and Bloglines. WIth ONElist, I rented machines from Digital Nation. With Bloglines, I purchased the machines and hosted them at a local co-lo. The advantages of renting machines are that you have a lower up front cost and you don't need as much sysadmin experience, because they will handle a bunch of the work for you. The advantages of purchasing are that it's cheaper in the long term and you're not limited in your hardware selection. Now that I have experience with both approaches, in general I'd probably go with renting. Renting saves a lot of effort (configuring and racking machines is work), and costs less in the beginning. This lets you get your start-up out the door more quickly and cheaply. And that's a good thing.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 08:07 AM | Permalink

Stealth mode is when a company is operating in secret for some length of time before launching their product or service. In many industries, creating a new product or service takes significant time and effort. During this time, being in stealth mode may make a lot of sense. But creating a new web service is not rocket science and does not take a lot of time or money. My rule of thumb is that it should take no more than 3 months to go from conception to launch of a new web service. And that's being generous. I'm speaking from experience here. I developed the first version of ONElist over a period of 3 months, and that was while working a full-time job. I developed the first version of Bloglines in 3 months. By myself. It can be done. And I suck at it! Just ask all the engineers who have had to deal with my code.

Why go fast? Many reasons:

• First mover advantage is important.
• There is no such thing as a unique idea. I guarantee that someone else has already thought of your wonderful web service, and is probably way ahead of you. Get over yourself.
• It forces you to focus on the key functionality of the site.
• Being perfect at launch is an impossible (and unnecessary and even probably detrimental) goal, so don't bother trying to achieve it. Ship early, ship often.
• The sooner you get something out there, the sooner you'll start getting feedback from users.

Some people think that they need to stay in stealth mode as long as possible to protect their exciting new idea. I hate to break the news to you, but unless you're Einstein or Gallileo, your idea probably isn't new. I have this theory. The success of a web service is inversely proportional to the secrecy that surrounded its development. There are exceptions of course. But I also think this can be applied to other things. Segway, anyone?

Web services have many advantages over shipping software. You can continuously update the service, fix bugs and add new features. There are no long development cycles. Embracing this is a key to success. The first version (or several versions, probably) of any service you create is most likely going to suck. And that's ok. Your service won't scale to handle a lot of traffic. It will be missing a huge amount of functionality. It'll probably look bad. And it'll have bugs. All of this was true for both ONElist and Bloglines, but they both ended up reasonably ok. Because you can continuously update the service, you can deal with these issues.

One of the many great things about running a web service are the users. A passionate user is one of your greatest assets. And I would argue that the only thing of real value a web service has is its users. They act as advertising for you, telling all their friends about your service. They are the best source of new feature ideas. And they are the best Q.A. testers you can get. Most importantly, they're the gauge that tells you whether your service is actually useful or not (ie. is it worth losing years of your life continuing to develop and run it). By getting your service launched as quickly as possible, you'll get exposure to this wonderful resource sooner. By listening to your users as you add features and improve the service (because, remember, it won't be perfect at launch), your users feel like they are a part of the process. They start to have a sense of ownership of the service. Which reinforces their passion. And with the constant updates and fixes to your service, you're continually giving your users reasons to talk about you. Users are the one thing that your competition cannot copy and develop internally. Technology can be copied. Users have to be earned. One thing to remember, however, is that you need to be responsive to customer support, because that's one of the key ways to cultivate passionate users.

I'll end this rant now. I don't mean to single out 24 Hour Laundry, they're probably nice people. But they were the ones that reminded me of this. I could also rant on how you only need a couple of people to create a web service and that starting one doesn't require a lot of money (and oftentimes raising a lot of money actually screws things up). But I'll save those for another day.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 06:56 AM | Permalink

I haven't posted in awhile because I've been busy. Busy is good. As we continue to build out the team at Bloglines, I was reminded of something that first occured to me during ONElist's early days about starting a company.

As an employee climbing the corporate ladder at a company, it's all about getting more. More responsibility, more control, a larger salary, a bigger title. However, the exact opposite is true when you start a company. A big part of starting and building a company is about giving up. A founder is in a weird position. When you first start a company, everything is yours. You own all the stock, you make all the decisions. This point of creation is the only time this will be the case, however. Forever after, the founder must give up more and more control to other people and more and more ownership to employees, investors, etc. The founder must do this for the company to be successful, but at the same time this is the opposite of what many people are used to doing.

Anyways, it's just one more thing to consider when deciding whether to start a company. I've found that hiring and working with exceptional people and wanting to see them succeed makes the process much easier. Besides, running a company can be a lot of work, especially for us lazy folks. We need all the help we can get!

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 11:41 PM | Permalink