What an interesting period in the business media world?
Rafat Ali - the pioneer of the business blog - decided to step down two years after selling his influential and trail blazing PaidContent.org blog to The Guardian. While Ali did eventually raise some financing from Alan Patricof’s Greycroft fund, he captured the spirit of the bootstrapped startup that went on to stratospheric heights. Ali will take some time off before making a decision on the next step. I interviewed him last year, at one point we talked about the deal with The Guardian: continue reading...
Rafat Ali will go down as one of the poster children for the resurgence of the web. At a time when people were running as far away from the Web - after the Nasdaq market crumbled and took the dot com industry down with it - Ali dived deeper in the eye of the storm and launched PaidContent.org.
Somewhat akin to eBay’s mythical “pez dispenser” story, Ali claims that he launched the site as a way to showcase his writing skills in his quest to land a journalist gig somewhere. “No one was hiring at newspapers or magazines,” Ali is known for saying… but I think that’s his modesty. I presume deep down inside Ali knew that Paid Content could become the poster child for lean blog-based, trade publishing empire that we see today at his Content Next Media, Tech Crunch, Giga Om, etc. continue reading...
