stevenberlinjohnson.com

Baton Passing

It's almost two years to the day since I originally decided to put together a team and raise a little money to build outside.in, after the gentle prodding of my friends (and now outside.in board members) Andy Karsch and Mark Bailey. At the time, the idea was that I would help put together a prototype, and make a couple of early hires, and then if things seemed promising, we'd find a real CEO to run it, and I'd go back to writing the next book, which I was already under contract to write for Riverhead.

Obviously, that didn't exactly go according to plan -- though for excellent reasons. The site quickly got way too interesting, and the people I was working with (my co-creator John Geraci and our super-talented CTO Cory Forsyth, and then our first wave of investors and early employees) were all just too stimulating to hand off to a new CEO. And the fact was I couldn't really get the problems we were trying to solve out of my head -- even if I'd wanted to go back to writing a new book. So my tenure as CEO ended up lasting much longer than I had intended. And though I did in fact finally start writing the new book a few months ago (more about that in another post), I had convinced myself that I could run a 20-person company and write a book at the same.

But then I got introduced to Mark Josephson, who was at the time president of the ad network company Seavast, and who had helped build About.com before that. We hit it off very quickly, and it was immediately clear to me that he would bring a set of skills and experience to the CEO job that I didn't have, skills that in many ways were more suited to where outside.in was in its evolution as a business. Fortunately for us, he saw a similar opportunity in outside.in, and a few weeks ago he officially joined us as CEO. We're announcing it today, along with a $3 million round of financing that we just closed on Monday.

My new role at outside.in will be as an active Executive Chairman -- I'm still very much involved in the day-to-day business, but trying to leave open the mornings for writing. If all goes well, you'll see a steady flow of new features and partnerships from outside.in through the year, and then a new book from me in early 2009. So good news all around!

Go Buy Microcosm Right Now!

Carl Zimmer may be my favorite science writer around today (others seem to agree), so I'm excited to report that his new book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life hit the shelves yesterday. I had the opportunity to read it in manuscript form, and it's really an exceptional book -- what Carl calls an "(un)natural history of E. coli" -- the world's most famous microbe. Having just published a book that partially starred a bacterium myself, I know how hard it is to make a book about microbial life engaging to human readers, but Carl pulls it off brilliantly here -- it's creepy, mind-twisting, and delightful all at the same time. It's the kind of book that literally expands your perspective on the world -- it helps you see how this alternative universe of tiny life forms is bound up crucially in our own day-to-day experience. So go check it out now....