
Few successful entrepreneurs blog - asanwal
https://twitter.com/rabois/status/397075060499812352
======
jpeg_hero
I'm a CEO of a co that's doing well.

This comment resonated with me.

Started blogging a few yrs ago, then dropped it.

1) ain't nobody have time for that.

2) too fraught in general. Supposed to be face of company so can't really say
anything interesting in a blog.

3) and that Dalton kid posting the millionth "MBA and startups" article: who
gives a fuck, what's the use, hire good people that fit... Don't engage in
navel gazing analysis.

~~~
elwell
ain't nobody _got_ time for that

------
tikhonj
Few people blog, full stop. Is the proportion smaller among successful
entrepreneurs?

There are a few companies and people that stand out immediately: 37signals,
Joel Spolsky, Jeff Attwood, Priceonomics and probably a bunch more that I just
don't pay attention to.

The last three really come to mind because blogging is pretty important to
their companies. A large reason that StackOverflow had a strong audience from
day one is that both Spolsky and Attwood had good followings on their blogs.

~~~
netcan
Not sure if this is an example or counterexamle. Both stopped or slowed on the
blogging as Stackoverflow got big/mature.

------
pg
Keith's comment surprised me. I found at least one counterexample among
companies we've funded: Jason Freedman of 42Floors. But there are certainly
not many.

~~~
amplification
If the challenge is to "think of successful entrepreneurs or CEOs who blog", I
can think of a bunch off the top of my head:

Leo W. at Buffer -
[http://blog.bufferapp.com/author/leo](http://blog.bufferapp.com/author/leo)

Ryan Carson at Treehouse - [http://ryancarson.com/](http://ryancarson.com/)

Jason Fried & DHH - [http://37signals.com/svn](http://37signals.com/svn)

Matt Mullenweg - [http://ma.tt/](http://ma.tt/)

Patio11 - [http://www.kalzumeus.com/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/)

~~~
selmnoo
Sridhar Vembu of Zoho -
[http://blogs.zoho.com/author/sridhar](http://blogs.zoho.com/author/sridhar)

Craig Newmark - [http://craigconnects.org/blog](http://craigconnects.org/blog)

Mark Cuban - [http://blogmaverick.com](http://blogmaverick.com)

Tim O'Reilly - [http://radar.oreilly.com/tim](http://radar.oreilly.com/tim)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure evidence to the contrary is stronger. A little googling
tells me C-levels and founders of forbes 100 are often proflic bloggers.
Novell, Cisco, Oracle, a _lot_ of founders of big companies in India, and many
here in the non-tech sector blog as well.

Insofar as commenting on HN and other similar sites is quite similar to
blogging, there's a lot of others here too.

~~~
declan
Craig and Mark are owners of companies or sports franchises (or own large
amounts of equity in them), but are not CEOs. I'm not aware of the CEO of
Craigslist, Jim Buckmaster, blogging. Nor am I aware of 2929 Entertainment's
CEO, Todd Wagner (co-owned by Mark), blogging.

Also on some of the other folks listed in sibling comments, like Richard
Branson, I'd be very surprised if he were the one posting on the Virgin "blog"
under his name. Just as executives and politicians have speechwriters, they
also have exec comm and marketing staff to write blog posts.

------
monkeyspaw
Coding Horror?

The whole exchange seems to be @rabois saying "no, that's not a startup. No,
that's not what I meant by CEO. No, he doesn't count."

What's his point in making this statement, except to attract attention?

~~~
enra
Some people really like writing, or blogging, so they do it anyway, whether is
useful or not.

I think the point Keith is making that successful people don't have time to
blog, or the blog really doesn't help that much. They prioritize their time to
do things that actually matter for their business, rather than being on top of
HN or being tweeted 1000 times.

It's not the whole truth. When you have actually "made it", had some
successes, you don't need the promotion or visibility that much, but when
you're just starting out, basically anything might help.

~~~
vdaniuk
Being tweeted 1000 times actually matters for a business if they have their
own marketing machine ready to squire, convert and activated visitors.

~~~
vdaniuk
Did I really write ready to squire? Correction: ready to acquire, convert and
activate visitors.

------
davemel37
Those who don't engage at the top of the funnel won't be able to afford
advertising to the bottom of the funnel.

I Can't think of a single founder who blogged high quality original content
consistently for more than two years that didn't turn his audience and
readership into a successful company.

There is a massive misconception about blogging and content marketing in
general that gets ignored by people. Creating content that can't be found
anywhere else, content that represents the true voice of the CEO or founder
and their vision is top of the funnel marketing that makes advertising and
regular marketing MUCH MUCH More effective.

Content is the long game, and builds on itself one reader at a time.
Eventually it breaks through and than every piece of content you produce gets
massive exposure. Exposure at a much more affordable price than any other
strategy that exists in the universe today.

Tomorrows leading companies will be the ones that realize they must become the
media company for their niche. They must be the go to place for the best
information in their industry.

Startup CEO's that don't blog are missing out on the big picture and should
really learn to prioritize the value they can create.

Just look at Moz.com and Hubspot. Two great companies poised for massive
growth that built their audience by blogging, one reader at a time.

~~~
ronaldx
> I Can't think of a single founder who blogged high quality original content
> consistently for more than two years that didn't turn his audience and
> readership into a successful company.

This is statistical nonsense. You are unlikely to be able to think of those
founders who don't have successful companies, whether they blogged or not.

In general, we are more aware of founders who blog precisely because they do
that. Making a list of blogging founders is pointless unless you have a fair
way of listing the non-bloggers.

~~~
davemel37
My claim is no more statistical nonsense than the original tweet that claimed
successful ceos don't blog.

My point is simply that blogging is a proven, repeatable strategy for building
an audience. An audience that trusts you and is happy to give you their money.

Whereas not-blogging is at best a shaky correlation to successful ceos and
their success is just as likely to be despite their not blogging than because
they save two hours a week not blogging.

------
tptacek
Few _people_ blog. The question is thus, "are bloggers represented
proportionally among startup CEOs"?

------
yo-mf
And no successful VC's blog...oh wait.

Obviously most "people" do not blog regularly. Whether it is CEO's of startups
or chefs at top tier restaurants or whatever else you can think of. Does real
questions is whether anyone have time for blogging? And the answer for the
most part is no.

Yet a few people persist. People laughed at Fred Wilson when he started
blogging. VC's mocked him. A decade later, every major VC started blogging and
are falling over each other to start their own online entrepreneur magazine.

How is this to turn the question on Keith's head: founder CEO's that blog will
in fact be a bigger deal and provide better "cost/benefit" than any other
communications channel?

------
minouye
Jason Goldberg of Fab blogs regularly at
[http://betashop.com/](http://betashop.com/) and is surprisingly open about
his company and its progress.

------
paulgb
Ilya Grigorik ran an excellent programming blog while running PostRank (and
continues to run it after being acquired by Google)
[http://www.igvita.com/](http://www.igvita.com/)

------
gexla
Jason Fried, 37signals in SVN? I'm not sure that's a good example. It's a bit
of an outlier and SVN has components which go to their bottom line (selling
books, jobs board.)

------
homosaur
Why is this treated like some insight? People who are running big successful
companies are too busy to do a lot of stuff, blogging just yet another thing.

------
xtc
I think the primary point is that the successful founders we can think of
don't blog _regularly_. I could think of a few exceptions to this that have
been mentioned in other comments (Freedman, Musk, Spolsky, etc). However of
the exceptions even fewer blog on a regular basis.

There will always be exceptions to this and I hope people don't read remarks
like Keith's as how-to guides. It's only a pattern that fits the mold. Don't
think that your time is always too precious to 'share insights & experiences'
as Hunter stated. That should have its time and place as well. It's very
helpful to outsiders such as myself.

------
jawerty
There is no real causation between blog posting and the success of an
entrepreneur but there may be a correlation between success entrepreneurs and
whether they are likely to blog. At the end of the day, I don't think it
matters. The CEO's transparency and image is all depending on what company it
is. The CEO of IBM is less likely to blog than the CEO of Airbnb (I don't know
if either of them blog, it's just a comparison).

------
auctiontheory
<generalization alert>

Writers tend to be high-ideaphoria people. This should be pretty obvious.

In my experience, many successful businesspeople are not high-ideaphoria
people. They may be very smart, talented, etc., but their tendency is toward
singular focus, rather than an exploration of the interplay of ideas. So it
seems natural they would tend not to write/blog. (And yes, I realize there are
many exceptions, James Altucher being my favorite.)

------
abalone
Typical Rabois shock-truthiness but he's really just playing with definitions.

In the resulting argument thread, he just labels as "corporate blog posts" any
example of a successful entrepreneur who actually does blog.

What he's probably right about is that when they blog it's mainly about their
business. But that's a very different, much more limited and not as shocking
claim than "nobody successful blogs".

~~~
paulrademacher
I understood his point to be that successful CEOs don't have time to blog
about how to kick ass, or lessons learned running a company, or the usual
self-promoting topics we see so much of here.

------
mbesto
Slightly meta, but this is one of the many topics that (1) will continued to
be debated and (2) always draw attention. The problem with these statements is
a fundamental issue with definitions.

What does successful mean? Raised a million in funding? Sold company for a
million?

What is a blog? Is a magazine/newspaper turned digital considered a blog? Does
a press release written by someone else count?

What is an entrepreneur considered? Someone who just started a company (less
than 1 year)? Someone who's started 40 companies over 30 years?

Probably the most well known entrepreneur blog by what is considered a highly
successful entrepreneur, is Richard Branson - [http://www.virgin.com/richard-
branson](http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson) \- but as far as I can tell he
doesn't actually write any of it himself.

------
ibudiallo
You know, when you make an interesting statement like this one, you have to
keep quiet and let it sink. Let others debate on it and such. Go on with your
day. But if you keep arguing and arguing, it loses all its value.

He should have gone to sleep after that.

------
davycro
Reasons that I did not blog when I ran a company:

1) I'm a poor writer 2) Any insights that I shared would benefit my
competitors and would be insignificant for customers

37signals is an outlier because their readers are potential customers

~~~
tmallen
> 37signals is an outlier because their readers are potential customers

Your readers are _always_ potential customers.

~~~
lucasnemeth
Yes, as in anyone you meet in the street is a potential costumer. So this is a
very weak counter-argument. But there are companies that have more economic
value in maintaining a blog than others, YC, 37 signals, and other companies
that market directly to people who work in the same business, will benefit
more from famous blog posts from their CEOs than B2C companies or B2B
companies that develop products for companies in different fields.

------
benmoore1982
It really depends how you see success... "Success is working towards a
predetermined goal" Earl Nightingale How much money does a CEO need to make to
be deemed successful? For me people like Ryan Carson are successful because he
is on a journey and whilst I admit he doesn't blog now as often as he used
too, when he does blog it is about the journey he is on. Mark Suster I would
deem successful irrelevant of how much money he has and his blog is brilliant
and regular and a great read for any entrepreneur. Just my thoughts :)

------
jmount
I thought that was the whole point of Daniel Lyons's Fake Steve Jobs blog:
that Jonathan Schwartz being a blogging CEO was counter-pointed by Real Steve
Jobs as a non-blogging CEO.

~~~
jiggy2011
The genius of Steve Jobs was that he only had to send a few words from his
iPhone and others would do the blogging for him.

------
jiggy2011
Surely the more important question is, "is the % of successful entrepreneurs
who write blogs moving up or down".

If you think back to the 90s before "blogging" was a thing, the number of
entrepreneurs who blogged was approximately 0%.

You could probably rewind to 1995 and say something like "Few successful
businesses have a website" but would it naturally follow that investing in a
website was a waste of time?

------
yesimahuman
I think he's largely correct beyond just VC-backed companies, though he did
seem to go back and forth between "personal" blogging and company blogging. On
a side note, I found his definition of success to be typical of an investor:
If you get them a return, you're successful (oh, and "changing the world"
means getting them a return). Pretty boring definition of success.

------
SandB0x
Elon Musk? Mark Shuttleworth?

------
dzink
Viral B2C startups don't require blogs to grow. If your business requires a
blog(it requires sales), it is probably B2B, or B2C with linear growth which
takes a while and is likely not done by the CEO but by staff. Thus none of the
unicorn models actually require a blogging CEO. A server scaling or coding CEO
though would definitely fit the bill.

------
tbrooks
Jason Cohen a.k.a "asmartbear" blogs regularly and he was the CEO of WPEngine
before handing over the reins to a new CEO.

------
ksk
A parallel statement could be said about Wikipedia. I bet if you're a world-
class expert at something, probably the last thing you want to do when you get
home after a hard days work is log to Wikipedia and edit articles and deal
with mods.

Still, Wikipedia manages to maintain a not-bad-for-a-first-try quality level
on most science-y topics.

------
atmosx
In my view, statements like this are _thin air_. People shouldn't even bother
to comment seriously on them because they lack context.

Until I am 100% sure what Keith means by the words "successful" and
"regularly", I can't comment nor I can take anyone else's comment on such a
broad statement seriously.

------
callil
I wish more did, but I suspect there is a good reason they don't. There is
liability in what they say. And when dealing with lots of money it's easier to
say nothing publicly.

[offtopic] Wow I hate reading twitter threads, I wish there was an easier and
better way to see related tweets and connect who is talking to who inline.

------
systems
just drop the word entrepreneur, and this claim is very plausible

i hate it when a shop owner calls herself CEO, CEO should only be used for
very large organizations

yet even if you own a miserably failing business (success is in the eye of the
beholder), you can still call yourself entrepreneur, i think keith just
overestimate the term entrepreneur

------
MaysonL
Probably a far greater proportion of successful entrepreneurs blog than
bloggers among the general population.

------
ojbyrne
He expressed this on twitter, which can be characterized as a microblog. I'd
hazard a guess that fewer people blog and instead address the kinds of
comments in shorter form mediums.

This seems like a general trend, and "CEOs and entrepreneurs" are probably
just following that general trend.

------
bkanber
There's one from Tim Cook on HN right now:
[http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304...](http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304527504579172302377638002-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwMjEwNDIyWj)

~~~
declan
I would have said "an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal with Tim Cook's
byline." Nothing indicates that he wrote it himself (though he may have
reviewed it before submission).

------
ajsharp
While I generally disagree with the sentiment, his observation for the subset
he's talking about -- "world changers", e.g. Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams,
Zuckerberg, Brian Chesky, Drew Houston, etc -- is correct.

------
lucisferre
Damn I'd better stop blogging. I want to make sure I'm successful.

~~~
jonnyhosabah
I think you got the Cause-Effect process backwards; when you are successful
you will be too busy to blog, but to be successful, initially, you need to
market yourself and your products through blogs...

~~~
BCM43
I think that may be the joke. Though this is the text, so I'm not sure.

------
wmougayar
Actually, "successful" isn't a good criteria. Any entrepreneur who is on their
way to success, or trying to be successful should be counted.

The lessons on the path to success are many, and they are varied.

------
josephscott
I'm not sure if he would qualify on the exact metrics mentioned, but certainly
in the general sense: Fred Wilson, [http://www.avc.com/](http://www.avc.com/)

------
ajlin500
Gary Vaynerchuk (garyvaynerchuk.com) blogs all the time and runs a highly
successful, high growth marketing agency. Although, he mostly video blogs
which can take less time than writing if you are good.

~~~
flyosity
His business was built on blogging and vlogging, it's at the core of how he
makes money and markets his products. Not the best example because, of course
he still blogs and vlogs.

~~~
ajlin500
Very true. There is an obvious ROI for him. However, he is one of the busiest
guys I know and still manages to make it happen. Regardless of incentive, it
shows it is possible to manage both a high growth start up and a powerful
personal brand.

------
codex
Agreed. Blogging is a tool of the mediocre. It's like the blind leading the
blind. And those who do have a clue are trying to manipulate you to their
hidden agenda.

------
adamzerner
dhh is the first example that comes to my mind.

Interesting point, but I think it's still probably important for early stage
startups to blog. It helps get them exposure and increase their luck surface
area ([http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-
surf...](http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-
area)). Things probably change when you get really big though.

------
josephjrobison
Does Alex Turnbull, CEO of Groove count?

[http://www.groovehq.com/blog](http://www.groovehq.com/blog)

------
Killswitch
Jacob Thomason of RentPost.com - [http://jacobt.com/](http://jacobt.com/)

------
yuhong
Recently SEC approved Twitter for disclosing material information. I wonder
how many CEOs etc will use it.

------
pistle
You can talk about it. You can do it. If your doing isn't talking, then you
aren't doing it.

------
joelrunyon
What's the level of "success" he's talking about?

Millions? Billions? Yacht & Helicopter money?

------
scotthtaylor
I wasted 10 minutes reading that entire thread. Probably could have written a
blog post in that time.

~~~
lucasnemeth
... Well, but you probably are procrastinating. Writing a blog is a creative
effort. And in 10 minutes you only can write a very short or unoriginal blog
post...

------
QuasiAlon
Joel Gascoine and Leo Widrich from Buffer do. Essential part of their routine
and business practice.

------
spullara
Dick Costolo tweets. Close enough.

------
thejerz
Mark Cuban, anyone?

------
js2
Ben Horowitz?

------
LizVerano
Surprised by the ideas.

