Mike McCue

As an entrepreneur, in many ways it's like looking into the crystal ball for what my company will hopefully go through as it starts to think about bigger challenges - scaling internationally, getting ready to go public, and all those different things.

In high school, I started my first company, called M Cubed Software. We named it that because it was me and two other guys named Mike.

Kind of like Google crawls the Web, we crawl the social networks. Where Google analyzes links and Web pages, we look at the same thing with people. So we can tell, for example, who you interact with more frequently. Or if it's not frequency, maybe it's consistency.

You don't feel like you have to interact with a whole bunch of people when you get on Flipboard. It's not a source of social anxiety.

I.B.M. was my college education, effectively. They were very good at teaching you management.

The Web as we've known it for a long time has been pages linking and pointing to other pages.

That's why we created Flipboard as a social magazine meant for an iPad, meant for a large touch-screen device. That idea of content presented beautifully, oriented around communities and special topics of interest, is really powerful.

I think the screen size chosen for the iPad is perfect for publishers to render content beautifully, for games to be played.

My dad died from cancer when I was 18, and my mom was in a really tough spot. So I wanted to try to help at home. I had started doing some technology consulting.

One of the things that Flipboard is great at is certainly looking at the news in a realtime format, which a lot of the personal news aggregators don't really focus on, so you can see things right up to the minute.