The Printed Blog

There are a lot of people to thank.

First, I thank my wife Elaine, for giving me the opportunity to pursue a dream, and supporting me when I had to work 20 hours a day for months and months.

Second, the team – bar none, the most talented and committed group of individuals I have ever had the privilege to work with. Special thanks to Jennifer Beese, one of the top social network managers in Chicago turned operations manager at The Printed Blog – we could not have accomplished as much as we did without her tremendous hard work and dedication, even when things got tough.

Thank you to Koray Girton, a gifted designer and great friend who left his family and flew to Chicago on one-day notice in the middle of January after a single conversation… simply because I asked him to.

Thanks to Terry Mertens, Michelle Doellman, Ion Olaru, Amanda Nyren, Todd Alexander, Erin Holness, Luke Trayser, Katie Huntley, Katie Killary, and Emily Schleier, all of whom were outstanding contributors who remained engaged through the very end.

Thanks to Steve Bunes, Whitney Faile, Drew Doleski, Lauren Omura, Mandy Murphy, Chad Koskie, Jamie Villarreal, Kelli Hartsock, Vladimira Yanevska, Brian Berg, Catherine Foulkrod, and Lindsay Baron, whose early efforts helped get The Printed Blog off the ground.

The Printed Blog had a number of editors I would like to thank: Jeff Pelline, our managing editor, Laurel Dailey, our photography editor (and to Brandon Oeling, who helped us with photography at the end), Mark Cope, Claire Bidwell Smith, Carley Marks, Matthew Nickerson, and many others helped who us comb the blogosphere for the web’s best content.

Thank you to Edward Domain who proved that we could indeed sell ads successfully
for The Printed Blog.

Thank you to John Swift of John S. Swift and Co. – hands down the best printing company in the US. If you need something printed perfectly, and competitively priced, count on John Swift. He was a fantastic partner.

Besides the team and our few investors, we couldn’t have published issue one without the bloggers, photographers, and many other talented content providers. Thank you one and all…

To Neal Boulton of BastardLife, Jenny Lawson of TheBloggess, Adam Hircsh of Mashable, Mark Cuban of, well, Mark Cuban…the four of you were early contributors who set the stage for the 2,000 plus other bloggers and the 1,000 plus photographers who made the paper what it was. You have my heartfelt thanks and my apologies that we couldn’t make a go of this.

Thank you Yelp, Eventful, We Are Hunted and Guidespot for allowing The Printed Blog to syndicate your contact BACK into print.

Thank you David Segre of Wilson Sonsini for taking us on as a client.

Thank you to Fred Hoch at the Illinois Technology Association for giving us space and helping us through the most formative stage of the company’s growth.

While not a single venture capitalist would fund us, most of those with whom we met gave our business serious consideration… I will name names (the people I actually pitched, either in person or over the phone), as too often venture capital firms get bad press from an entrepreneur whom they did not fund.

Thank you Al Wasserberger for setting up the first meetings.

Thank you Stewart Alsop, Fred Gibbons, Jeremy Liew, Andy Sheehan, Mark Jacobsen,
Kevin Efrusy, and Daniel Ciporin. We also got a one-line response from Mike Moritz and what I think was a personal note from Ann Winblad, but I’m not sure. These nine venture capitalists, and Dave Segre at WS, are really decent people. They asked good questions, were thoughtful, and told me why they did not want to invest. I think they all should have, but some of these guys passed on Google, too. The only bad experience I had was with a VC firm in Chicago, and I’m not going to name them here… you can look up my review at www.thefunded.com.

I’d like to thank all of the people who handed out the paper in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, some of whom I still owe money… it wasn’t easy, in Chicago for certain, to hand out all of the papers in sub-zero temperatures…but you did it.

Thank you to Chris Snyder, formally a writer for Wired.com’s Epicenter blog, for noticing my Craigslist ad and writing a post. It was this single post that got the attention of the New York Times.

Thank you to the hundreds of print media representatives, tens of thousands of bloggers, and hundreds of thousands of commenters who took time and space to write about The Printed Blog, good or bad.

Thank you to the TV stations, in the US and abroad, that filmed us and put us on TV (and who did a bunch of live spots, too); thank you to National Public Radio, American Public Radio, Radio Classic in Paris, and the two dozen other radio stations we appeared on. And thank you to the thousands and thousands of people following us on multiple Twitter accounts and our Facebook page.

Thank you to all of you who did advertise with us. I hope the experience was worth it.

And finally, thank you to our readers all over the world. Since handing out our first issue on that frigid morning in late January, we distributed nearly 80,000 physical copies of our publication and watched people download it tens of thousands more times. Thank you for taking a portion of your day and devoting it to our paper. Thank you for your kind words and e-mails, in every language you can imagine.