By Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart
The Beginning
In April of 2001, before Vox, Typepad, Movable Type and even Six Apart, I had a weblog called dollarshort.org. What began as a space online to tell stories about my childhood or daily adventures with my husband, Ben, dollarshort.org grew into something more — my introduction into an industry, the inspiration for a business and the source of meeting some of the most important people in our lives.
To make a better dollarshort.org, Ben and I wanted to make a better blogging tool and in October 2001, we released the first version of Movable Type. Intended to be a fun way to pass the time while we looked for jobs after the bust, supporting and developing Movable Type quickly became a full time job for the both of us. Working out of our spare San Francisco bedroom as we iterated and our customer base grew, we realized in July 2002 that Movable Type could become something big and, our company, Six Apart was born.
Becoming a Business
In the summer of 2002, the number of folks embracing blogging was growing and we knew that in order to be able to serve this new audience, we'd need to create a product that didn't require a web server or technical expertise. While Movable Type was intended for the designer, engineer or tinkerer, our new product, TypePad was intended for those who just wanted to blog. While we were working on TypePad, we were contacted by Joi Ito, an entrepreneur and investor in Tokyo who was also an avid Movable Type user and supporter. He wanted to know if we were interested in taking some funding to grow Six Apart. Initially we were against the idea of taking capital since Movable Type was built with a lot of sweat but no outside money (other than the donations we received from our users). After meeting with Joi and his advisor, Barak Berkowitz, Ben and I realized that we wanted Six Apart to grow into something much grander and with a real impact on blogging. With that decision, Six Apart took the initial funding from Ito's Neoteny and new faces — including Anil Dash, our first employee — became a part of Six Apart and we moved into a small office in San Mateo. A year later, Barak Berkowitz took over my role as CEO and I became President of Six Apart. Barak remained CEO until late 2007, leading us through a period of our greatest expansion and remaining a trusted advisor for the company.
October of 2003, two years after the release of Movable Type, saw the launch of TypePad and Six Apart's official move into Japan. In a move that was quite remarkable and unimaginable to two kids working out of an apartment in 2001, TypePad was introduced into the Japanese market through licensing deals with NTT OCN and Nifty and through our subsidiary, Six Apart KK, which opened and is operated under the management of Nobuhiro Seki. An acquisition of uBlog, a French blogging provider, in July 2004 brought Six Apart into Europe and now this subsidiary, Six Apart EMEA, is leading the push for platforms like Movable Type to become powerful business tools in European markets.
By May 2004, we put out a highly anticipated version Movable Type, Movable Type 3.0. This release was significant not only because it marked a decision to officially promote the software as a platform, but also because we introduced some paid license options for the first time. This was pretty tricky — we learned that going from free to pay is a tough thing to do, and nobody had done that before in the blogging world. This was also the basis for making Movable Type a serious business blogging tool, at a time when most people scoffed at the idea of big corporations using blogs. Since then, we've been really gratified to see the Movable Type community embrace the idea of business and Enterprise blogging, and while we skinned our knees a little bit in explaining the changes to the community, once everyone understood what we were trying to do, Movable Type started growing stronger than ever.
To help us continue grow our team and to remain leaders in the blogging world, we closed a Series B round of funding for $10 million dollars from August Capital on October 1, 2004. In December 2004, we had finally outgrown our first real office and we moved out of our original San Mateo offices to offices in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco. This new location set the stage for the most ambitious expansion of our team yet.
The first week of January 2005 came one of the biggest announcements of Six Apart's history: the acquisition of Danga Interactive, the makers of LiveJournal. Founded in 1999, LiveJournal created many fundamental parts of what's now called Web 2.0: The ability to add friends, powerful privacy features to control exactly who has access to your blog, and even some of the open source infrastructure that runs many of the most popular sites on the web. Over the next few years, we continued to grow LiveJournal immensely, tripling it in size to almost 15 million members and adding dozens of new features. Then, in December of 2007, the LiveJournal community reached a graduation of sorts, being reformed as an independent company called LiveJournal, Inc., which was acquired by SUP, an international media company that is dedicated to helping the LiveJournal community thrive worldwide from its base in San Francisco.
The Last Pieces of the Puzzle
In 2006, we'd also set about to define the last platform to fit the needs of bloggers — the kind of elegant experience that Movable Type and TypePad users were used to, but with the really powerful privacy controls that LiveJournal had invented. Launched in October of 2006, three years after TypePad, and five years after Movable Type, the final piece of the puzzle was Vox. Vox also reflected a lot of what we'd learned about the rest of social media on the web, and incorporated popular services like video and photo sharing sites right into the blogging experience.
Best of all, after spending more than a year of development on Vox, we were able to bring those technologies into our other platforms. One of the best examples has been Movable Type 4.0, which almost six years after launching, was revitalized with a user interface influenced by Vox, an open source version inspired by LiveJournal, and new media and management features which it shares with TypePad.
Along the way, we've also had a unique chance to work with the rest of the web industry and have seen our teams create interesting technologies like OpenID, which has become the most popular open authentication system ever. We've acquired smaller companies like SplashBlog and Rojo, which weren't just interesting from a technology perspective, but provided Six Apart with the resource that means the most: An amazing team of dedicated, creative, passionate employees. One great example is Chris Alden, who's now CEO of Six Apart, and who has been a member of the blogging community for more than half a decade.
Looking Toward the Future
A lot has changed since it was the two of us working out of our apartment. Yet even today, Six Apart is a company committed to helping our community make the best blogs in the world, to helping them reach the audiences they care about, and to leading the revolution in media that blogging has created.
I can't imagine where we'll be in a year, let alone five years, but I'm certain blogging is here to stay.
—Mena Trott
