

Kawasaki and Truemors: The stupidest idea ever? Not anymore. - nickb
http://www.mercurynews.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?articleId=7059903&siteId=568

======
create_account
Venture funding: The stupidest idea ever? VC WAS DISSATISFIED WORKING ON SMART
IDEAS, SO HE WENT THE OTHER WAY By Elise Ackerman Mercury News Article
Launched: 10/02/2007 01:35:04 AM PDT

    
    
     As managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, Guy Kawasaki funded all the really smart ideas he could find. None hit it big.
    

So earlier this year the guru of Silicon Valley start-ups decided to fund a
really dumb idea that cost as little as possible.

In May, Kawasaki started Truemors, a site specializing in what it calls "true
rumors" submitted by readers. It cost less than $13,000 to launch and was
almost immediately dubbed "the worst site ever" by a leading European
technology news site.

Why would a respected venture capitalist and author of bestselling business
books make a site like Truemors his next act? Because Kawasaki, 53, wanted to
get firsthand experience with a user-generated, Web 2.0, social-media Web
site.

He also felt that starting the site would illustrate what he saw as a problem
with venture capital - these Web 2.0 sites did not need lots of funding, and
even if they did it was becoming harder for VCs to pick the winners.

For nine years, Kawasaki and his partners had invested millions of dollars in
companies that seemed like smart bets. They had their share of successes, but
nothing on the order of Google or Yahoo.

Meanwhile, ideas he dismissed became stock market sensations.

Like Yahoo. In 1995, venture capitalist Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital
asked Kawasaki if he'd like to interview to be chief executive of Yahoo. "It
was a list of David and Jerry's (co-founders Filo and Yang) favorite Web
sites," Kawasaki recalled. "It had no business plan."

Kawasaki said no. Years passed. Two guys from Stanford created yet another
search engine. "The 15th search engine - what a dumb idea," Kawasaki quipped
about his reaction. That turned into Google.

"The only thing you can conclude is that it's a crap shoot," Kawasaki said in
a recent interview at his home office in Atherton. "You have no idea what is
going to succeed."

Bill Reichert, Kawasaki's partner at Garage Technology Ventures, said the
tipping point for his partner came after Kawasaki chaired a panel discussion
featuring start-ups like Hot or Not - a Web site where men and women submit
photos to be rated by strangers - and Plenty of Fish - a free dating site.

Neither site had raised venture capital, but both were enjoying advertising
sales of more than a million dollars a year. That made it clear to the folks
at Garage that the problem was the venture capital model itself, which seemed
out of whack.

Kawasaki decided to find out how little it cost to start a Web 2.0 company
himself. He paid $4,500 to Web developers in South Dakota whom he had met
through his personal blog. He spent $4,824 on legal fees. He spent almost
$3,000 more on a logo, domain names and other miscellaneous expenses.

And he began devoting himself to what he truly loved: Selling products and
ideas.

At Apple Computer in the 1980s and 1990s, Kawasaki had helped turn Macintosh
users into Apple fanatics. He left the company in 1997, and made a career as a
venture capitalist and speaker. His book "The Art of the Start" became a bible
for would-be entrepreneurs.

Some of his key advice: "Don't be afraid of polarizing people," and "Don't let
the bozos grind you down."

Two days after he launched Truemors, Kawasaki discovered the value of his own
advice.

Kawasaki had wanted the site to be a place where news and gossip met. He
imagined his average reader as a Google programmer who was about to go on a
date with an East Bay non-profit activist.

What would they talk about? Truemors could help. Its news items covered
everything from politics to sports, Hollywood gossip and technology culled
from the Web and, occasionally, firsthand accounts.

"I promise, if you read Truemors, it will make you a more interesting person,"
Kawasaki said.

Unlike Digg, a similar user-generated site that lets people rank stories on
its front page, Truemors lists stories in the order they were submitted. Users
can vote to move a story to a "Greatest" page - or to the dumpster if they
think something is untrue.

The blogosphere's first reaction to Truemors was a blistering attack. A hacker
broke in. Obscenities were submitted as news. Kawasaki himself was trashed.

"I have a very low opinion of the blogosphere," Kawasaki said. "I think it is
made up of about 250,000 people who are mostly 45-year-old men who live with
their mother and have dead cats in their refrigerators."

Kawasaki didn't let the bozos get him down. He cleaned up his site. The
attacks quickly died down.

Earlier this month, the European news outfit with the scathing early review
recanted. "We're big enough to admit that Truemors is definitely not the
world's worst Web site any longer," Martin Veitch, executive editor of IT
Week, wrote in a Sept. 10 article on theinquirer.net, a technology news site.

Kawasaki said the coverage was responsible for a huge spike in page views,
which are now averaging about 150,000 a month, according to Google analytics.

Drew Curtis, founder of FARK, a Web site of interesting and amusing news
stories that was one of Kawasaki's inspirations, said those numbers are pretty
good. He said FARK, which now gets 53 million page views a month, got only
50,000 page views in its first year. FARK was launched in 1999.

"He certainly has critical mass," Curtis said of Kawasaki.

Kawasaki insists he wants the site to be a success, but he acknowledges that
the stakes are not high. His monthly break-even point is only $3,000.

Kawasaki is still a venture capitalist and continues working with Garage's
portfolio of companies. "Truemors helps me understand Web 2.0 better than any
other experience," he said. "Life is good for entrepreneurs these days."

------
aston
Print link (no registration):
[http://www.mercurynews.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/pr...](http://www.mercurynews.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?articleId=7059903&siteId=568)

~~~
omouse
Isn't it amazing how their registration shit is easily defeated? :D

------
SwellJoe
150,000 page views? That's not very much, is it? My book on the web was
getting 30,000 pageviews a day when it was first published...and these days it
gets about 100,000 per month in its current wiki form four years later (about
1000 visitors per day and slowly climbing). And it's not at all Web 2.0 or
constantly new. Our business website even gets 100k page views per month
(similarly, 1000-1500 visitors per day), and we definitely don't consider that
a triumph.

I'm not begrudging him success with Truemors. I, unlike a lot of folks here,
think very highly of Kawasaki. I found his books inspiring and occasionally
educational, and his Art of the Start presentation is awesome. But I think
it's too early to call it a success at 150k page views per month...the 250k
users thing doesn't quite gibe with the 150k page views...that would mean that
almost no one EVER comes back to Truemors after their first visit, which is a
very bad thing.

~~~
gommm
What book ?

~~~
SwellJoe
The Book of Webmin. It was published by No Starch Press in 2003, sold modestly
(but got lots of readers on the web, too). It's now been combined with Jamie
Cameron's book about Webmin (which was published in the same year) to form a
wiki at <http://doxfer.com/Webmin>

------
dcurtis
From the first time I heard about Truemors, I thought it was stupid. And it's
still stupid. The only reason it gets any press/traffic at all is because of
Kawasaki. You always hear of it as "Kawasaki's Truemors."

At least the man knows how to leverage slight success on his name's reputation
alone.

------
donna
If Guy could get paparazzi to publish real _inquiry minds want to know_ news
and somehow give them the same amount of cash for the news; now that would be
an interesting competitive business.

------
jsjenkins168
Can someone with an account please summarize? I am curious.

Edit: The article basically talks about how Truemors is not as bad as it once
was, and is slowly building a better reputation as they learned from some
mistakes, like how to keep the content clean and useful. Nothing revolutionary
here..

------
dfranke
I'm not registering to read this.

~~~
herdrick
I decided to break my rule of "no registering to read" and immediately
regretted it. They demand that you pick a password with numbers and letters!
To read a newspaper article!

------
asdf333
150K a month... is not alot of views....

------
shadowplay
> _"The only thing you can conclude is that it's a crap shoot," Kawasaki said
> in a recent interview at his home office in Atherton. "You have no idea what
> is going to succeed."_

(Guy passed up on Yahoo and Google.) I think to someone without the requisite
skill necessary to evaluate the technology and people it's like a crapshoot,
sure.

However, I think a more accurate analogy would be that it's poker. Luck is a
factor but it's dominated by skill (execution). If you're not an expert player
then it _seems_ like it's all luck; but expert players finish at or near the
top over and over again.

Start-ups are like players that don't have a track record, so you have to
watch their play carefully to decide if they're good or not. But in order to
do that accurately you have to be an expert yourself.

