Many times I've gone on tours with Paul Anka. He would have someone sitting behind him to keep people from even talking to him. You were almost in a little restricted area there.

I still think my whole career was accidental. I didn't pursue it. I feel like I'm cheating sometimes.

Yeah. I've been pretty fortunate to travel I guess, all around the place.

Yeah. I'm amateurish. I can play enough to write a song, or strum on a little guitar to write out a song. But, I don't play well at all. I wouldn't even attempt for a second to play in public.

The biggest challenge is to build the team and start the company, while hiring people, raising money, building a brand which has no history, all at the same time. You're doing a lot of things that in an established company are already done.

Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the sabermetrics formulas used not only by oddsmakers but general managers in hiring players. So the amateur fantasists ended up creating some of the algorithms that Oakland GM Billy Bean's statisticians used to win games with less salary money available for star players.

Other than that one year, Salon has been very cautious about the way it spends money. For instance, since last year, we've had virtually no marketing budget. It's just word of mouth. And our circulation continues to grow that way by breaking news stories.

Apart from earning an awful lot of money, why would you go to Hollywood?