Ted Rheingold is the "Top Dog" and founder of Dogster & Catster. In 2002, he founded web services company One Match Fire. Ted graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 with a B.A. in International Relations. Dogster recently raised $1 million in early stage funding from angel investors after operating for two and a half years. Visit the company blog here.

How did Dogster become so popular and profitable?

Those are really long answers. Luck, commitment to the community, listening
to the community, putting the community above revenue.

Profitability came from bring ad sales inside and not rely on any services.

Why did your company wait two and a half years before taking investment
money?

Investment can topple a company as easily as they can make it successful. We want to have a secure foundation to build upon before adding fuel to the fire. Also the terms we got originally for funding were not close to being in our favor because we could hardly be valued at $1,000,000 so a $3M investment would have given away 75% of the company ...

What are your future plans for the company?

We want to be all things to all pet people. If we can master that and still have room to breathe we want to become a network of passion-centric sites that cover all realms of interests.

A longer audio interview can be found at CenterNetworks.