I had one simple idea about telling friends about arts and technology events. People in the community suggested everything else to us, and that's our theme. We're really run by the people who use the site. We just run the infrastructure, and help out with problems.

I want you to know, at this very moment, I am simulating normal human behavior.

I need to make an okay living. The people who work for us need to. But after you make a comfortable living, how much more do you need? It's like I make a joke about nerd values, because I'm very much in the rich nerd tradition. And you know, we say, like, hey, people pay us for this stuff, like programming. You know, what else do we need?

A lot of publishers have close relationships with people in power. So the press, which used to speak truth to power, doesn't. The big result of that has been the erosion of trust.

I feel that one of the best things a person can do for another is to create a job. So you do OK commercially, and then you try to make a difference of some sort.

My take on the whole dot-com bubble was that a lot of people who wanted to make a lot of money got too excited and hyped up the commercial aspects of the Internet prematurely. I think the vision of the Internet as a democratizing medium - as everyone's printing press - is real. We got distracted from that by the mass hallucinations of the bubble.

We don't have much in the way of a business strategy. Like no business plan. Which I say to torment all my friends who are VCs or MBAs. That's always entertaining. The deal is, it's a mixture of luck and persistence.