

An Interview with Mark Fletcher, founder of Bloglines and ONEList - rjurney
http://techdrawl.com/an-interview-with-mark-fletcher-founder-of-bloglines-and-onelist/

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celiadyer
Great interview. Thanks, Mark. Always wanted to go to Buck's Woodside.

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bendyer
Points well made. Great interview by RJurney.

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brunnock
Neither ONEList nor Bloglines had any revenue. Why are they considered
"successful" companies?

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rjurney
Because they were pretty big acquisitions, built at a time when building to
get acquired by bigger internet companies was a completely viable business
model.

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brunnock
The IRS doesn't recognize that business model. If a business has no
expectation of making a profit, then it's a hobby.

<http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=169490,00.html>

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rjurney
At the time, eyeballs had a premium dollar value. Being 2 for 2, Mark is
comfortably rich. Clearly in today's market one would need a more concrete
revenue model than eyeballs.

Do you have a point?

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brunnock
Of course. The purpose of a business is to generate a profit. Anything else is
a con. You might as well post an interview with the founders of Kozmo.

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rjurney
Both these businesses generated a large profit for their founders. Maybe if
you learned from guys like Mark, as opposed to the IRS, you'd make a better
Hacker News commenter and... I daresay, a better entrepreneur?

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gojomo
Fletcher also had a entrepreneurs' community site called Startupping that came
on the scene about the same time as News.YC (back when HN was called 'Startup
News').

Compare the sites in February 2007:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20070224011950/http://www.startup...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070224011950/http://www.startupping.com/)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/)

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rjurney
Startupping got off to a great start. Unfortunately spam took it over. :(

