Interview: Kim Hastreiter, The Iconic Editrix Behind Paper Magazine

On Paper's evolution... When we first started out, the best part was we had a very strong community. It’s not a huge community, but it’s an influential community where the people in our community are the do-ers and they start everything. So brands, a lot of times, would realize that it was a good type of person that they want even though we didn’t have like, a zillion of them. These people had big communities of their own, so they were ambassadors in a way. We were also pretty early online because my partner’s kind of a techie. We were the first print magazine to make a website in 1994. Before there was Netscape, we had a bulletin board. It used to just be words before there were browsers. You used to have to type in all these symbols and it was crazy, but there were these bulletin boards and we were doing them. We always wanted to do a daily, and we realized the Internet was the perfect way to do a daily. I always say, you start your company and then you end up with a different company. You start your store like a company making chairs and you’re ending up making, I don’t know, dog leashes. Is that a sign of success to you? Well, I think it’s a success to be nimble and to take your assets and use them to pivot to where you need to keep going. We’ve always believed in the power of print and paper and our content, the concept of "paper" and what we stand behind. And all of that hasn't changed, just the delivery system changed. People of your age really don’t read print magazines, but that doesn’t mean that the message and information and the beauty or all that stuff can’t be delivered in another way. So you just have to adjust your business and use all your assets in a great way where you can maximize.