Posted Wednesday, Apr 24, 2013
Marco Arment’s career has come in two main acts: as the first employee of Tumblr, he helped create a service that changed the fundamental nature of blogging by introducing both ease of creation and social networking. While there, he toyed with a service, to let him read Web pages offline without formatting, that became Instapaper. In late 2010, he left Tumblr to focus on that service full time. Now Marco is a successful podcaster and the editorial director of The Magazine — the best publication ever created — at which I’m the editor and he’s my boss! (I still have a job after we recorded the podcast.)
Our conversation will be aired in two parts, each about an hour long. In this first part, we talk about how as a Tumblr developer Marco found out he didn’t want to manage people, how Instapaper developed, and issues of managing resources and scaling. In the second, we move further into podcasting, The Magazine, blogging, advertising, and other areas.