Things you might not know about Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable

Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of Mashable, has a net worth of approximately 80 Million as of this year. And there are certainly no signs of him slowing down!

For those of you who do not know what Mashable is, it is a blog that covers mainly social media and tech news such as news about Facebook, Twitter or other companies such as Apple. Started in the year 2005, Mashable has grown into an empire overtaking Techcrunch, another popular blog dedicated to delivering similar news. So how did it all get started? Here are some of the things you may not know about the life and times before its position now.

Pete had started Mashable when he was just 19 in 2005. He had it run over WordPress, a well-known blogging platform. Before we go any further, Pete had already showed signs that he had passion for running businesses. Before the start-up of Mashable, he had already done other small businesses such as selling ebooks on ebay. To him, starting his own business was always his forte because he had said that he was not good at listening and taking instructions from people! So he figured the best way to avoid it is to become the boss himself!

Moving on, when Pete had this idea of starting a blog covering social media and tech news, he didn’t have a clear idea if there’s a market for it. He just went straight ahead and learnt as he went along. He also mentioned that he did not read that many books in his lifetime as he prefers to jump straight into things to see how it turns out.  He started out the blog not just as a hobby but hoping that it could be a profitable business to run someday.

So in order to determine if this was the right direction, he started working on it. Some days he will be working 20 hours in order to get some things done and covered. Like he said, he wanted to get things done as quickly and efficiently as possible to see if it works. And if it doesn’t, he would’ve wasted less time and moved on to another form of method. After 9 months of writing and experimenting, the blog was generating a lot of traffic prompting an advertising company to approach him.

They were willing to offer him approximately three thousand dollars a month to post their advertising on his blog.  Without hesitation, Pete accepted it feeling confident that this blog could actually go somewhere. Just after 9 months, Pete has been able to generate enough traffic to have a company pay him three grand a month just to put an advertising there. Is that luck? Doubt so.

Fast forward to this year, 2012, Mashable is now at its peak in the internet world. Pete was featured in ‘Forbes under 30’ and was voted one of the most influential internet celebrities. His twitter has now more than 2 million followers and has been deemed the most influential Twitter user in the world in 2009. And more importantly, some even started calling him the English version of George Clooney! Not too shabby right?