Yesterday, Constance Loizos at the San Jose Mercury news was kind enough to include me in an article and sidebar about juggling involvement in multiple startups. Reporters and their editors must always make hard choices about what quotes to include and what to leave out, but in this case it caused me a problem. Constance and I spent at least 30 minutes on the phone. For better or worse, the catchiest thing I said to her was:
Basically, everyone I know is involved in five or six projects right now,” said Scott Rafer, 38, formerly CEO of the search engine Feedster and now CEO of blog tracker MyBloglog.com, cofounder of Mashery.com, a stealth-mode company aiming to help Web developers, and chairman of WiFinder.com, a Wi-Fi hotspot directory. “VCs spread their risk across numerous companies,” said Rafer. “Why shouldn’t we?”
To my ear, that sounds more than a little flip and dilettante-ish, and that’s not fair all of us working so hard on MyBlogLog. I reached out to Constance via email with my concern, and she was back to me in just a few minutes offering to add one of the more substantive, yet boring things I said to the online version of the story:
And knowing how to prioritize is critical. “You can only have one day job. The people on every project need to know what comes first. Mashery, WiFinder, et al., know that if MyBlogLog has a crisis — whether a good one or a bad one — I drop everything else to go address it.”
I took her up on it. Thanks again, Constance.