But on the other hand, you did accept VC funding for Posterous (I'm assuming nobody was holding a gun to your head and forced you to do it), and for whatever reason you then left and moved onto other projects.

Now you are saying you will never sell out, will never lose focus and will stick around forever. Isn't that like a politician promising they won't ever raise taxes? "Ever" is just a really strong word. Life happens. Priorities change. Heck, most marriages don't even last forever.

That said...

I believe you. I think you're telling the truth about how you actually feel right now and what your plans for the business are right now. It's just that right now only lasts an instant.

I think we're put on this earth to create things of great lasting value that are good for others around us. Many things in our lives will change, but I believe this one is a constant guiding light.

Support him? By bailing out? Was it easy for your cofounder to replace your skillset? Would love to hear the whole story if you don't mind, it could help help others who are in similar situations. It's sad that cofounders who once created something together are not able to find a common understanding in later stages. Sad that both parties reached that point where they have to utter the threat either my way or I leave. WTF. I know this is common and probably the reason why most startups fail but just leaving (or maybe the true story was different) sounds a bit strange. However, maybe it was the best decision for the organization.

Support him BEFORE he bailed out. Ie. he supported the VC thing, although he didn't like the direction.

As for the "skill-set", it's not as if building a web service, and such as simple one as posterous (or twitter, or tumblr) is rocket science.

Scaling it is a little harder, but still, thousands of companies and websites do it on their own. So what What ireplaceable skillset?

And now he wants to work on something like Posterous again. His priorities don't seem so shifty.

It's nice to see you acknowledge that things were rocky with Posterous but you are now moving forwards in a new direction based on your past learnings.

After all, isn't that one of the great things about being human? We can all learn from our past mistakes and strive to better than the person we were yesterday.

I built a team. Accountability and execution in the company. It's not as easy as it sounds.

We made mistakes and learned. I think everyone did well and are on to great things.

Different idea, but, for example Matt M. created the WordPress Foundation to independently carry out the things he believed in.

http://wordpressfoundation.org/

"From an ultimate decision-making point of view, the Foundation is mainly just me. [...] It’s worth noting that the Foundation was created purely to be a trademark and IP holding entity that Automattic could transfer its ownership of the WordPress trademark to. There are no “members.”" [0]

[0] http://wpkrauts.com/2013/leaders-and-the-greater-good/#comme...

In addition, having counseled clients on this structure, the benefit of creating a nonprofit and giving it IP is that it creates a public check on anything to do with that IP. For example, while a startup's founders can sell the company, they can't unilaterally agree to sell off the IP in the nonprofit, and the public can challenge any such sales by recourse to a state attorney general's office.

It's not perfect, but it helps protect the IP in the way founders want to. In many ways, it's a one-way decision, which is why it works.

(Yes, IAAL.)

second, can we auto-migrate somehow from a posterous backup - my wife runs a blog on posterous and is really worried that she needs to migrate. if i could tell her that she just now needs to pay $5/month and not rely on me to hack something together w/octopress and github she will be so excited.

The apostrophe is for possessives and contractions. Pluralization is neither.

Wrong: Greatest Hits of the 90's / The 90's' Greatest Hits / 1990's' Greatest Hits

Right: Greatest Hits of the 90s / The 90s' Greatest Hits / 1990's Greatest Hits

It's easy if you think of the difference between the plural and possessive "s" using the unabbreviated word:

Television's favorite stars are always on our televisions.

TV's favorite stars are always on our TVs.

Any style guide that writes that sentence a different way is simply wrong.

I think you are being a bit hard on tedunangst since his statement "Sometimes the apostrophe is preferred..." applies in situations different from your examples.

For example: "The Times (and some other publications, including the Chicago Manual of Style) do call for using an apostrophe in the plural of abbreviations that include periods."

http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/faqs-on-st...

You can find more discussion here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Representing_plurals_an...

rubyrescue: since you're posting here, you have a grocer's apostrophe on the home page... it's "URLs", not "URL's".

tedunangst: Depends on your style guide. Sometimes the apostrophe is preferred for abbreviations ... not something I'd correct somebody for unless we had specifically and previously agreed to a particular style guide

tedunangst claimed that was a style choice. It's not. By all these guides, "URL's" is wrong, and is something that would be corrected by editors using your examples of NYT or Chicago Manual of Style.

Also, for the periods, omitting the periods is often the cleanest answer. Instead of "C.P.A.'s" which is both ambiguous and ugly, consider "I went to my CPA's office. Naturally, it was full of CPAs."

You're safest following this line from your Wikipedia link: The MLA is explicit "do not use an apostrophe to form the plural of an abbreviation". The APA is specific in "without an apostrophe".

Just wondering: how can somebody start again something he worked already years on? I understand that you might learned a lot with Posterous and now you'd like to just employ that knowledge in a new blog project. But is it not a bit dangerous to stick to the same thing over years? You could loose time and after ten years looking back and you pity that you just worked only on blog systems. I don't want to talk blogs down, they are a very interesting use case and I still think there's room for improvement but in terms of spreading the bets and just the need to start something totally new I am a bit confused that you do the same thing over and over again (and I didn't see any disruptive feature or new angle with Posthaven).

Hhh? Most people work on the same thing their whole life.

And it's not like this will be the exact same thing as Posterous was.