Tuesday’s financial discussions were with Kobi Levy and Jake Stein from Insight Partners, the private equity firm that was buying ReadWriteWeb on behalf of Ziff Davis Enterprise. Jake looked like he’d just come out of business school (which I soon found out that he had). Despite his fresh-faced youth, he had a...

2004, twenty years ago, was the year that Web 2.0 truly began. In February, Facebook was quietly launched in a Harvard dorm room. Meanwhile, across the border in Canada, a photo sharing site called Flickr was released. Then in April, Google launched one of the first web apps that worked just like a native app:...

The due-diligence meetings with Ziff Davis Enterprise would start at midday on Monday. But first, I had arranged to meet Bernard Lunn, a freelance ReadWriteWeb writer and now my business advisor, who was based somewhere in greater New York. Around 9:00 a.m. I finally put a face to the name, when Bernard met me in...

NYC from above; photo taken by author in May 2008. As soon as I got back home, RWW made it to the top 10 on Technorati. We were now one of the world’s ten most popular blogs, based on how many websites had linked to us in the last six months. Alex had spotted it first, and Marshall confirmed it with a screenshot....

Instead of the latest installment of my serialized Web 2.0 memoir, this week I want to talk about the experience of selling a tech blogging business — and the after-life this can have, which sometimes (maybe most of the time?) can be more hell than heaven. I found out this week that ReadWrite, the current version of...

Early on Thursday morning, after a phone call with Bernard on the East Coast, I sent my email ultimatum to CMP/TechWeb. “I’ve given this a lot of thought over the past 12 hours or so,” I wrote, “and it really is time for me to make a decision.” I asked for “a firm, signed, LOI” [Letter of Intent] before 9:00 a.m. on...

Mike Azzara from Ziff Davis Enterprise had arranged a dinner for three people — he’d be bringing along a new ZDE editor named Stephen Wellman, whom he’d just hired from (of course) CMP. The dinner reservation was at a restaurant called TWO, in the trendy SoMa district of San Francisco, apparently in the original...

On the opening morning of the Web 2.0 Expo, I met Marshall Kirkpatrick for the first time in the press room, on the third floor of the Moscone Center. He was a big-boned guy, a couple of inches taller than me, with brown hair and well-trimmed beard. He looked young, an impression further emphasized by the...

'Intro to RWW' slide from a March 2008 presentation. I hadn’t seriously thought of selling ReadWriteWeb before 2008, but I knew I needed help to expand the business. Early in the new year Sean Ammirati put me in touch with Bob Evans, a senior executive at CMP Technology, a media company and coproducer of the Web 2.0...

In early November 2007 Mike Arrington and his TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde approached me about participating in a new awards competition they’d come up with, “the Crunchies.” The idea (as far as I could tell) was to replicate the Webby Awards, which had been running since 1996. The Crunchies would focus specifically...

The first sign of health problems came before I went to the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit. Late that September, I was traveling by car to Kaikoura, a scenic coastal town near the top of the South Island of New Zealand. My wife and six-year-old daughter were with me; we intended to spend a few nights there and then visit my...

MySpace party during the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit; from left to right: Prashant Agarwal, me, Sean Ammirati; photo by Brian Solis. In August 2007, I began discussions with Marshall Kirkpatrick, a former TechCrunch lead blogger who was now working for a marketing company. Marshall was from Portland and working for a local...