Friday 23 November 2007
A Chat with Aaron Swartz ☀
- GB: In what environment did you work before that?
- AS: Before Y Combinator, I was a student at Stanford. Then I worked at Reddit for a while – the four of us packed into a small 3-bedroom apartment in Somerville, MA (I slept in the cupboard). Then we got bought by Condé Nast (the publishers of Wired, Elle, The New Yorker, Details, GQ, etc.) and they moved us out to San Francisco to work at the Wired offices and then they fired me. On the plus side, I did get this nifty shirt.
- GB: Oh my. If you had to take a guess though, why do you think they let you go? Incompatibility with an office environment?
- AS: Yeah. I was unhappy working in an office and didn’t hide it. So I’d come in late and set up lots of off-site meetings and stuff. And my boss wasn’t really thrilled about that.
- Also, I think he was upset about me disappearing for so long on vacation. One of the places I went to in Europe was the Chaos Computer Conference. And while I was there I hung out with my friend Quinn Norton, who was reporting on the event for Wired. She took my photo for one of her articles and it was featured on wired.com’s front page. “Heh,” I joked. “I bet the first time my boss finds out where I am is when he sees my photo on the front page of his own website.”
- GB: Heh. That was in Berlin?
- AS: Yes. But the best punch line was that Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, later wrote on his blog that he didn’t find out when it was on the front-page of his website – he found out when I posted that fact to my blog!
