Sitting Down with Adam Ostrow of Mashable – Part 4: On Adam
December 5, 2008 :: Steve FisherIn Part 4 (the final part) of our interview with Adam Ostrow of Mashable, we had a chance to get a little introspective and look inward on things. Our interview continues below…
Steve: You founded Readburner and it has grown by leaps and bounds since March of this year. What are your plans for the company?
Adam: Like I said earlier, I think building a destination site is really hard right now. While we have a nice following at ReadBurner, the bigger play is in becoming a platform, and letting developers do interesting things with our data that helps them increase engagement and pageviews. We recently launched the first version of our platform with Duncan Riley’s new project – The Inquisitr – as our launch partner. While we’ll continue to add cool features to ReadBurner site, as a business, we can do a lot more in providing tools that help other websites improve their metrics.
Steve: Living here in the DC area yet working in the Web 2.0 community abroad you have a unique perspective. What are your thoughts on the differences between the DC metro and Silicon Valley tech communities?
Adam: The DC tech community has come a long way since I was in college here at The University of Maryland. While the focus used to be mostly tech companies that sold to the government, we’re now starting to see a lot more consumer-focused Web companies with an international audience. Silicon Valley is still undoubtedly #1 when it comes to a density of tech companies and people in a specific geographic area, but I think it’s not nearly as challenging to start a tech company from elsewhere today as it was 5-10 years ago.
Steve: Outside of your busy entrepreneurial roles, what do you do for fun?
Adam: I love sports…golf, basketball, and football. I also play video games and enjoy scotch…usually separately.
Steve: How does someone reach you if they want to say hello or ask a question?
Adam: twitter.com/adamostrow has become my favorite mode of communicating, but you can also email me at ostrow@gmail.com
Interview Parts with Adam Ostrow:
Part 1 – Intro
Part 2 – Adam on Mashable
Part 3 – Adam on Entrepreurship
Part 4 – Adam on Adam
Comments are moderated and will appear shortly. See terms.
