There was never any danger of Business 2.0 ever going under.
There certainly was a lot of potential in the air for doing a magazine which focused on the way business, in particular, was being transformed by the Internet.
The story of the Internet is this incredibly strong, exciting change.
The stock market can be down, but the stock market is not an indication of where people's spirits and enthusiam are, and where their intellectual energy is.
The magazine was being started by a company that had no experience in business magazine publishing. It was a little difficult to get people to sort of buy into it and to join the staff, but we did.
The hardest part of it was really being away from my family - I have two small children. Last year I took over 20 business trips, so being away from them was hard.
The collective energy of everyone is what really made Business 2.0 exciting.
The best rock musicians are the most exciting people in the world.
See, what we were going to do was say, the Internet is this great business strategy tool.
Rock stars are incredibly energizing to me.
People who say that the Internet is the bubble are incredibly misguided.
People say we were an overnight success. It took us a year to be an overnight success.
It's very rare that publications double their frequency.
I'm a history buff, and right now we're sitting on one of the most dramatic historical shifts that this planet has ever seen and we have a front row seat for it.
I think what we should have done is integrate the web site with the magazine much earlier in the process.
I think up until that time a lot of focus on Internet coverage was either sort of the bits and bytes aspect of it, sort of the high-tech aspect of it, and the sociological aspect of it, which is how it was transforming culture.
I think Fast Company has a tremendously smart focus and execution.
I got to sit down with people who I admired, and have conversations with some of the greatest thinkers and artists and performers. It's a huge privilege for me to be a journalist.
Certainly there are bubble-like valuations of certain companies, but I don't think anyone out there believes that we're going to go back to doing business the way we used to do business.
Business people have been made into these rock stars because they've made a lot of money.
Business 2.0 was hugely profitable last year, and will be profitable this year.
And I love writing. I've always loved writing.
I still believe that the mission of Business 2.0 is very strong, very fundamental, and we're really at the beginning of where they're going to take us.
You can't suppress creativity, you can't suppress innovation.
You lie awake at 3 in the morning thinking of story ideas. You're online at 8 a.m. on a Sunday or midnight on a Wednesday. It's a job that you never push aside.
