Wired: Life in the [Andover.net] Quiet Period

“Rob Malda launched Slashdot, built a community hundreds of
thousands of nerds strong, sold his company for millions, took the
IPO ride with his new corporate parent. And told his diary the
whole story.”

“DAY 1: File S1 It’s been a long couple of weeks. Andover
finally announced its IPO today. The process is frustrating. We had
to be careful about the actual announcement – there were
restrictions even on that. I wanted to write up an explanation of
the open IPO. I wanted to talk about the Red Hat letter and what we
learned from it and how we wanted to do things differently.”

“DAY 26 I’ve been posting less over the past few weeks; of
course, the conspiracy theorists churn out all sorts of reasons for
it: I’m dying. I’m quitting. I’m lazy now that I’m supposedly about
to become fabulously wealthy. The truth is that I’ve been pulling
strings behind the scenes and rewriting large lumps of code. Server
stuff. Perl. Of course, nobody wants to believe that – it’s so
boring.”

Complete
Story