Great interview. Thanks, Mark. Always wanted to go to Buck's Woodside.

Points well made. Great interview by RJurney.

Neither ONEList nor Bloglines had any revenue. Why are they considered "successful" companies?

Because they were pretty big acquisitions, built at a time when building to get acquired by bigger internet companies was a completely viable business model.

The IRS doesn't recognize that business model. If a business has no expectation of making a profit, then it's a hobby.

http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=169490,00.html

At the time, eyeballs had a premium dollar value. Being 2 for 2, Mark is comfortably rich. Clearly in today's market one would need a more concrete revenue model than eyeballs.

Do you have a point?

Of course. The purpose of a business is to generate a profit. Anything else is a con. You might as well post an interview with the founders of Kozmo.

Both these businesses generated a large profit for their founders. Maybe if you learned from guys like Mark, as opposed to the IRS, you'd make a better Hacker News commenter and... I daresay, a better entrepreneur?

Both services, or their descendants, are still in operation at the profitable, ad-driven acquirers, years later.

We can thus assume they have been profitable or fit strategic goals which generate profits elsewhere for these companies.

Like GeoCities?

Fletcher also had a entrepreneurs' community site called Startupping that came on the scene about the same time as News.YC (back when HN was called 'Startup News').

Compare the sites in February 2007:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070224011950/http://www.startup...

http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombi...

Startupping got off to a great start. Unfortunately spam took it over. :(