smugblog: Chris MacAskill

In big-time consumer press, you’d think the big brands with big PR departments would steal the show.
But what if the little, family-owned company with only 200,000 paying customers had something completely unique that really mattered?
Fortunately, thanks to our customers, we do: themes & customization.
Many thanks to families like Lee Shepherd’s, who designed several [...]

Once upon a time I founded Fatbrain.com (because great minds think a lot), took it public, and later sold it to Barnes & Noble. It sold books to geeks, along with other stuff geeks needed like Sun and IBM manuals, training CDs, etc.

What made Fatbrain as good as it was is that Amazon was [...]