Andrew at Six Apart

About two years ago Andrew Anker emailed Ben and I and asked if we wanted to meet up for lunch. Although I knew the name, I had to do a search to see what I could find about him on Google. I stumbled onto the first result, a links.net page written by Justin Hall. The first line:

"Andrew acted like a big brother. Snide, know it all condescension, with deference thrown in for civility."

And a little farther below, Justin writes:

"From whispers and tales I gathered he'd lead a wild life, sometime in his past, but now he's family man, with kids, wife, saab, pastoral dwelling.

"Yeah, I'm tripping already."

We also gathered from more recent web pages that he was a General Partner at August Capital.

Now, the venture partner thing didn't bother me as much as that Grateful Dead comment. I mean, it's one thing to be a venture capitalist...

So, I said to Ben "are you going to write him back?" and Ben said "no, are you?" Needless to say, neither one of us wrote him back.

Fast forward two years, Andrew has left venture capital and is still interested in Six Apart. This time as a member of the team and not a VC. In spite of his "know it all condescension," we hired him anyway as our Executive Vice President of Corporate Development.

I share an office with Andrew and Barak and finally realize that the Dead comment is quintessential Andrew. A third of the time, you can't take him seriously, the other third, you want to smack him and the final third he has something good to say. (Actually, most of the time these thirds are not exclusive of each other).

Regardless, he's a valuable add to Six Apart and has added much structure to the corporate development side of Six Apart. He gets weblogs, has his own (or two or three) and, despite (or maybe because of) his smartass tendencies, is quite a good fit for the company.