FAW #30: Mena Trott of Six Apart
Six Apart comes together
Mena and Ben Trott are the husband and wife team that co-founded Six Apart. They were both bloggers in 2001 and were recently laid off from work and dissatisfied with the blogging tools available at the time. They wrote a piece of software called Movable Type to “scratch their own itch” which they gave away on their site. They acted as consultants for awhile delivering customizations on Movable Type. The product gained steam and generated decent consulting revenue but they decided rather than be consultants they wanted to productize it and sell it to consumers. That started them down a long road of taking funding from Neoteny, writing an entirely new hosted version called “Type Pad,” acquiring Live Journal and then ultimately developing a blogging community platform called Vox that incorporated a social networking component.
Made possible only through their own inexperience
Like other founders, the Trott’s lack of experience actually propelled them through difficult times because they didn’t know it couldn’t be done. Mena says, “We always had an ambitious, ‘we want to win’ attitude, but we never had the stakes so high, because it never occurred to us that we could do it. I think that’s one of the good things, too: since it never occurred to us that we could do it, it didn’t occur to us that we couldn’t do it. We just had to put our minds on it. And that has been really key to what we’ve done. The lack of experience made us think, ‘Why can’t this just be done?’”
Fortunately they did have an experienced CEO Barak Berkowitz who helped coach them through some of the basics in setting the business strategy and doing the things that needed to be done like establishing the basic operational infrastructure and negotiating a lease. In Ann Winblad fashion, he allowed them make small mistakes and “find the edges” themselves. “If it wasn’t for Barak, I don’t know where we would be now. We knew what we knew, which was the product. But there were all these little things that you just have no clue about. It was incredibly overwhelming. But if you think about it too much, then you don’t do it. You almost have to not know what you’re getting into to actually do it.”
On why there aren’t more female founders
Of the thirty-two vignettes in the Founder’s series, only three interviews were with women. When asked why there aren’t more female founders, Mena replied, “I think one of the reasons happens to be that women aren’t always necessarily that motivated to prove themselves in the way that men are. It’s not saying that they don’t have ambition; it’s saying that there’s something in our makeup that makes us be confident more in what we are and what we’ve accomplished independently without having to say, ‘I’m a founder, I’m an entrepreneur.’”
I disagree that there’s a gender-specific personality trait responsible for the scarcity of women founders. I believe it’s much simpler than that: in college (at least when I attended) women tended to gravitate towards the social sciences and away from the engineering degrees. Nearly every founder in this book had exposure to some critical element of the engineering side that allowed him to make the quantum leap of innovation that became the essence of the business. I would argue that it’s a simple numbers game and the scarcity of women founders in tech startups is purely a function of the low relative number of women with backgrounds in engineering. It’s not that they “don’t feel the need to prove themselves” as Mena suggests, it’s that they lack the critical precondition of exposure to the engineering to have the current failing and the innovation opportunity that facilitates the business.
Six Apart continues to run as a private company with a stable of four compelling blogging products.