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.
Would pg really consider himself a CEO now? Also, if we're considering pg's essays to be different than blogs, then I generally dislike blogs. Essays are way better.
Since pg can't always talk directly with each and every YC funded startup founder, I believe he writes his essays so all of them has a chance to get his message. Those texts are deeply related to his core duties at YC and no, I wouldn't call that "regularly blogging" - not even close.
What? Are you comparing idle blogging emmissions starting with "If you are like me" or "I have always been a huge fan of" or "What I will say has been said already here, there and there but I will repeat it anyway" with pg essays? Are you comparing playdoh "shapes" produced by an army of monkeys monkeying each other with the few and rare carefully carved gemstones we can read under pg's hand? Must be kidding...
Depends on if you view a blog as a type of content or a method of organising content (electronically distributed, ordered reverse-chronologically , short enough to be consumed in one sitting).
It seems a little anachronistic as some of his essays predate even the word "blog", and he's been doing largely the same thing for years. If anything the notion of blogging has grown even more topical and ephemeral than ever.
What we now label "blogs" predate the word "blog" by several years. They date back to at least ~1993. A word was added to our language to describe something that already existed.
If using that word to describe examples that came before the word was coined is anachronistic, then surely so must be using modern English to discuss, say, the Roman Empire?
To me, a "blog" is a particular format of online writing, but not all online writing is blogging. You can tell because newspapers often have blogs separate from their other content, drawing a distinction. I think there's a similar distinction between "essays that happen to be posted online" and "blogs".
I don't think PG's blogs are chronologically organized in any meaningful fashion. I also think that your definition is too broad, as it would include any self-published book series or maybe even the Bible.
I originally included "short" as a criterion, but I removed it as subjective.
And PG's essays are chronologically organized : the topmost are the most recent.
Again that's so vague as to be meaningless--you have to order them somehow and I don't think having a page that lists them in chronological order makes it a blog. At the very least most blogs show the full content of multiple posts on the same page, or have links to previous and next posts.
I think the defining feature of a blog that's absent from Graham's essays is that blog posts can be intentionally insubstantial, sometimes containing nothing more than a link, possibly with comments. The least substantial essay Paul Graham has written is probably the one where he clarifies that he's not a racist just because he thinks having a thick accent makes it hard to be a CEO. I don't think he would consider posting intentionally insubstantial content to his list of essays.
There's a hint of at least two tenuous causative implications there: if you're successful, you ought to think twice before wasting time blogging (ie. blogging by the CEO adds no value to the business). Or the corollary: if you're blogging, chances are you're not yet successful (it's a marker for lack of success). Both are reaching.
Blogging by the CEO (founder) simply means that marketing is (also) done by the CEO. The founders and CEOs who don't blog probably delegate marketing activities to specialists (nothing wrong with that). You delegate when you don't possess the skills to execute. This will probably happen when the founders or CEOs don't possess the technical knowledge or expertise about their own fields.
PG's blogging is different. It does not inform the competition (much), but is INCREDIBLE outreach.
PG's essays are THE essays to read if you are an excellent entrepreneur - and if you are - and you make the decision to go to an accelerator - which one do you think you want to go to?
More importantly, pg's essays are marketing for YC. Without knowing the man, I would guess this is probably more a happy side-effect than a goal of his writing, but nevertheless the economics are clearly in favour of him writing.
I really enjoy Jason Freedman's posts, but I suspect 42Floors and many of the examples given in this comment thread don't meet Keith Rabois' criteria which he mentions in the Twitter exchange.
"change the world, or $1 Billion exit or 10x for series A, B investors and 5x for later."
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.
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.
A significant number of these people and those mentioned in the sibling comments here are not CEOs (if you seek out their job title carefully) and/or don't have startups.
There are exceptions to every rule, but I generally agree with Keith's comment. For most successful entrepreneurs, the cost/benefit analysis just doesn't work out. Potential issues range from helping the competition to simply wasting time that would be better spent on the business. Additionally, entrepreneurs often have boards and shareholders that are scrutinizing everything they say. Unless someone has a burning personal desire to blog, there are just too many issues involved for already successful entrepreneurs to want to bother with it.
Those aren't the concerns for me (in-so-far as I'm "successful"). The main problems for me are:
1) time. Running and growing a successful company is an enormous sink of time, energy, mindshare, etc.
2) completeness of thoughts. I don't like to blog about stuff where I don't really know what I'm talking about. That unfortunately is also the most interesting stuff I could blog about at the moment. However, since it's still unfolding and the results of my decisions will take 6+ months or even years to arrive, it's difficult to make a cogent blog post about those decisions. Hindsight is a valuable tool for insight, but I'm still in the middle of all these things.
Key points that as I discussed with Keith became clear we were using different definitions:
What is a blog? I'd content any direct communication with the internet at large is in the intent of "blogging".
Which CEOs should count? I have no idea. But for fun lets say $100M+ valued companies.
Does frequency matter? To Keith it does but I think its beside the point.
Does it have to be written personally by the CEO? I would argue not. Many blogs (Svbtle, Medium, Sequoia's) include editing or content help.
So...
If you use the above criteria many many many CEOs blog. From Steve Jobs' letters explaining why Apple has it's stance on Adobe to Elon Musk's discussions about cars catching on fire. Then there are the by almost any definition bloggers mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
(I can't believe the one night I decided to go out with friends, this is the thread that shows up on Twitter--my wheelhouse!)
I built and bootstrapped a tech company from the ground up in the Valley. Sold it in 2007 for 7 figures. Then took my personal blog and grew it into one of the top entrepreneurship blogs online. Now running a funded startup and just completed Techstars Austin.
Now that I think about it, my blogger friends and my tech CEO/CTO friends do run in different crowds. Most of the blogger types end up writing books (Tim Ferriss is an example I think HN'ers would be familiar with.) I turned down a book deal to go back and do another tech company because that's what I love to do.
There is a trend amongst bloggers to start software companies. Clay Collins' LeadPages is a good example; he's a crossover blogger/Internet marketer turned software company CEO. He just closed $5M in funding for LeadPages led by Foundry Group.
There are a few more up-and-comers in the blog world who are crossing over into software, but so far very few have made the leap--I think because the skillset is so different.
Weird to think that I'm rare, but it's an interesting viewpoint to hear from the tech community.
I'm not sure if you're trolling or you genuinely misread my comment--I'll assume the latter.
LeadPages generates real revenue to the tune of >$3M/year and is funded by Foundry Group as well as other angels and VCs. It is a legitimate business.
My company is funded by 500 Startups, Techstars, and a group of angel investors. We have one product on the market that is generating significant revenue, and are launching MarketVibe, our latest product, this month.
I would agree with the general premise of "successful entrepreneurs who blog are outliers."
i.e. Not startup bubble companies, companies that actually produce something of value, either for society or in significant returns. "Lead generation" isn't one of those.
Perhaps there should be a timeframe clarification, "few successful entrepreneurs blogged while doing their venture that made them successful." I'd say for many of the successful entrepreneurs, it was only after they were "successful" that the opportunity to productively blog was opened up.
Look at the CEOs of AirBnB, Dropbox, SpaceX, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. when they were really growing or fighting to survive. None of them seem to blog.
There are exceptions.
But to be clear: if you're a CEO doing something big, chances are you don't blog much. If at all.
Just like you don't go to a lot of conferences and become a "conference ho", as one of your better CEOs once wrote.
I would argue blogging is not a big value add to the startup itself or the CEO.
Someone wise once said, Startups = Growth.
Startups should focus on 5%+ weekly organic growth in revenues or user engagement well after Demo Day when it is much, much harder to grow at that rate.
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.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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...
Alex Bangash @AlexBangash
--
@rabois @hunterwalk great observations... seems like we are in world of promoters. Those who can't build, tweet and blog.
and
Keith Rabois @rabois
--
@hunterwalk @AlexBangash I don't know of a single successful CEO or entrepreneur who blogs regularly.
for ONCE, and I mean for ONCE, I agree with some twitter garbage linked on HN.
And if your reading my comment, that means that the self-aggrandizing "creators" and "entrepreneur" douchebags who have single handedly ruined HN with bullshit like this haven't voted me down yet.
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
I think points #2 and #3 are the most important thing. Even if are a great writer, if your potential customers aren't going to be reading your blog, the only person you are helping is your competitors. It just doesn't make sense to blog, you are putting your own ego ahead of the success of your company. If writing helps you do your job better, write to a journal.
And if you think little bits of information can't help competitors, I strongly disagree. A little perspective (like where a company is focusing or where growth is coming from or whatever) can go a long way, and when you blog you are just leaking those things to everybody else.
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.
One of the most important roles of a CEO is to tell a good story, so writing is an excellent way to practice that and you don't need to write about things that will benefit your competitors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadI'm not sure what's the point of this statement. Few successful CEO's blog. Few politicians blog. Few celebrities blog. Few people blog. So what?
Edit: but maybe, if one in hundreds will think twice before writing again something like "If you are like me" in their post...
If using that word to describe examples that came before the word was coined is anachronistic, then surely so must be using modern English to discuss, say, the Roman Empire?
To me, the defining characteristics of the blog are as follows :
A collection of texts which are :
1 - Published incrementally as they are written, and chronologically organized.
2 - Meant to be read by a wide audience
3 - Usually not ran past an editor.
4 - Not necessarily sharing any common theme
5 - Usually all have the same author.
I cooked up this definition after noticing that the EWDs had been more or less Dijkstra's blog, long before the Web.
PG's essays obviously fall under this definition as well.
I think the defining feature of a blog that's absent from Graham's essays is that blog posts can be intentionally insubstantial, sometimes containing nothing more than a link, possibly with comments. The least substantial essay Paul Graham has written is probably the one where he clarifies that he's not a racist just because he thinks having a thick accent makes it hard to be a CEO. I don't think he would consider posting intentionally insubstantial content to his list of essays.
There's a hint of at least two tenuous causative implications there: if you're successful, you ought to think twice before wasting time blogging (ie. blogging by the CEO adds no value to the business). Or the corollary: if you're blogging, chances are you're not yet successful (it's a marker for lack of success). Both are reaching.
Blogging by the CEO (founder) simply means that marketing is (also) done by the CEO. The founders and CEOs who don't blog probably delegate marketing activities to specialists (nothing wrong with that). You delegate when you don't possess the skills to execute. This will probably happen when the founders or CEOs don't possess the technical knowledge or expertise about their own fields.
PG's essays are THE essays to read if you are an excellent entrepreneur - and if you are - and you make the decision to go to an accelerator - which one do you think you want to go to?
"change the world, or $1 Billion exit or 10x for series A, B investors and 5x for later."
Leo W. at Buffer - http://blog.bufferapp.com/author/leo
Ryan Carson at Treehouse - http://ryancarson.com/
Jason Fried & DHH - http://37signals.com/svn
Matt Mullenweg - http://ma.tt/
Patio11 - http://www.kalzumeus.com/
Dalton Caldwell of App.net - http://daltoncaldwell.com/
Suhail Doshi of Mixpanel - http://sufficientlyadvanced.net/
Jack Groetzinger of SeatGeek - http://jackg.org/
Eric Koester of Zaarly - http://ekoester.com/
Craig Newmark - http://craigconnects.org/blog
Mark Cuban - http://blogmaverick.com
Tim O'Reilly - 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.
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.
Dan Shipper - http://danshipper.com/
Collis Ta'eed of Envato — http://notes.envato.com/author/collis/, http://inside.envato.com
1) time. Running and growing a successful company is an enormous sink of time, energy, mindshare, etc.
2) completeness of thoughts. I don't like to blog about stuff where I don't really know what I'm talking about. That unfortunately is also the most interesting stuff I could blog about at the moment. However, since it's still unfolding and the results of my decisions will take 6+ months or even years to arrive, it's difficult to make a cogent blog post about those decisions. Hindsight is a valuable tool for insight, but I'm still in the middle of all these things.
When Hunter mentioned the CEO of LinkedIn blogs, Keith said it doesn't count because they're not a startup.
But by definition, the "unicorn" companies are all more like LI than the average startup.
Maybe the question is "at what point does a company cease to be a startup?" At a $1B valuation? Or a significant liquidity event?
What is a blog? I'd content any direct communication with the internet at large is in the intent of "blogging".
Which CEOs should count? I have no idea. But for fun lets say $100M+ valued companies.
Does frequency matter? To Keith it does but I think its beside the point.
Does it have to be written personally by the CEO? I would argue not. Many blogs (Svbtle, Medium, Sequoia's) include editing or content help.
So...
If you use the above criteria many many many CEOs blog. From Steve Jobs' letters explaining why Apple has it's stance on Adobe to Elon Musk's discussions about cars catching on fire. Then there are the by almost any definition bloggers mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
Blogging is a marketing strategy. It's not always a good one (time expensive, money cheap). It also works a lot better for some people than others.
(I can't believe the one night I decided to go out with friends, this is the thread that shows up on Twitter--my wheelhouse!)
I built and bootstrapped a tech company from the ground up in the Valley. Sold it in 2007 for 7 figures. Then took my personal blog and grew it into one of the top entrepreneurship blogs online. Now running a funded startup and just completed Techstars Austin.
Now that I think about it, my blogger friends and my tech CEO/CTO friends do run in different crowds. Most of the blogger types end up writing books (Tim Ferriss is an example I think HN'ers would be familiar with.) I turned down a book deal to go back and do another tech company because that's what I love to do.
There is a trend amongst bloggers to start software companies. Clay Collins' LeadPages is a good example; he's a crossover blogger/Internet marketer turned software company CEO. He just closed $5M in funding for LeadPages led by Foundry Group.
There are a few more up-and-comers in the blog world who are crossing over into software, but so far very few have made the leap--I think because the skillset is so different.
Weird to think that I'm rare, but it's an interesting viewpoint to hear from the tech community.
LeadPages generates real revenue to the tune of >$3M/year and is funded by Foundry Group as well as other angels and VCs. It is a legitimate business.
My company is funded by 500 Startups, Techstars, and a group of angel investors. We have one product on the market that is generating significant revenue, and are launching MarketVibe, our latest product, this month.
I would agree with the general premise of "successful entrepreneurs who blog are outliers."
https://twitter.com/rabois/status/397233618449227776
i.e. Not startup bubble companies, companies that actually produce something of value, either for society or in significant returns. "Lead generation" isn't one of those.
Look at the CEOs of AirBnB, Dropbox, SpaceX, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. when they were really growing or fighting to survive. None of them seem to blog.
There are exceptions.
But to be clear: if you're a CEO doing something big, chances are you don't blog much. If at all.
Just like you don't go to a lot of conferences and become a "conference ho", as one of your better CEOs once wrote.
I would argue blogging is not a big value add to the startup itself or the CEO.
Someone wise once said, Startups = Growth.
Startups should focus on 5%+ weekly organic growth in revenues or user engagement well after Demo Day when it is much, much harder to grow at that rate.
The rest is not important. Including blogging.
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.
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?
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.
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.
http://www.groovehq.com/blog
Alex Bangash @AlexBangash -- @rabois @hunterwalk great observations... seems like we are in world of promoters. Those who can't build, tweet and blog.
and
Keith Rabois @rabois -- @hunterwalk @AlexBangash I don't know of a single successful CEO or entrepreneur who blogs regularly.
for ONCE, and I mean for ONCE, I agree with some twitter garbage linked on HN.
And if your reading my comment, that means that the self-aggrandizing "creators" and "entrepreneur" douchebags who have single handedly ruined HN with bullshit like this haven't voted me down yet.
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
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
And if you think little bits of information can't help competitors, I strongly disagree. A little perspective (like where a company is focusing or where growth is coming from or whatever) can go a long way, and when you blog you are just leaking those things to everybody else.
Your readers are always potential customers.
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.