Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Ed Batista excerpted part of what Jason Calcanis had to say about re-inventing oneself, taped during a Dave Winer coffee notes:
You have to reinvent yourself, and sometimes you have to kill your previous persona. I had to kill [my] Silicon Alley Reporter persona to become Weblogs, Inc. I’ll have to kill Weblogs, Inc. to be Netscape, kill Netscape to be whatever comes after that. You can’t live on your past brand, or else it owns you, and you no longer own it.
Batista wrote:
…a pre-existing persona can also be a hindrance when you need to make a major change, and sometimes you just need to blow it up and start from scratch.
Though I looked at my butt and there isn’t a burn mark, I have noticed that there are still 466 Blogline subscriptions to Burningbird. That means 466 people are missing out on all the fun.