"One fifth of Six Apart’s portion will go to executives Ben Trott (who founded the company with his wife, Mena), Andrew Anker and Jeff Ash. The rest is distributed among the rest of the Six Apart’s shareholders."
If my math is correct, that means the founder gets $3.9M * 1/5 * 1/3 * 0.75 = roughly $200k post-tax.
I can't find the source right now, but I remember it being mentioned that the founders took some cash off the table during the first big funding round.
Amazing, especially considering that during the early Web 2.0 days most people cited Six Apart as being the IPO candidate that will rejuvenate the tech market.
This is actually really sad for me. Mena Trott and I were kind of bloggy friends back in the day when I ran "the tinyblog", and she ran "Dollarshort". We were two pretty darn early bloggers and it was still a small ecosystem.
One day she told me that Ben was going to turn the custom blogging tool he wrote for her into a product and wanted to know if I wanted to try installing it myself, with Ben supporting me over IM.
That installation (many times upgraded) is possibly the 2nd oldest Movable Type installation after Mena's.
I was overjoyed at their success and a little sad to see WordPress eventually eat their lunch and their other product fail to gain traction. I wish them success in all their future endeavors.
What do think the role of Fantastico and other easy-install scripts had? Given a choice of a one-click install or download-upload-untar I usually chose the easy path myself anytime I would be setting up a quickie blog or site.
Or Zagat, or Yelp -- or anyone willing to setup up to the task of answering simple, pertinent questions like "how do I find a decent Thai restaurant nearby that's open at this hour?" seriously.
Sucks for Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal). They bought his company for stock (I think) then sold it for $25M cash to a Russian company (which users hated I believe). Now he's probably got a pittance of stock in Say Media, which will also probably fail.
I always wonder, in cases like this, about the role that the underlying technology plays. Wordpress's choice of PHP meant that installation was easy, theming/modification was easy, and it would work on your crappy shared host with FTP access. In fact, that's why I used Wordpress, back in '04 or '05. Because I couldn't get MT working properly on Powweb. For a platform that needs to be ubiquitous to succeed, I guess you really need a ubiquitous programming language.
I can't even guess how many tools I never investigated because they required language or library support that I didn't have installed. One failed "port install" in the whole dependency and I will probably have to give up.
Maybe MT's failure to catch on had nothing to do with Six Apart's failure to catch on. Still fun to think about.
Wordpress won because, reason 0, it actually worked and didn't break all the fucking time. Particularly for enduser software, people severely underrate code that isn't brittle shit that breaks if you look at it cross eyed.
From my own experience in trying to set it up, the hardest part for me was setting it up to correctly generate all the static HTML pages and get them to correctly post to Perl CGI forms for things like comments that would then trigger a regeneration of the static HTML. It always struck me as an extremely fragile setup.
Oh, and the theming ecosystem was non-existent compared to Wordpress.
That company would make an awesome case study. Where did they go wrong, exactly? My take: they tried to move (unsuccessfully) into social networking etc., and pretty much abandoned the blogging space into the hands of WP.
That, and just plain bad tech choices, like generating static pages which meant that your entire site had to be rebuilt after each blog post. And bad licensing choices.
The sad part is MovableType is almost solely responsible for WordPress's dumbfounding success.
If MT had not suddenly decided to go pay-only for version 3, it would not have made tens of thousands of people start looking for an alternative and there was WP 2.0 alpha/beta, a fork of b2/cafelog, one of the few open-source programs ready to take them on. MT went open-source for version 4 but it was too late.
Otherwise WP would have been just one of the many PHP based blog programs out there today with a small following, and many of us might still be struggling to code in Perl for MT instead of PHP.
I for one do not miss Perl at all, but believe it or not there is at least one website out there I made still running MT 2.66 from 2003!
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[ 32.3 ms ] story [ 1150 ms ] threadIf my math is correct, that means the founder gets $3.9M * 1/5 * 1/3 * 0.75 = roughly $200k post-tax.
Ouch.
How did Six Apart screw up: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Six-Apart-screw-up
One day she told me that Ben was going to turn the custom blogging tool he wrote for her into a product and wanted to know if I wanted to try installing it myself, with Ben supporting me over IM.
That installation (many times upgraded) is possibly the 2nd oldest Movable Type installation after Mena's.
I was overjoyed at their success and a little sad to see WordPress eventually eat their lunch and their other product fail to gain traction. I wish them success in all their future endeavors.
Trophy cases for badges. Jeez.
Lesson: get cash or public company stock.
I can't even guess how many tools I never investigated because they required language or library support that I didn't have installed. One failed "port install" in the whole dependency and I will probably have to give up.
Maybe MT's failure to catch on had nothing to do with Six Apart's failure to catch on. Still fun to think about.
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004350.html
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/03/15/
Or BradD, who has no fewer than EIGHT MT installs to try to get their shit software to work. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/housekeeping-mo.html
Wordpress won because, reason 0, it actually worked and didn't break all the fucking time. Particularly for enduser software, people severely underrate code that isn't brittle shit that breaks if you look at it cross eyed.
I agree with your point, but I think being built on PHP was also a big factor in WP winning.
Oh, and the theming ecosystem was non-existent compared to Wordpress.
That, and just plain bad tech choices, like generating static pages which meant that your entire site had to be rebuilt after each blog post. And bad licensing choices.
If MT had not suddenly decided to go pay-only for version 3, it would not have made tens of thousands of people start looking for an alternative and there was WP 2.0 alpha/beta, a fork of b2/cafelog, one of the few open-source programs ready to take them on. MT went open-source for version 4 but it was too late.
Otherwise WP would have been just one of the many PHP based blog programs out there today with a small following, and many of us might still be struggling to code in Perl for MT instead of PHP.
I for one do not miss Perl at all, but believe it or not there is at least one website out there I made still running MT 2.66 from 2003!