Open any business publication on any given day and you'll find wall-to-wall coverage of startups chasing their next funding round and Fortune 500 companies managing their next quarter. It's not that those stories don't matter. It's that they crowd out everything else.
Small businesses, the ones with five employees, or twelve, or twenty, drive the majority of the economy and employ most of the people in it. They don't have press teams or investor updates. They have owners who are trying to stay on top of things while also running the business. Most of what gets published wasn't written for them.
Bookmark exists to fix that. Twice a week, we cover the news, tools, and ideas that actually matter to people running small businesses, without the jargon, the startup hype, or the trend pieces about companies that exist in a different universe than yours.
I co-founded Fathom, an underwater drone company that raised over $190,000 on Kickstarter and went through Techstars. I made every mistake a first-time founder can make and it turned out to be a pretty good education.
I spent five years at Yale's Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking building entrepreneurship programs and spent time with hundreds of founders learning what they actually needed. The pattern was consistent: the resources that exist are built for startups chasing venture capital, not for people building durable, profitable businesses on their own terms.
These days I run community at Bamboo Grand Rapids, a coworking and event space in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I publish Bookmark. Every day I'm in a room with small business owners, freelancers, and operators who are running real companies. That's why this exists.
