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IPFS News Link • Technology: Computer Hardware

Halt and Catch Fire IRL: The Evolution of Startup Culture

• Wired

It's a Friday afternoon when I ring the founding CEO from my former job at a Soho tech startup. We haven't been in touch since I left the company, but I've called to ask Marc Cenedella a few questions about his experience as a serial entrepreneur.

Cenedella is a Harvard MBA and three-time startup founder who has launched a new business every 10 years since 1994. His first go at it: starting and subsequently dissolving Forbes Pacifica, an online pet-food distributor. After his next gig at a corporation, he struck out on his own again and founded career-service site TheLadders, where he's still chairman today and meanwhile works with a six-person team on his new business, personality-rating app Knozen, which launched last year.

I want to know: Can he tell me the craziest thing he's done as entrepreneur?

"Not on the record," he laughs.

If you've never worked at a startup, his response conveys exactly the work culture you'd envision based on portrayals in TV and film: the hard-earned early days, all-nighters and glamorous overspending. If you have worked at a startup, his smug but nostalgic laugh is like an inside joke that acknowledges the experience of being part of something unique, even when it's less than glamorous.


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