On Recode Selling

John Gruber at Daring Fireball pointed out something I missed about Recode selling to Vox: Recode had 44 full-time employees.

The advantage the internet provides to new publishers is that there’s so little overhead. You can go really far with a really small talented team. 44 employees sounds like Recode was trying to go head-to-head with the Wall Street Journal on the business/tech beat. Rather than start small and grow big organically, they wanted to start big. And so to start big they took on investors, and next thing you know, they had to sell.

How the hell did Recode have 44 full-time employees? Recode wasn't particularly well designed or feature rich. There aren't that many writers. What did everyone do?

AfterPad has one employee. Me. I'm not a professional writer, designer, or programmer. And yet I've been able to build this site on my own. No VC funding required. AfterPad isn't perfect, but it's mine.