It is thanks to his good looks that Pete Cashmore is referred to as “the Brad Pitt of the blogosphere”, but as movie analogies go, Howard Hughes might be more appropriate. For the first five years after he founded Mashable — the technology news website poised to sell for £130m (€156m) — he did not meet any of the people who worked for him. Cashmore, who has 50 staff, admits that may seem strange, but “when you’re a digital native it seems natural to work over IM [instant messaging] and email”.
Besides, he was used to being alone. Cashmore, now 26 and poised to be the next internet zillionaire, started messing around on the web aged 13, when an operation to remove his appendix left him with complications that meant frequent spells in hospital and long absences from school.
He set up Mashable seven years ago, working round the clock from his bedroom in Banchory, near Aberdeen. His parents had no idea what he was up to until he was named one of Britain’s most influential bloggers and a reporter came knocking.
Last week, Mashable set the blogosphere ablaze when a blogger attending the South by Southwest technology conference in Austin, Texas, said a “little bird” had told him CNN, the global news network, was bidding for the site. The story was also reported by The New York Times, which said the two sides were in “advanced talks” about a possible acquisition. A Mashable executive “liked” the story on Facebook. CNN and Cashmore have declined to comment.
A sale would make the aptly named Cashmore a millionaire many times over, like his hero Richard Branson (the Virgin chief is one of three people Cashmore has said he would want at his ideal dinner party, along with Albert Einstein and Bono). And success has brought him out of his shell: Cashmore’s Twitter page is one of the UK’s 10 “most followed” and he has just been appointed to the next world economic forum in Davos as part of the young global leaders’ group.
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“His timing was brilliant, launching in 2005 when social media was just starting to take off, and Cashmore has cleverly leveraged social media himself,” said Ian Maude, an analyst at Enders, the media and telecommunications research house. “Mashable is promoted on Twitter and there are lots of links from Facebook. There’s clearly a cult of Pete right now and he’s enjoying the limelight. He’s a nice guy, a great ambassador for his business.”
In the public bar at the Stag Hotel in Banchory — an affluent village outside Aberdeen, favoured by oil company executives — there was pride and incredulity at the local boy’s good fortune.
“A few of the younger lads know Peter from school. They all describe him as a very quiet lad who kept himself to himself,” said one of the regulars. A former classmate added: “Peter was a scrawny wee guy who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. He was bit of a loner and I don’t remember him taking an interest in football or ever having a girlfriend.”
Indeed, Cashmore spent much of his teens at home in a modest semi with his mother, Julia, and his father, Colin, a laboratory quality manager who works for the NHS. Cashmore credits his father as his inspiration to succeed. “My dad is good at sticking with stuff and he has a strong work ethic, which is imbued in me,” he said last year. “Growing up, he would constantly ask what I was doing and was I achieving anything. Now, he’s the opposite. He’s like, ‘Oh, you should work less. It seems like you work the whole time.’ I say, ‘I do. Well, you told me!’ ”
The internet appealed, “partly because it was something I could do in bed and feel I was achieving something”. Determined to overcome his health problems, he found the internet promise something unique.
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“I didn’t enjoy education because I didn’t like being told what I should be interested in,” he said, when he was named one of Forbes magazine’s “25 web celebs” in 2009. “I was a super-overachiever, but it wasn’t for me. I had a streak of wanting to do something for myself. I’m not very employable.”
He was intrigued by the growth of websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo and began to write about the development of this new social interaction. He added information about what was happening in technology, new gadgets that were being tested and other sites that were starting up as what he initially saw as a form of research. He was searching for an idea to start up his own company, something big. Eventually it dawned on him that the blog itself, which was attracting thousands of readers — and now has 2.3m regulars — was that something.
The name came from the “mashup” trend, he explained. “In recent years, people have been combining pieces of the web in interesting ways; you might want to plot photos from your Flickr account on Google Maps, for instance. You might also want to combine music, videos and text from different services. Whenever you combine parts of the web like this, it’s called a “mashup”. These days, virtually everything on the web is remixable ... Mashable, in other words.”
Right from the start, his aim was an American audience. “There was a time-zone challenge — I’d sleep until noon, then work all through the night. I was working 18 hours a day, but it meant other blogs in Europe weren’t able to compete. It probably wasn’t good for my health, but I didn’t care about that.”
Within a year he was bringing in $3,000 (€2,277) a month in advertising and hired his first co-writer. Within two years, Mashable was in the top 10 technology blogs worldwide. Cashmore expanded slowly but surely and now stands to become rich because his business has not been reliant on private investors. “My parents told me not to take risks,” he said recently. “They’re still like, ‘Well, I don’t know if you should do that, it sounds risky’.”
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His success stems, at least in part, from creating his site in a place that could hardly be further — geographically or mentally — from Silicon Valley: “Aberdeenshire is not a place you can start a technology company and get a lot of people interested very quickly ... I mostly work from New York and San Francisco now, but going home [to Scotland] to a world where people don’t take this stuff for granted makes you explain things in a human way, to make it accessible to a broader base of people. It’s only by talking to people who aren’t in the industry that you build something massive.”
And massive Mashable is, even if industry experts are split over whether access to its readers is worth £130m. The potential sale comes on the heels of a string of similar purchases, including that of The Huffington Post news site by AOL for $315m last year, the TechCrunch blog, also by AOL, for $25m in 2010, and the British music site LastFM by CBS for $280m in 2007.
Such growing companies are attractive to the giants for the potential future advertising audience they might open up. “That audience is key,” Stuart Miles, a British blogger, said last week. “They are early adopters, they are interested in the internet, they’re sharing stuff and they know how the internet works.”
Cashmore says he still has not met everyone he employs. He does not have a TV: “If it doesn’t come through the internet it’s not really compelling to me. I don’t like being broadcast to, I want to participate.”
Two years ago, the softly spoken Mashable chief executive was featured — just behind Andy Murray — in a list of Scotland’s most eligible bachelors and asked about his dream date. “It would be a classic dinner in Los Angeles. I love it there. I don’t have any celebrity crushes so I would like it to be with someone smart.”
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At about the same time, he started going out with Lisa Bettany, a former Canadian figure skater turned photographer who co-created Camera+, an iPhone app. In a curious echo of Cashmore’s story, Bettany got involved with the internet nine years ago, after she broke her back in a skating accident. Bed-ridden and forced to give up her dream of competing in the Olympics, she was lent a camera by a friend and started posting photos on her blog, mostlylisa.com.
Bettany has filmed a “day in the life” video about her boyfriend and is now travelling round the world, taking pictures with an iPhone, blogging as she goes. She has more than 1m followers on Google+, Twitter and Facebook.
Success — and having a beautiful woman in tow — seems to have done wonders for Cashmore’s confidence. He is a frequent attendee at techie conferences and an advocate of the internet as a tool for social good. On stage last year, he talked to Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel prize winner, about the future of ethics in a digitally connected world.
Cashmore’s Facebook page shows him standing, collar fashionably turned up, in front of snow-covered mountains, wearing designer sunglasses and the merest hint of a smile. His interests reveal his love of classic rock and blues music. Perhaps appropriately, the tracklist of one of the soon-to-be richest men in Britain shows he has been listening to Greenbacks by Ray Charles.