Husband-and-wife cofounders Mena and Ben Trott started Six Apart (named for the number of days between their birthdays) in their apartment in 2001. Trott's personal blog, Dollarshort, was growing in popularity, and she was dissatisfied with the blogging software available at the time. So she and Ben decided to develop their own and share it with some friends. Movable Type became popular almost immediately on its launch in October 2001. In April 2003, Six Apart received funding from Joi Ito's Neoteny. They launched their hosted service, TypePad, later that fall. In January 2005, the company announced the acquisition of Danga Interactive, the makers of LiveJournal. Six Apart launched Vox (formerly known as Comet), a hosted blogging platform with a social networking component, in 2006. Livingston: Take me back to how things got started. Trott: I started with a blog called Dollarshort in about April of 2001. I did it because I felt that I needed a creative outlet. I just started writing a blog, writing stories. I was still at my job, but I didn't feel incredibly fulfilled. My blog was getting more and more popular, and we were getting more involved in seeing what people were doing. When the company closed and we got laid off, we said, "Let's start working on a blogging tool--just release it as donationware and see where that goes." We didn't expect anything from it. We thought we'd get donations and maybe some stuff off our Amazon Wish List, but we never imagined anything more than that. As we got more and more involved, we became more ambitious, but I don't think we ever would have woken up and said, "Let's start a company." It just never occurred to us that it was even possible. When Ben and I were in college 405 Mena Trott Cofounder, Six Apart 30 CHAPTER (we've been together since we were in high school), we started to think about a web design company, but it always seemed overwhelming. We had no idea where to start. When I look back, it seemed like the hardest thing in the world. Luckily, it was all kind of accidental. When we released Movable Type, it became popular pretty quickly, and it became a full-time job. I think having customers from day one was the thing that really forced us to be a company. If we had been just talking about a product and we had to build up a customer base and figure out how to market it, that would have been incredibly hard. So what we did was just jump in with no desire to do anything more than create something that we love. Later on when we were talking to VCs, they would say, "What problem does this solve?" We weren't giving pitches, it was just conversational, but that's the thing that never occurred to us. We were never trying to solve anyone's problem other than mine or a few bloggers'. But there was a big demand for what we were creating, and Movable Type became really popular. Around July 2002, we were at a fork in the road and we asked ourselves, "Do we want to become consultants and focus on building out customizations of Movable Type and doing implementations?" We went that way for a little bit and then said, "This is not fun." (I still have an invoice that we were never paid and we ended up paying out of pocket.) So we said, "Let's do something even harder. Let's go straight to the consumer." And we started working on TypePad. We formed the LLC in July of 2002, right before we decided to start doing TypePad. We still didn't have funding--it was Ben and I still in the apartment in Richmond. We used the spare bedroom and our desks were literally back to back. We spent a lot of time there, 18 months in total. It's funny when I tell these stories. It seemed like a different world. It's kind of like when people have babies and they say they can't remember how painful it was and they say, "Let's have another baby." I think there's a chemical in my brain that forces me to forget how painful the time was. Livingston: Tell me about some of the painful times, when it was just the two of you sitting in a room. Trott: I think that was painful enough! One of the reasons that I started my blog was that I felt like I didn't really have any friends. When Ben and I were together at college, we never forced ourselves to make friends with other people because we had each other. It was a new thing for us because we had started going out when we were seniors in high school, and then we spent the rest of the time joined at the hip. We always had each other. Plus we got so involved with the Web and doing work that it never occurred to us to make friends. So I wanted my blog to have a connection with people online, all these people that I wanted to be friends with. My blog helped facilitate that. One of the things that was really painful about those times in the apartment was that Ben and I really didn't have any friends, and we really didn't do anything extracurricular. We went to parties occasionally, but it was never fun. So one of 406 Founders at Work the hard things was that we shut ourselves in for so long working on this. It was such a different experience because Ben and I became such a team, everything we did was together. There was probably a 2-year period where we didn't spend more than 6 hours apart. The first time I went on a business trip for the company was the first overnight trip where we were apart longer than 6 hours. It's really good that we now have other people, because you can get really caught up in living with someone and being so part of it. But I think we didn't know any better. We could definitely form a company again, but we couldn't do it that way, because you get drained. Even after we became more of a company and we had employees, it wasn't until about a year ago that we've been able to say, "No, I don't want to talk about work at home." Having an office made a difference. Working out of the home is the hardest thing to do, because you can never leave work. Livingston: You were working on Movable Type. Were you just planning to launch it and see what happened? Trott: We had a lot of excitement before the launch because I announced it on my blog. About 2000 people signed up to be notified when we launched. All these people were like, "Movable Type's coming this week, we're really excited." And we thought, "Oh my God, there's so much pressure." We were looking at each other saying, "Should we do this or not? It could be tethering us to this product forever." We made the decision to do it. Of course, if I knew then all the stuff that would happen to us, certainly I would do it. But the first couple months were pretty hairy. Ben and I sort of have this perfectionism about what we do. We can't do it halfway. So we said that we were going to figure out how to make this something that could sustain itself. But at the same time we knew that we were going to have to get jobs. At least that's what we thought, because it was free--it was just donations. You can't make money off of shareware. But luckily people started donating very quickly, and we were at break-even just about after the second month. And it was break-even pretty much until we got funding. Livingston: How did you get people to donate? Trott: We never actively asked for money because we thought that was obnoxious. We had one page up that said, "We take donations and this is why you should donate." There were two factors why people would donate. One was that they liked the product. The other was that we'd give recently updated keys. When you posted your blog, it would appear on our main site, and if you paid around $20 you'd get a key to do that. So people would say in the email, "Can I have my key? Here's my money." Well, you could kind of think that you are paying for the software, but here's your key. I actually sent those emails out with their keys up until probably January of 2004. It was a really long time. I felt that they were giving money, so I wanted to honor that and thank them. Livingston: So you're taking donations, it's paying the rent and keeping things moving. Did you then try to seek out VC money? Mena Trott 407 Trott: No. We never sought out money. Joi Ito contacted us because he was using the product, and he was interested. He was actually probably more interested in just talking to us about what we were doing. And then he said, "If you're ever interested..." We kind of ignored him because we didn't know what to do. We didn't have any desire to take money. We had heard all these horror stories about people receiving venture money (this is 2001/2002), and even though we didn't think we could have the aspirations to be something huge, we certainly didn't want to crash and burn because we took money when we shouldn't have. And we didn't know anything about it. Are you supposed to pay them back? We didn't understand that investors put money in and they own a part of your company. All we had heard were bad things that happened, and we didn't know why. So Joi contacted us and he was smart because he was also a user of the product. He knew that we wouldn't ignore user questions. He was asking technical questions and he donated, so then we felt really obliged. Then in December of 2002 we finally met him at the Supernova conference. We met him with Barak [Berkowitz], who is now our CEO, and they talked about what we were interested in doing, and we said, "We're working on this hosted service"--it didn't have a name yet--"It's easy and it's this thing that we think we can get a lot of people using." But to us, a lot of people meant that if we had 130 people using it, we'd break even. If we had 3,000 users, we'd be set for life. And we would maintain a service where it was 3,000. Barak said, "That's great for a niche or personal lifestyle business, but we're not interested in investing in that." At that time we thought, "Who is this asshole? Why is he saying that to us?" First, we didn't care--we didn't seek him out. And also we didn't want someone else telling us that our goals weren't ambitious enough. After that lunch, they invited us to go to Japan to talk. We were like, "OK, we get a free vacation." We didn't think that we would take any money. The fact that Barak was challenging whether we could do it made us want to do it more. We also knew that, if they didn't invest in us, they'd invest in somebody else. At the time, Blogger hadn't been bought by Google yet, and we thought, "OK, Blogger will get the money if we don't." (Which was probably true if they hadn't been bought.) And we didn't want that--we wanted a stake in it and didn't want to be a footnote. We always had an ambitious, "we want to win" attitude, but we never had the stakes so high, because it never occurred to us that we could do it. I think that's one of the good things, too: since it never occurred to us that we could do it, it didn't occur to us that we couldn't do it. We just had to put our minds on it. And that has been really key to what we've done. The lack of experience made us think, "Why can't this just be done?" So time flies and we grow the company, and we acquired a couple companies in between. Livingston: How much funding did you take? 408 Founders at Work Trott: Initially it was less than a million dollars--so angel money, really. Livingston: So you now had the money to hire some people and get an office. What were some of the first things you did? Trott: Nothing, that's the funny thing. We treated the money like it was our own. We were so concerned about it. Suddenly we had this money and we couldn't spend it all because, if we spent it all, we'd need more, and then we'd need more and then we'd have zero ownership of our company. That terrified us. As a result, we didn't hire fast enough and we weren't in an office. We had closed in April, but we didn't move into an office until August. We had one employee who was working out of his house in San Jose, one in New York, and our support person was in Minnesota. It was like a remote office and nothing was really changing because we thought, "We can't spend this money." We bought operations stuff for TypePad--servers, etc.--and we had payroll for the first time. Five people on payroll. Five people is a lot more than zero. And Ben and I were never really taking a salary other than what we earned from consulting, which was just kind of recycling itself. We were the complete opposite of the things that typified the Bubble. We saw the Bubble, and we saw people spending too much money on things that didn't matter. Then you have us, who didn't even want to buy a refrigerator for the office because it cost $150. I think that there's a middle road that's a lot better. Livingston: Why did you set yourself up as an LLC instead of a C corporation? 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 looking at the checklist and we saw "can't take money," so we said, "Let's do that one." It's amazing. For anyone who is starting a company, it's so hard. Ben and I were 24, and where are you supposed to learn this stuff? We got the Nolo book on incorporating and we looked online, but it's so hard. We owe a lot to Barak. He became a board member (for Neoteny) after the investment, and he was the best board member because not only did he help us figure out the business strategy, but he also helped us figure out how to get an office, how to get insurance, how to wire our office and do the business stuff. That's one of the reasons we made him CEO--because he was so willing to do everything that we needed and he wasn't an investor who would just give us money and check on us every quarter. He did allow us to make mistakes, however. For example, he let us not ramp up as fast as we could because we had to learn for ourselves that that was not the best idea. Another example was when we went to look at offices. Barak went, because Ben was at home working. We'd look at offices that had like 10 or Mena Trott 409 20 offices, and I said, "If we need an office that big in a year from now, then I don't know what we're doing, because we don't need that many people." He said, "OK. You can make that decision." So we got like a 1,500-square-foot office that we outgrew in 8 months. People asked why we got such a small office, and it was because I thought everything else was too big. I realized that on my own. It was really important; he did it in a good way. Livingston: This is surprising, based on the stories I've heard about investors. Trott: The Neoteny investment was such an anomaly. We were this incredibly early-stage company that had no structure, no employees, no really good accounting, nothing but the LLC. But we had a huge customer base, which I don't think most startups have. We had hundreds of thousands of people using our products, and it had been operated with so few resources. So we had to 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 ourselves to death. Ben and I pretty much were the only people that built the first version of TypePad. We said, "Let's not hire anybody. We did Movable Type on our own. We can do TypePad on our own." And it killed us. The slow pace at which we hired was good for the budget because we were able to operate on that $600,000 for a really long time. But at the same time, it wasn't good that it was at the expense of our health. I made the decision to put Barak in at CEO in November of 2002, but he didn't become CEO until July of 2003. He was kind of acting like CEO in January 2003. He worked without a salary. He got paid eventually, but he worked under just a promise that he'd be made CEO, which was amazing. To work 6 months with just an understanding--he had a lot of faith in us. Livingston: Why did it take so long? Trott: Because we were just so focused on operating the business. He had his employment letter that I had to write and we had to consult a lawyer--it's kind of a big thing to put a CEO in. Because of all the negotiations (that were really minor, actually), it just always got put on the back burner. Livingston: What else went wrong? Trott: Skimping on hardware sometimes. I wouldn't recommend that. We often had to replace the stuff we bought because we had been so worried about costs. But that's not always a bad thing. With LiveJournal, Brad [Fitzpatrick] wrote everything instead of buying things. That worked for him. He did his 410 Founders at Work thing for 6 years. So I think it works, but we had a different scale than LiveJournal, which took a long time to get a large base. Livingston: Why did you build new software for TypePad instead of reusing the code you had for Movable Type? Trott: Movable Type is download software that you install on your own server. It was meant for people who knew their way around installing server software. We realized that more and more people were coming to blogging with less and less experience. That's relative to the people who are coming in now, who probably 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. Livingston: I heard that you planned to transfer the code behind TypePad to Movable Type. Is that true? Trott: No. We always thought that the features of TypePad would go into Movable Type. But as time went by, more people who want to use TypePad have just gone to TypePad, and Movable Type tends to be more of a professional business tool. Even though there are still "prosumers" that are using Movable Type, it's easier to deploy the features that people want on TypePad. It's funny, because Movable Type is a tricky install, but it would be almost impossible for someone to install TypePad because there are so many things that are required with the server setup. It's kind of trying to decide what the best of all the worlds are. That's what we're doing with the Comet stuff that we announced at DEMO. It's kind of the next-generation platform. It's all the features of LiveJournal that are really good--privacy per post, friends aggregation, to be able to read people's posts--with the publishing options of Movable Type and TypePad. So the reason why TypePad didn't become Movable Type is because the audience is differentiated and it didn't make sense to have that on an installable. Livingston: What did people misunderstand about what you were doing? Trott: There was licensing. From October 2001 to May 2004, Movable Type was always free and you had paid options. Commercial was the one level that was never completely free. So if you were using it in a commercial way, you'd have to pay $150. The thing was that we had these huge companies using Movable Type, paying $150 and putting 150 to 200 people on it. We never felt that was right. That's why we had a strict license that basically said that you don't make money off the stuff that we're not making money off of. It wasn't Mena Trott 411 that we didn't want people to make a living off of Movable Type; it's just that, if we weren't making a living, we didn't think that other people should be making 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 for that. With Movable Type, we said, "Why should businesses get this for free? Why should we get taken advantage of?" There were so many people that were setting up hosted services using Movable Type, and they would charge users money. So we set up these limitations with the licensing saying that you can only have x number of blogs and x number of authors. We just wanted to target the people who were making money off the software that way. But we applied it to personal users too much; we said personal users couldn't have this and people freaked out. They went crazy. Our biggest mistake was that it shouldn't have been across the board. When we changed the licensing, people flipped out. They were like, "These are the people that screwed you. We supported you for all these years." It was really hard for us because we had always been the darlings in the industry. We never tried to be that, but people just thought we did no wrong. And we didn't do any wrong. I don't think we did wrong with that, but, as soon as you charge for something, it changes people's impression. So we suddenly became evil because we wanted to make some money from our product. It's unfortunate because it's kind of the mindset that people have on the Internet--that things shouldn't cost money. But you have to pay people and pay the rent. It's really complicated, and I think that most people who aren't in our situation can't really pass accurate judgment. I remember when Ev [Williams] sold Blogger to Google, and people were like, "Ev sold out!" We thought, "OK, he started a business and he sold his business." You shouldn't be ashamed of wanting to be a successful business. Of course, you shouldn't do things that are unethical, and we have never done anything unethical. Livingston: What competitors did you worry about most? Trott: We never really obsessed about it. We were always worried about Blogger. I think we always knew that Yahoo or Microsoft would enter the space, and they did. When AOL Journals came out, I thought, "There were these big 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. 412 Founders at Work What we want to do is get tons of people blogging--hundreds of millions of people blogging--and there's room to have more than one software doing that. I don't think people realize that. They see it as an all-or-none game. I think it's really important to realize that you are building a market, and you have to build for the most number of people and not be so worried about counting. It's not as much a numbers game as much as innovation. Livingston: Was there ever a time when you wanted to quit? Trott: Yeah, it was really the pre-launch of TypePad. That was the hardest time because Ben was doing more of the operations stuff. I remember I was in the shower, and I just lost it. I was crying and I was like, "This is never going to end. I can't do this anymore." I don't know why I broke down in the shower, but I remember it because we were at our old apartment. I remember looking at the tiles, and I just could not imagine how we could get out of it. It's really hard to think about it because it was a really hard time. I've never blogged about it. Maybe I should, because people don't understand how hard it was. Livingston: Was it the pressure? Trott: It was the pressure. Paying customers. I think it was actually after TypePad had launched because we had paying customers. It just didn't seem like there was any light at the end of the tunnel. But it's like when you look back at your teenage years and you think about how horrible they were, but then you realize that they weren't that bad. What, you didn't go to a dance? That's the worst thing in your life? It's like, "Well, it wasn't that bad," but it always seems worse when you're in the midst of it. When we went to Japan for that trip, we said that if nothing ever came out of this company other than this trip to Japan, we've accomplished a lot. We never thought we'd go to Japan, let alone on somebody else's dime. What we have to realize is that we've had so many good opportunities and we've learned so much that, if everything failed tomorrow, we would still have gotten so much 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? No, I wouldn't have, because I didn't. But we came pretty close. I think it was even harder because of the marriage. It's hard to be so stressed out and not have any outlet that's not work. But at the same time, Ben knew what I was going through more than anybody else could in the world, and so I didn't have to tell him how I was feeling because he knew what was bothering me. Livingston: Did you ever argue at work? Mena Trott 413 Trott: It's not like that anymore, but when we fought, we fought out in the open. That's one thing that people told me I had to stop. If I'm freaking out about something, I freak out on the one person I think I can. I mean, I can't yell at Barak necessarily, so I'll yell at the person that I'm married to because it's easier to do that. Whenever we got into really big fights, it was always about something not working right. And it was me. If something breaks, usually it's going to be engineering. It's not going to be design, because design is something that doesn't break. It may not work the way people want it to, but it's not going to be noticeable. So I would freak out and say to Ben, "This is down! Don't you know it's down? Don't you care about the company?" But yelling at Ben isn't going to fix it. That's something I realized. But it's back to that pregnancy thing; I've blocked out the really bad fights. Livingston: Why do you think there aren't more female startup founders? Trott: This is the part that I always end up regretting because I set the gender back. I think one of the reasons happens to be that women aren't always necessarily that motivated to prove themselves in the way that men are. It's not saying that they don't have ambition; it's saying that there's something in our makeup that makes us be confident more in what we are and what we've accomplished independently without having to say, "I'm a founder, I'm an entrepreneur." When I was in school, I was always a class clown. And if I think about the 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 to where we are now, it's my competitiveness with Ben. When we were in high school, I was practically failing out of my classes. I hated school. It wasn't that I wasn't smart, but I just didn't care about math and science. My English and history grades were great, but everything else was horrible. And then I started going out with Ben and he was valedictorian. I went from a D average to hanging out with the valedictorian, and I thought, "I don't want to be considered the stupid one of us," so I brought my grade point average up in the quarter from a D to a B+. In college, we were always competitive in every class we took. I'd get pissed off because he was a math major and I was an English major and he decided to minor in English and then he'd come into my classes and there were a few where he'd do better than me. I'd say, "Stay in your own field!" But the thing was with the business, too, I wanted to be successful and he wanted to be successful at the same time, and so we've been competing because we have to be better than each other. Livingston: Any other reasons why there aren't more female founders? 414 Founders at Work Trott: People do ask me that all the time, and I have to step back and try to figure out why it is. I'm at a weird age group where I haven't been in the industry for a long time and I haven't seen it first hand, but then it's like, "It can't be a problem because I'm here." If I'm forced to think about women who are in this field, I can't usually. But I know there are. Many women are in marketing or design. I think marketing and design are a lot harder to learn than engineering. That's my opinion. People put value judgments on engineering like, "There are more men; therefore, it must be a smarter field that women should get into." I don't think that's the case at all. I say, look at women, they're strong designers and strong at marketing and communication. That's a harder skill to acquire in life. Being able to write and being able to figure out what people want in their product, how to sell it 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 I should know everyone's name, but it's hard. The good part of it is that I don't have to interview everybody. It's not like a small company where, if I don't interview this person, then they can't get a job. So I'm very happy. We still have our staff meetings every Friday where everybody comes in, and we talk and introduce people. So we're still a small company in that sense. It's surprising that we're still doing it after 4 years and that I actually like this job. I never liked any of the jobs that I had (even though I only had two). This is something that I enjoy doing. I love work. Last night I thought about it because we just sat around all weekend watching TV, and for a little while I was like, "I don't want to go to work tomorrow because I want to finish watching Lost" but then I thought, "I like work and I like coming in and talking to people." I'll be sad the day that the company doesn't exist in some form, but maybe that will be longer. With Amazon, it's been 10 years. Livingston: Is there anything that your colleagues would describe as a Mena-ism? Trott: There's the whole joke about me being self-absorbed. I believe I am, but in a way that I'm very self-aware about, and it's one of the ways that I make fun of myself. So I say, "I can't be that self-absorbed because I'm most critical of myself." The running joke at the company is that I'm self-indulgent, but that's me. I'd say that the worst part of me is all out there, so if you see me and I'm being snappish or egotistical, that's the worst it gets. It doesn't get much deeper in terms of my bad things. I think less people know my good parts than my bad. Mena Trott 415 Livingston: What's your best quality? Trott: Can you even say what your best quality is without sounding... I guess I'm not humble. I really care about people. I think that's one of the reasons I tend to be flippant at work or critical of people and make fun of them in a joking way. It's that I care about everybody. And I don't want to be that sensitive 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 is a really important thing, and I'm happier. I can actually say I'm happier, which I think the people who get famous can't say. I'm not famous in the sense that anybody outside of weblogging will know who I am, but I'm still famous to the point where I don't feel comfortable just writing about anything online anymore, because people will dissect it. That's hard. But it's been good, too, because I think we've gotten closer to what people really want. You can't have someone leading a company who is so concerned about the whole world knowing what they're doing and caring about being famous, because that's not how most people are. It's been better that I've become more inward, because I think that that's how people function. If I cared most about getting the most number of readers for my blog, that's not going to scale, because most people aren't that way. I went from that in 2002--that was probably the height of the popularity of my blog--to where I am now, and it's just like, "I like my LiveJournal because 20 people read it." And figuring out how to make that experience better is really important. Livingston: How do you handle people who criticize you? Trott: There are a lot of people, especially competition, who really criticize the company for no reason. They personally attack us. They say we're stupid. It's really mean. That stuff bothers me. Not as much anymore, because you have to realize that people don't do this sort of stuff unless they're really... It's like when your mom tells you that the reason a girl is picking on you in school is probably because she's depressed. You have to understand they're coming from a place where they feel like they have to do it. We've never done things like that. Sometimes I wish these people would get told off. But we're successful and that's one of the reasons why we get picked on. You don't pick on the underdog. But it's hard, and that's why I'd recommend doing something like the LiveJournal for some friends that know you in real life, because it's not fun to 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. 416 Founders at Work 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 got all these emails saying, "You should leave your husband," and "How much does he spend on beer in a year?" All these things that were such judgments. And it's like, (1) you didn't get my joke (it's really hard to translate humor on the Web), and (2) shut up, don't talk about my husband that way. That was the peak of my wanting to talk about everything. Or wanting to talk to a lot of people. Mena Trott 417 Lycos was started in 19