Laurel Touby: “I Haven’t Taken a Real Vacation Since I Started the Company in 1994″

FishbowlNY caught up with mediabistro founder Laurel Touby for a feature interview as she begins her six-month sabbatical, traveling the world with husband Jon Fine.

On what she is most proud of:

When you look back at the hundreds or thousands of Internet companies that were around when we started in 1994, there’s not many of them left. There was Nerve and AOL, but The Knot wasn’t there, Google wasn’t there, YouTube didn’t exist. I wish you could take a snapshot of the Web and see what was there at the time and what is still there. There’s not a lot that’s survived.

On if she had any “pangs of guilt” from selling mediabistro two years ago or going on sabbatical:

No, not really. I always thought of myself as sort of an adoptive parent, because when I got funding for the company in 1996 — I got funding from VCs, who were pretty serious investors — they said to me, “Are you sure you can do what it takes? One day you may not be CEO, you may have to sell it, you may have to go public and let someone else run it and it may become a huge thing that you aren’t capable of running.

Touby is currently in Italy and this Italian PRNewser certainly agrees with this statement: “Right now, it’s harvest season in Italy and Italians really know how to relax.” Read the full interview here and check out Touby and Fine’s blog chronicling their travels, Culture Tripping.

(Photo by Jon Fine)

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