We decided to forgo our initial revenue from website creation to focus on building a network, which made it easier to attract more companies to join Link Exchange.

One of the early companies that joined Link Exchange was Auction Web, which later became known as eBay, highlighting how even successful companies needed promotion in their early days.

One of our first customers was a comedian who used HubSpot to set up his website, showcasing the diverse range of businesses we served. In the early days of HubSpot, we built a tool called Website Grader that helped users evaluate how well their websites attracted links and were optimized for search engines.

When I returned to San Francisco, I was inspired by the explosion of technology connecting people in unprecedented ways, leading me to believe we could leverage these connections for meaningful purposes.

In the late 90s, there was unlimited demand for anyone who could create HTML, allowing us to charge high consulting rates and bootstrap our business.

Stripe's marketing strategy focused on creating a beautiful website and excellent documentation, catering specifically to developers rather than business people, which was revolutionary at the time.

In the early days of the internet, we started AudioNet, the first streaming content company, which evolved into broadcast.com, the largest multimedia site at the time.

San Francisco was once perceived as a ghost town after the dot-com crash, but the Web 2.0 boom, driven by companies like Stripe, Airbnb, and Dropbox, revitalized the city.

After selling Link Exchange to Microsoft, we started an angel fund called Venture Frogs in 1999, which was a challenging time due to the impending dot-com crash.