Pete Cashmore Doesn’t Like TV, Says Naiveté is Good

Mashable – the technology website with a social media focus – is one hell of a success story. The site was launched by Pete Cashmore when he was only 19 years old, and today attracts almost 13 million unique visitors a month.

He tells Entrepreneur that he was initially attracted to the Internet because he was bed-ridden for a long period of time as a teenager, and blogging gave him a sense of productivity. And to think, some say people who blog from their beds are losers. Take that America!

Some other items we learned about Cashmore from the interview:

• He doesn’t like TV, so he doesn’t own one. “If it doesn’t come through the Internet, it’s not really compelling to me.”
• He listens to his employees. “You don’t get the best work from people if you’re guiding them versus them guiding themselves.”
• He thinks a fresh approach is a good thing. “There’s an advantage to having a certain degree of naivete about the challenges and the way things were before, so you can build something in a completely different way.”
• He’d have dinner with Albert Einstein, Bono and Richard Branson, if it was possible.

 

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