{"id":20476,"date":"2018-11-27T08:48:47","date_gmt":"2018-11-27T13:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/company\/stories\/idea-website-turned-squarespace\/"},"modified":"2022-03-04T23:11:52","modified_gmt":"2022-03-05T04:11:52","slug":"idea-website-turned-squarespace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/company\/stories\/idea-website-turned-squarespace\/","title":{"rendered":"How an Idea for a Website Turned into Squarespace"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Back in 2003, Anthony Casalena wanted to create a website with a blog, a photo gallery and a bunch of other projects he had coded. He was a computer science major at the University of Maryland and started working on his website between classes and homework assignments. After writing maybe one or two blog posts, Casalena founded Squarespace<\/a> instead. He chose that name because computer monitors used to be square and this was the available space within the screen, plus the domain name was available, and he thought the name warranted a simple logo. The blog hosting service he started as a one-man show in his dorm room has since grown to a company that provides an all-in-one platform for websites. In 2017, it was valued at $1.7 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On Monday, October 22, 2018, Bloomberg Television\u2019s Scarlet Fu discussed Squarespace, entrepreneurship and the importance of website design with Casalena as part of the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Speaker Series at Bloomberg\u2019s Global Headquarters in New York City.<\/p>\n

Casalena admits that blogging isn\u2019t his forte and, while he gravitated towards the more technical aspects of his website and its design, he found the development process cumbersome. At the time, no one offered an all-in-one solution \u2013 he had to assemble different pieces of software on a hosted system, maintain the servers and run his own analytics. Second, he cared deeply about what his site looked like and how it represented his thoughts, because that would be how people perceived him and his ideas.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started Squarespace for myself because I wanted those two things, and then quickly realized that perhaps more people cared about those same two things,\u201d said Casalena.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n