Tech Blogs Are From Mars, Music Blogs Are From Some Crazy-Ass Planet You've Probably Never Heard Of
As a founder, I have a personal goal that’s just as important and just as core to our culture: I do not want to sell this company. I have opened nearly every meeting by telling potential investors and potential employees this, so I guess readers should know it from the beginning as well.
Of course, there’s the caveat that if someone calls me tomorrow and offers $1 billion, I might cave. I do have investors after all, and everyone has a price. And I’ve been around enough entrepreneurs to know the journey changes you in ways you can’t expect. I’m as aware as anyone this resolve might soften over time.
So let me put it this way: Selling is not success to me. If I wind up selling, I’ve failed in some way. We didn’t get as big as we should, we didn’t execute on the opportunity or I didn’t hire the right team and got too burned out.
That is from an introductory post. On a fucking tech blog. That got funded with $2.5M venture capital. (And still looks like Wordpress amateur hour.)
Let me not count the ways in which popular tech blogs are the fucking worst (because that would end with me repeatedly banging my iPad against my head after the first thirty items or so) but only semi-jokingly note that all the music/publishing industry needs to escape its seemingly inevitable decline is a healthy dose of bubbly business hype & venture capital fairy dust. We just aren’t bullshitting enough!
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UPDATE:
Oh my god this gets even better. One of the first posts deals with the publishing industry’s woes:
When you see Snooki’s book on the New York Times Best Seller List, you know publishing is in trouble.
You can blame readers and say publishing is just giving the public what they want. But that’s only half the problem.
The rest is a lazy publishing industry that does far too little of the work that got them here: Discovering new authors and giving them a shot. Instead, they go for the lazy lay-up: Overpaying on celebrity memoirs and pop culture phenomenons with a built in audience.
…
But I don’t have much more sympathy for publishing than Farhad Manjoo has for independent book stores. Amazon didn’t create publishing’s woes, any more than blogging created the challenges of newspapers. The company is just cleverly exploiting them.
And good for them. My hope is disgruntled publishing executives like the one above will quit their comfortable jobs at dysfunctional prehistoric companies and start innovating on the model. I don’t believe the public only wants books written by over-tanned drunks who go clubbing anymore than blog readers only want slideshows and posts on Apple.
WORDS FAIL ME.
