Dick, would you mind giving us an introduction to FeedBurner?

FeedBurner is a simple company with a simple plan. We manage distributed media for online publishers. The hypothesis behind FeedBurner is that: in a world where all media is distributed and your audience is desegregated and fragmented, there is spiraling complexity for publishers in understanding what their audience looks like away from their website. As content is distributed to more and more endpoints via widgets and so forth, FeedBurner is in the business of managing media distribution for publishers and helping them understand and measure their audience, so that they can better understand how to monetize that audience.

FeedBurner has four distinct founders that were involved in the founding of the company. How do you ensure the relationship between the four is conducive to building a successful business? How do you build a foundation for founders to work together?

It's a good question. I think there are two important things to talk about there. One challenge is when you start the company and you are equal partners, if you will, in a company and then you go out and raise money. Well your investors want to see an organization with a distinct reporting lines and distinct responsibilities. You can't go on and grow the company with the four of us as the boss and everyone else who works here are the workers and we're going to have this "cloud organization." You have to have distinct reporting structures.

So the first challenge is making sure that everybody is comfortable with, and all the founders are comfortable with, the fact that, look, somebody is going to be the CEO and that person is going to gauge responsibilities. Eric is going to be the CTO and when the servers crash the first month of operation at 2:00 in the morning, that's going to be your problem.

You need to have this discussion before you go out and raise a bunch of money. That's the first thing that we did. We have done this in the past and we're all comfortable with our roles and we know that there are a lot of bad things that go along with the good things in whatever role you've got. I think the second point to make is that while we all started working together almost 13, 14 years ago now and we were all essentially computer science majors, computer engineers, computer science majors. We all quickly forked off into a logical grouping of the things we liked to do and those, fortunately, didn't overlap so much.

So Eric, for example, who is the CTO, really had absolutely no interest in working on revenue forecast or managing a large collection of people. And Steve, who is doing all the international business development, likes to travel internationally, likes to get on planes and go do that stuff. So there's a challenge around making sure that, hey, even though we came into this equal partners, you know I'm know reporting to Eric.

But the other aspect of that is making sure that the founders also fall into their more natural roles. Right? Just because, if for example I said. "Well, I really want to be CTO this time," you know that's just not going to work out. I'm not a technology officer.

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