Patrick Clinger

I originally started making websites in the days of GeoCities, back when the blink tag was a thing. In the many years since, I've spent my time building software, starting companies, leading teams, and hacking away at random side projects that interested me.

In my early days, I tried to build over a dozen different businesses. It seemed like every day I had a new idea to try. My first major success online came in the late 90s with a website I built with a friend called HostedScripts.com. It was a free service that allowed you to add interactive features to your website, such as a guest book, a basic message board, or even a graphical website counter that tracked how many visitors you had (which was all the rage back in the day). Traffic to the site grew to hundreds of thousands of pageviews, and it was generating real revenue when I was just some kid in high school.

Later I decided to split off and do my own thing, so I went solo and created ProBoards. When it launched it was the best message board product on the market (in my obviously unbiased opinion). I had the site up and running near the end of 1999, but I officially launched on January 1st, 2000, because I thought that date sounded super cool. ProBoards grew to be the internet's largest free forum hosting provider, with millions of forums created and tens of millions of users joining the forums. I grew the company and eventually exited, selling the business to VerticalScope in 2021 (shout out to the great team over there!).

Bootstrapping ProBoards taught me a lot. I got into this game because I loved programming, but as my business grew I had to learn skills beyond coding. Leading a team wasn't easy, and if I'm being honest, it wasn't natural to me. I was very fortunate to have great people working with me who were willing to give me honest feedback. I listened to their feedback and became a better leader because of it.

After selling ProBoards, I stayed on with VerticalScope for nearly two years. I had a lot of fun making an impact at a larger organization after spending most of my career building and running my own business. I eventually moved on to Raptive, where I'm Vice President of Engineering, leading our Ad Code engineering teams.

I started this site to share my personal thoughts on leadership, technology, AI, and entrepreneurship. I hope you enjoy the content, and if you're interested in staying up to date with my future posts, you can subscribe to my free Substack newsletter.