Founders at Work.pdf

Mark Fletcher 245
next morning, too, and how dare I not answer every single email? That was
crazy.
I remember my birthday that year. I got a phone call because the phone
number registered in the ONElist domain was the second line in my townhouse,
and there was an answering machine on it. I remember getting woken
up on my birthday that year by some guy saying, “I don’t know if you know this,
but your site is down.” So I logged in, and our whole database machine had
died, in Virginia. We were Digital Nation’s biggest customer and they didn’t
really have much experience with these database machines we were using, so
they were trying to figure out what was wrong. I had to call in sick from work. It
was very stressful. We had scaling issues all summer; we had to turn off new
user registrations for 3 months because we couldn’t handle the influx of people
coming in—which is crazy, you’re not supposed to do that.
Livingston: Would you recommend starting a startup on the side while you are
still employed?
Fletcher: It worked out for me. Sometimes that’s the only way you can do it. It
certainly is one way of mitigating the risk significantly, because if you do it on
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 work full-time on
ONElist?
Fletcher: We got funding. We had signed the term sheet for the $4 million in
our series A, and at that point we were like, “Time to quit.”
Livingston: Was there any time with your startups when you felt like giving up?
Fletcher: Not with Bloglines, but certainly the first year with ONElist. A lot.
Especially with all the emails every night, with working a full-time job, with the
incredible amount of stress. My family was great. I just remember them
encouraging me to stick with it. I probably never would have forgiven myself
had I quit, too. There are always dark times with startups, always. I was in a
startup in San Diego where we didn’t get paid for 3 months. There are different
types of dark times, but for some there is just no more fun than doing a startup.
Livingston: Did you ever experience some sort of malaise like, “This isn’t going
anywhere, I just can’t work on it anymore”?
Fletcher: Yeah. Somebody asked me what was my greatest strength and my
greatest weakness, and I think it’s the same thing. I get easily bored. I think I’m
able to focus on one thing, but I burn out easily. I’m still not good at the whole
work/life balance thing, and with a startup it’s very easy to skew that in only one