Founders at Work.pdf

C H A P T E R
17
Mark Fletcher
Founder, ONElist, Bloglines
Mark Fletcher was a senior software engineer for
Sun Microsystems when he started ONElist, a free
Internet email list service, in 1997. He ran ONElist
as a side project until he received venture funding a
year later. Yahoo acquired ONElist (later renamed
eGroups) in June 2000.
In 2003, Fletcher created Bloglines, a web-based
news aggregation service. He originally wrote the
program to manage his own bookmark list, but once
he launched it publicly, Bloglines was fast on its way
to becoming the most popular news aggregator on
the Internet. It was acquired by Ask Jeeves in February, 2005.
Fletcher’s startups typify many of the Web 2.0 aspects that we value today:
building inexpensive web-based companies that grow fast. ONElist got to one
million users before it took outside investment, and Bloglines took only
$200,000 of investment before its acquisition.
Livingston: Take me back to how you got started with Bloglines.
Fletcher: I had started ONElist, it became eGroups, we sold it to Yahoo, and
then I left at the acquisition in September of 2000. I decided I needed to take
time off—I hadn’t had a vacation since eighth grade, between work and school.
So I traveled around a lot, got really bored, and realized—I had been around
computers all my life, that is really what I like doing, so why am I depriving
myself of the fun of working on startups?
It really came down to solving a need of mine. I had started another
company—an anti-spam company—called Trustic, and that wasn’t going very
far. But as I was starting that, I was doing this other thing on the side, which
became Bloglines. I had a bookmark list of about 100 sites that I went to every
day just to see if there was new stuff. Things like Slashdot, CNN, my friends’
blogs. It was taking a long time; I figured there had to be a better solution to
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