Mena Trott
Mena Trott is a prominent figure in the blogging community, best known as the co-founder and former president of Six Apart, a company she established with her husband, Ben Trott. An early adopter of blogging, Mena created Movable Type, a user-friendly blogging platform, out of her dissatisfaction with existing software. This innovation played a crucial role in the blog revolution by enabling individuals with limited technical skills to engage in blogging. Mena's background includes a degree in English from Santa Clara University, where she was influenced by her husband's academic success.
After beginning her career in Silicon Valley during the tumultuous dot-com era, Mena transitioned to blogging as a means of connecting with others, ultimately leading her to develop Movable Type alongside Ben. While initially distributed for free, the platform later adopted a commercial model, which sparked discussions about the balance between accessibility and profitability in software. By 2004, Six Apart boasted over a million registered users, earning Mena accolades such as being named one of PC Magazine's people of the year. Following her tenure at Six Apart, she founded the Heynerd Group in 2012, a marketing firm focused on technology, while also maintaining her presence as a blogger across various platforms. Mena Trott's journey reflects her significant impact on the blogging landscape and her commitment to fostering a community around shared ideas and creativity.
Subject Terms
Mena Trott
Cofounder of Six Apart and creator of Movable Type
- Born: September 16, 1977
- Place of Birth: Woodland Hills, California
Primary Company/Organization: Six Apart
Introduction
Mena Trott was the president of Six Apart, a company she cofounded with her husband, Ben Trott. Mena was an early blogger, and the Trotts developed Movable Type, one of the tools within Six Apart, because she was dissatisfied with the blogging software available to her. Mena Trott is sometimes called the founder of the blog revolution because of the popularity of Six Apart and its tools, including not only the easy-to-use blogging tool Movable Type but also the blog-hosting service Typepad; these tools made it possible for people with limited technical skills to become involved in blogging.
Early Life
Mena Grabowski Trott grew up in California and was the teenage sweetheart of her husband Ben Trott. She was not a particularly good student in high school, except in English and history, but she became interested in her studies when she began dating Ben, who was the class valedictorian. The couple also attended Santa Clara University together, and Mena has recalled that they were competitive with each other in their studies. Both graduated in 1999, Mena with a bachelor's degree in English and Ben with a bachelor's degree in mathematics.
Life's Work
After graduating from college, Trott entered the workforce in Silicon Valley just as the dot-com bubble of 2000 was about to burst. In this volatile atmosphere, many companies that had been founded on an idea or product that seemed promising went bankrupt rapidly. Trott's first job was at a start-up company that was building a portal to help parents monitor their children's school performance. When that company went broke, she joined a design firm, which also went broke. She began keeping an online diary, DollarShort.org, in 2001, and the attention and response granted her fairly ordinary personal thoughts persuaded her that blogging had a commercial future, as people's interests seemed to be shifting away from being passive recipients of media and toward creating their own.
Part of the reason Trott became interested in blogging was that she wanted to connect with people online; she felt isolated because of her heavy work schedule and the fact that most of her nonwork time was spent with her husband. During a period in 2001 when both Mena and Ben were out of work, they collaborated in creating Movable Type, a program to facilitate blogging; Mena did the design for the program and Ben did the coding. The impetus for creating Movable Type was Mena's dissatisfaction with the tools available to post her own blogs, and initially they distributed Movable Type for free, asking only for donations (as was the custom with much shareware at the time).
Neither Mena nor Ben was familiar with the process for starting a business, but the entrepreneur Joi Ito was a Movable Type user and arranged for a meeting with Barak Berkowitz, who would later become Movable Type's chief executive officer (CEO). Initially the Trotts' venture received less than a million dollars in start-up funding, and the company expanded slowly; Trott later recalled that she and her husband were reluctant to spend the investor's money, and in retrospect she has expressed regret that they did not hire more programmers and get a marketable product ready more quickly.
Movable Type was immediately popular with bloggers: soon after Trott announced it on her blog, about two thousand people signed up to be notified when Movable Type became available. However, the Trotts were slow to adopt a commercial attitude toward Movable Type: Until 2004, it was offered under a number of different license options, and all licenses but the commercial one were free. Even the commercial license was underpriced: It cost $150 for any number of installations within a company. Trott eventually realized that if other companies were using her product to make money, she should be able to make money off them. In 2004, Movable Type changed the licensing structure and began charging all users, a decision that generated some backlash from personal users and highlighted a philosophical issue that is still germane to software creators: Is their software just another commercial product that they are entitled to sell at a price the market will bear, or is it more like information to which everyone should have access? Trott took a middle ground on this question, stating that while she was in business to make money, she also had the goal of facilitating blogging for millions of people.
By 2004, the Trotts' Six Apart (a name chosen because its two founders were born six days apart) had more than one million registered users. That year, Trott was named one of PC Magazine's people of the year and was also named one of the top innovators under age thirty-five by Technology Review, a journal published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Trott gave an invited talk at a TED conference in 2006.
Six Apart went through several name and ownership changes in 2010 and 2011; by 2011, Six Apart was owned by the Japanese IT company Infocom, and Typepad and Movable Type were developed, marketed, and supported by SAY Media. Trott remained on the SAY Media board of directors from 2010 to 2012.
In 2012, Trott launched the Heynerd Group, a marketing firm that largely caters to technology companies. She remained a partner there in 2024.
Personal Life
Trott was married to Ben Trott, with whom she founded Six Apart; they have a daughter together. In May 2012, Trott announced their divorce. After they sold the company, she remained an active blogger, posting on SixApart.com, DollarShort.org, and SewWeekly.com. The latter was a personal blog turned group venture devoted to sewing projects that she published from 2010 to 2012.
Bibliography
Lacy, Sarah. Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0. New York: Gotham, 2008. Print.
Livingston, Jessica. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. New York: Springer, 2007. Print.
McNulty, Scott. Building a Typepad Blog People Want to Read. Berkeley: Peachpit, 2010. Print.
Myers, Greg. The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis. London: Continuum, 2010. Print.
“The Universal Diarist.” The Economist 25 Nov. 2006: 68. Print.