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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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If the challenge is to "think of successful entrepreneurs or CEOs who blog", I can think of a bunch off the top of my head:

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/

Tobi Lütke of Spotify - http://tobi.lutke.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/

minor edit. Tobi is the founder of Shopify, not Spotify.

I wouldn't necessarily add Dalton to the category of "Successful" just yet. Although he is a great influencer and a great technologist.

ZING (too true though)

Tom Preston-Werner - http://tom.preston-werner.com/

Looks like Tom hasn't actually blogged in 2 years though. That's not really very regular...

Joel Spolsky of StackExchange - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

Sridhar Vembu of Zoho - http://blogs.zoho.com/author/sridhar

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.

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.

Just clicking on the last few posts, Cuban didn't blog from March to October.

I can also think of KissMetrics CEO Neil Patel http://quicksprout.com/

Vinicius Vacanti of Yipit - http://viniciusvacanti.com/

Dan Shipper - http://danshipper.com/

Let's not forget to add Richard Branson http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson

Adii Pienaar of WooThemes — http://adii.me

Collis Ta'eed of Envato — http://notes.envato.com/author/collis/, http://inside.envato.com

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.

Who's that a smart bear guy? Jason Cohen of WP-engine? He blogs all the time.

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.

What about you, pg? Arguably you are the co-founder of a successful company which takes up most of your time, and you blog.

I'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?

pg blogs? Or are you thinking of his essays?

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.

His essays are way older than YC.

Same thing. Blogging used to have a different connotation, but it's lost it, and Graham's site fits squarely into the modern notion.

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...

Ok, I guess at least 5 bloggers felt wounded by my comment, which was a bit leaking.

Edit: but maybe, if one in hundreds will think twice before writing again something like "If you are like me" in their post...

Or several folks thought that your comment added nothing positive to the discussion.

There's good blogs and shitty blogs. Good music doesn't transcend music and become something else.

Certainly, but essays predates blogging and cover something else, all essays are not blog posts and all blog posts are not essays.

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".

Interestingly, my own definition of blogging is not tied to a specific medium.

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 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.

Yes, this is a good point. Agreed fully.

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.

He's only "arguably" the co-founder of a successful company? Wow , tough crowd!

I do.

(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 think the OP means real companies, not startups who blog and don't seem to do much else.

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."

Neither, actually. The OP is quite clear about what he means, probably more professionally than I put it:

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.

Keith couldn't make up his mind.

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?

When it has discovered a business model that works at scale.

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."

Not yet, but 42Floors is on track to so far.

I do enjoy reading 42Floors posts that get linked here, and of course SVN by 37Signals.

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.

As a general rule, Keith Rabois is correct.

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.

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.

Selection bias?

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.

1 counterexample from 600 companies...

do you think that's because once they get really big (especially if they become publically traded) what they can say gets restricted by the SEC?

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