SPEAKER_00: Like we always do with this time, I go for mine, I get to shine, let's go your hands up.

SPEAKER_05: So welcome, special thanks to our sponsors, Ustream and DNAmail, DNAmail, DNAmail.com. DNAmail.com, you can pull out my screen and you'll see what they offer for you. They offer Microsoft Exchange hosting, Google App hosting, they're an incredible company, they do a great job. And they've been great supporters of the show. We thank them and we thank Ustream for making this possible. And we usually do shows on Fridays, but we had somebody in from out of town, Lockhart Steele from Curbed. And I wanted to have him on the show, I've been waiting to have him as a guest. And we're going to get to him in just a minute, so we did a special Monday edition. Nobody knows the show's going on except for the 50 or 100 of you who are watching, but it will make a great download.

SPEAKER_07: And our first segment, of course, is Ask Jason. So we actually have some, this is, and by the way, this segment has become great for me because everybody emails me.

SPEAKER_08: And you get about, I don't know, 20 to 50 emails a day of people saying, hey, I have a question for you. And now, instead of having to answer them, I say, will you ask me on the show? And so we have a question. We have Jason Roberts on the line.

SPEAKER_09: I'm going to put the speakerphone on here.

SPEAKER_07: Jason. Let's see. Jason. Jason Roberts. Are you there? Check, check, check. Hey, Tyler. Do we have Jason Roberts on the line? Oh.

SPEAKER_09: Jason Roberts, are you there? Oh.

SPEAKER_13: Nope. Hello. Hey.

SPEAKER_09: Hey, Jason. How are you?

SPEAKER_13: Good. How are you?

SPEAKER_09: Good. You're live on This Week in Startups. Okay, great. And you sent me an email, I think, yesterday. Yes. And I asked you, like, hey, that's really some interesting questions. Why don't you ask me on the air? So why don't you tell me where you're at with your startup and then what your question is?

SPEAKER_19: Okay, so we started a little web startup to build a, I guess you'd say, web-based version of PowerPoint. This is probably back in 2005. So at that time, there really wasn't much else around except for, like, Gmail, Google Maps. So, you know, my thinking was, hey, this is going to be awesome. Nobody's doing anything like this. Unfortunately, it took about two years to build. And by the time we had released it, Google had already released their equivalent version into the Google Docs suite. So that was a problem. We came out a little too late, and Google was offering a comparable product for free. And also, at that time, it took us so long that we pretty much burned through the capital. So then, you know, what do you do? You're out of money, and Google has a comparable product that's free. So now it's been running for about a year. I haven't really spent a whole lot of time on it because I've had to earn income, you know, doing consulting and other things. And it's just sort of been picking up users. It's around 20, I think about 23,000 users with about 30, 35 new people sign up per day. And so the question is? The question is, what do I do? I mean, can you do anything with a company like this? Do I shut it down? Do I try and start, you know, charging people? How do I charge people without pissing people off? I don't really know what the best approach is.

SPEAKER_28: Well, first off, you learned a lot of lessons.

SPEAKER_09: And that's a great thing. So when you're doing a startup company, and this is your first company or second?

SPEAKER_18: This is about my second, I would say, startup software company.

SPEAKER_07: So the first lesson you learned was something we talked about in the first episode with Brian Alvey, who was here from Crowdfusion, which is release early, release often, don't worry, be crappy. You held the thing for two years, and then when you finally released it, Google had released theirs, so they took your steam. And they also took the user base, correct?

SPEAKER_19: That's right. And the other thing is that when you spend that much time on it, especially when you're in a small company, you just kind of put all your eggs in one basket.

SPEAKER_35: If we had released something a few months, if it didn't work out, we could have had time to iterate or change ideas.

SPEAKER_07: So, great thing you learned here is you learned an incredible lesson. You'll never do that again. You want to get the product out there. You want to iterate.

SPEAKER_05: You want to learn from your audience. The second thing is, Google drank your milkshake. And guess what? That's going to happen in life. So, that's another lesson. You know, you don't want to jump in front of the Google or Microsoft train because they can roll over you.

SPEAKER_40: So, I guess the question now is, it's got 20,000 users who seem to like it. What is it that they like about the product that they don't like about Google's offering?

SPEAKER_19: You know, I never really ask that kind of a question. I mean, I have people call me up and they thank me for it. And I think there's a lot of students and people like that who seem to like it. I don't even know why they haven't found or are using Google. I think they might have just stumbled across Prezo and thought, hey, this works. So, they like it, I guess.

SPEAKER_42: So, sometimes in life you have to cut your losses. You're not going to have the wherewithal to compete with Google.

SPEAKER_43: They've made this into a commodity business. Probably the best thing for you to do is to focus on another project. So, then the question is, what do you do with this asset? And the best thing to do with this asset is probably open source it, give it to the community. And maybe email your members and say, listen, there are other offerings out here. You guys like this one. We're going to have an open source platform. Give it to maybe your lead developer. Keep 20% ownership in it. And move on with your life. Because you learned a couple of great lessons and you got in front of the Google train. And every month you spend on this is a month you could be doing something else.

SPEAKER_44: That was kind of my thinking. And one other lesson I'd like to point out that I think I learned is, you know,

SPEAKER_19: when it first started working, the thought was, hey, this is where the world's going. All these big apps are going to go to the web. Let's get out there early. Let's do something that's complicated. And we'll, you know, flip it to Google or Yahoo or Salesforce.com or something. Problem is, it's a risky bet. You don't know what's going to happen. And I would say to people, don't do that. You know, start smaller and maybe not try and flip it.

SPEAKER_46: Listen, you tried.

SPEAKER_05: And even with the flipping concept, you know, every business has an exit. That's the reason people invest. You had investors. It's the nature of the beast. You could have released more often, but it may not have changed the inevitability of Google drinking your milkshake. Right. And you learned a couple of lessons. And now you move on and you go on to the next thing. You take the lessons you learned from this. You put it into the next ones. And a great outcome would be to give it to the community. There might be an open source product out there that could benefit from it. You keep some equity in the open source product or whatever. And you call it a day.

SPEAKER_43: You know, it's like taking an MBA class. You'll never forget these lessons.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, I could probably write down a whole list of them that I would, you know, never repeat. Can I ask you one question about that, though? We talked about releasing it to the, retaining ownership of some kind of open source product. I mean, how does that work? What are you going to mean by that?

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so you know there's open source software out there like the Mozilla Foundation. And if you go to SourceForge, you can see all the open source products. What you could do is you could maintain ownership of the domain name.

SPEAKER_47: Right.

SPEAKER_05: What's the name of the product again?

SPEAKER_47: It's called Prezo. Yeah, Prezo. P-R-E-Z-O.com.

SPEAKER_05: So you could own Prezo.com with your developer. You have a lead developer on this who's passionate about it.

SPEAKER_55: I am the developer.

SPEAKER_05: Oh, you are the developer. So even more reason to get this monkey off your back. You basically say to the open source community, here it is. You can own the domain name. You can own the hosted version of it. The software itself is open source to anybody. They can see the code. They can change it. And maybe you retain ownership of the hosted version in that domain name. And you charge people. And you just immediately take the 20,000 people who are using it and say, I can only keep doing this if you pay $10 a year.

SPEAKER_07: And boom, see how many of them do it. If none of them do it, you've actually learned how valuable it is to them.

SPEAKER_19: Right. Do you think it's better to send an email and ask people to get a sense of it? Or just go ahead and invest the time to set up a merchant account and pay mechanism and just do it and then see what happens.

SPEAKER_49: Well, the good news is you have PayPal.

SPEAKER_09: So the way you could phrase this is you could start your PayPal account and say, listen, I'm moving on to other projects. I know you guys love the product.

SPEAKER_07: Can I ask that we do a fundraising drive for the next six months if I can get this amount of money in the fundraising drive? $10,000. We'll keep it going. If not, I'm going to probably have to shut it down. You know, don't worry. I'm not going to pull the rug out from under you guys. But I do need to pay for these things. I've got a wife, kids, whatever, a life, time, et cetera. And if they don't respond nicely to that, you know, you could say just, hey, I'm asking for $10 to $100 per person. Right. And, you know, I think $50 is what it's worth. So, you know, let's see if we can get 200 people to do it. If you can't get 200 people to do it and pay for your product, it's probably not the greatest offering in the world and or you have somebody who's drunk your milkshake, which is the case in this case. Right, right.

SPEAKER_18: Okay, well, that sounds like great advice. That's pretty much what I was thinking might be your answer, and I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_07: Here's the good news. You're working on another company, I take it, right?

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, I have a couple of ideas, things that I'm kind of piecing together. Excellent.

SPEAKER_07: So if you can get that idea together by June 30th in the form of three slides, you can submit it to TechCrunch50, and you know me, and you've got my email address, and you've got the inside line to being one of the 50 companies that launch on September 14th and 15th in San Francisco at TechCrunch50. Yes, that's a plug.

SPEAKER_63: Great. That sounds like a great opportunity. I'll definitely see if I can get something to put together.

SPEAKER_07: Awesome.

SPEAKER_63: Well, thanks so much.

SPEAKER_07: Keep fighting, and getting knocked down, it's not a big deal, right? Some of the best fighters got knocked down a lot, and Michael Jordan missed more shots than anybody. He also scored more points than anybody. It's the nature of the beast. You swing the bat. Sometimes you get hit with the ball. Sometimes you strike out. Sometimes you hit a home run. Just keep swinging.

SPEAKER_67: Right, right. Okay, great. Awesome. All right, thanks so much, Jason.

SPEAKER_07: My pleasure. There you go. So there's an Ask Jason. If you want to be on Ask Jason, what are they supposed to email? Are they just contact at This Week in Startups? Contact, C-O-N-T-A-C-T, at thisweekinstartups.com, and you can be on the Ask Jason segment. So our first guest, and only guest, I guess I have to get used to that.

SPEAKER_05: We have one guest per show, is an old friend of mine, formerly a frenemy, in fact. A brief moment of freneminess, which we'll talk about. His name is Lockhart Steele. That's actually his real name. It's not his porn name, as everybody sort of thinks, that that's just too great of a name for a man to have.

SPEAKER_07: Lockhart worked in the magazine business before getting his big break working for Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media. He grew Gawker Media from a couple of million uniques to tens of millions, and was there, I would say, during the golden era of Gawker, when it became truly a force and was running the joint as the editorial director. He then had a side project called Curbed.com, which is a wonderful blog, if you haven't read it, about real estate in many local markets, including Los Angeles and New York and San Francisco, and I think a couple of others, which we'll get into. And he went out on his own, raised money, and now he's out there with a real estate blog network at probably the worst time in the history of real estate. But he's doing very well, so welcome to the program, Lockhart Steele.

SPEAKER_68: Jason, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_43: Was that a decent introduction, pretty accurate?

SPEAKER_69: That was right on the money.

SPEAKER_43: Okay, good. I always wonder, because I don't prepare the introductions, I just say them from my memory, and hopefully I pray that I get it right. But I think, perfect? Perfect. Okay, so take me back to when you got the job working for Nick Denton. When did you first meet the guy? Because he's a fascinating guy, obviously.

SPEAKER_71: Well, I was blogging in New York City back in, like, I'm a journalist by background.

SPEAKER_72: And I was blogging in New York City back around the year 2000, when there were, like, maybe ten of us in New York City who were blogging. Yes.

SPEAKER_76: And blogging at that point, if you'd told me that blogging was going to become a widespread phenomenon that was going to be widely known, I would have said, you know, you're a crack. Yeah. So flash forward to 2002, I was still blogging at LockhartSteel.com, you know, this was back in the day.

SPEAKER_77: What were you blogging about in the early days, just your life?

SPEAKER_76: Oh, yeah, you know, like, I live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, so I liked writing about my neighborhood, I'm a Red Sox fan, I blog about the Red Sox, my friends, you know, the usual stupid crap that personal blogs are about. I figured, you know, my ten friends would read this thing and enjoy it. But Nick Denton moved to New York City from San Francisco. Right, he was a journalist as well. In 2002, he was fed up with San Francisco and decided I'm going to move to New York. Go figure. And I used to read, he used to be a personal blogger too, at nickdenton.org, and back in the day, like 2001, 2002, he would be blogging like 20 items a day. I mean, he was a great blogger. Yeah. People forget that. So I read his blog, I knew who he was, just by dint of his sort of blogger reputation. Right. And I get an email from him out of the blue, like, hey, I moved to New York, I want to take you out for a cup of coffee or a beer or whatever.

SPEAKER_84: And so it begins.

SPEAKER_85: And I was like, well, this is cool, sure. Yeah. And he took me out, and he was like, hey, yeah, you know, I'm new to New York, I'm trying to meet the people who are blogging in this city.

SPEAKER_76: And as I said, there were like 10 of us, so it wasn't that hard to meet everyone who was blogging.

SPEAKER_85: He's like, yeah, I got this little idea for a company. You know, I think we're going to do some, like, niche-specific blogs built around topic areas. My first one's going to be about gadgets. Then I'm going to do one about Manhattan gossip and media.

SPEAKER_87: And he basically laid out the vision for Gawker Media, soup to nuts, you know, over a beer. Right. You know, summer of 2002, he had it completely locked down. I mean, what he wanted.

SPEAKER_90: And it was accurate in 2002 to what it became? Almost exactly.

SPEAKER_76: I mean, there were a couple blogs he was sort of toying with at that point in time. Like, he wanted to do a blog. One of his old ideas was to do a blog for rich people who wanted to live life on the cheap, which. Yeah. Classic Nick Denton obsession. Of course. Right.

SPEAKER_87: And then I realized that what I missed at the time, of course, was that what I thought was just a friendly conversation over beer was probably a job interview. Right.

SPEAKER_76: And he kind of took, I think, all these bloggers in Manhattan out for a drink. Right. And, you know, ultimately, like, I think he was looking for someone to edit Gawker. Right. And I didn't get the job. I didn't even know. I didn't even know. You didn't know you were in the running.

SPEAKER_87: I didn't even know I was in the running. But obviously, Elizabeth Spires got the job as the founding editor of Gawker.

SPEAKER_105: And became the most famous blogger of the period.

SPEAKER_76: And blew it out. I mean, she was the biggest. She invented, I think, a lot of the tropes of, like, of what pro-blogging now is. Right. You know, along with Pete Rojas at Gizmodo and then Engadget, the two people who probably have more to do with what blogging style looks like now than any two other people on the planet.

SPEAKER_87: Right. So, flash forward a couple more years, I'm working in a magazine. And it's actually a home and garden magazine for the Hamptons. Right. Which sounds silly, but I was really lucky working there because the guy who was my boss there was this crazy entrepreneur who was, like, 70-something years old. Right. He was actually my first boss back when I was a trade magazine writer back in the mid-90s. And he was like, hey, come work for this new magazine I'm starting. I know you are interested in the publishing process, and I will show you soup to nuts how a magazine goes from, like, a business plan all the way through to, like, publication. Great. Free education. It was amazing. Right. And he was the kind of guy who was very open with his books, very open with his problems. Right. You know, a great, also a pain in the ass. Right. Like a lot of people.

SPEAKER_107: Like all great entrepreneurs.

SPEAKER_87: Yeah, a lot of people couldn't work for him at all. Right. We happened to have a good rapport, and he was sort of like, you know, I got to see every step of the way. What, are you 25 years old at this time? No, I was about 30. I'm 35 now. Okay, so you were there. Oh, 29, 28 maybe. Right. So it was an amazing education for me. I've always known I love publishing and that the world of publishing and media was going to be my world. So the magazine topic we were working on wasn't of great personal interest to me. Right. But I was really able to see a lot of, like, the backbones of a media.

SPEAKER_113: No gardening and no house in the Hamptons. Right.

SPEAKER_76: But other than that, like, right up my alley. Right. But it was a great gig, and I ended up as the managing editor of that magazine for a few years.

SPEAKER_85: And then Nick approached me again in the fall of 2004, and he said, you know, Gawker's growing. At that point, I think there were 12 writers. It was still back when it was just, like, one blogger per site. Right. We're growing. I think there's going to be a lot of similarities between how this business ends up being run and how media businesses, magazines, and newspapers have always been run. Right. So I'm looking for someone with experience on the print side managing people, which I had. Right. And I'm looking for someone with blog experience, which I had. So my little personal Venn diagram at that point in time was, like, the perfect overlap for what he was looking for. And he offered me the job to come in and oversee the editorial operations of Gawker. Right.

SPEAKER_38: And you became sort of the buffer between the bloggers and him, which turned out to be a key role.

SPEAKER_122: That was definitely part of the job, and Nick was aware of that.

SPEAKER_87: Like, he's, like all entrepreneurs, he can, some people, he's really easy for them to work with him. Other people find him not so easy to work with, shall I say. Yes. So my job was in part to, like, you know. Buffer. Buffer, but also at that point, my job really became to find and hire the bloggers. I think when I started at Gawker, we had something like 12 bloggers. I think when I left, we had something like 150. Right. So, you know, you get very good at hiring and the tricks of the trade of hiring and firing.

SPEAKER_34: So basically, you're hiring a person every two or three days.

SPEAKER_87: Yeah, well, I, you know, I could, we could talk more in detail about hiring processes, because I, something that I think is really fascinating. But ultimately, I had to start trusting bloggers further down the wire for me to, like, bring, you know, bring talent up the wire.

SPEAKER_09: And was that the best way to find people? We always found people. Find a blogger?

SPEAKER_87: Sure. I mean, the best way to find, and this was one of Nick's original insights, like, if you like someone's blog, they'd probably be a good person to hire. Right. Because hiring in media, you get lots of piles, you used to get lots of piles of clips from people. Right. Who knows? You know, like, and it's like, oh, you got a byline in the New York Times business section? Like, well, congratulations. That shows a certain amount of savvy. On the other hand, I don't really know if you can write, because six editors probably played a part in turning your copy into whatever it was in the final form.

SPEAKER_38: When you're in New York in the media business, and you've met Jason Blair, and you've met the bad writers of the New York Times, and then you've met the great ones, you realize

SPEAKER_90: just because you write for the New York Times does not mean you're John Markoff or Saul Hansel. Exactly. You could just as easily be.

SPEAKER_125: Whereas, like, if you read Elizabeth Spire's personal blog that she was writing before Gawker, you knew, like, wow, this woman's hilarious, and she has this weird take on media world and Wall Street.

SPEAKER_122: And, like, you know what? That's the best way to hire.

SPEAKER_09: But, you know, it seems like if people are, the best way to tell if somebody can do the

SPEAKER_05: job is to actually have them do the job. Exactly. It's a crazy concept. This actually came up on the last show.

SPEAKER_141: It's a theme. When hiring, here's a tip. This is why you guys are tuning into This Week in Startups. If you want to know if somebody can actually dig a ditch, watch them dig a ditch. Yeah.

SPEAKER_145: If they actually can dig a ditch, then maybe you'd want them to dig a ditch for you.

SPEAKER_87: It was where I thought a writer was accomplished enough already, and I thought, like, oh, they could make this transition, and, like, a lot of times that transition from, you know, mainstream journalism or other forms of writing to blogging, you know, one of the things about blogging is you just have to be able to, I always say, you just have to be able to push the publish button. Right.

SPEAKER_76: And there are a lot of people who you realize, like, they've been working on the same post for four hours, and you're like, just hit the publish button. Right. It's as good as it's going to be.

SPEAKER_141: The comments will finish it. It's 150 words. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: Like, write it. It seemed to be the exact same issue we had at Weblogs Inc., which was the people from mainstream media, wanted to write 1,000 words, and then the great bloggers were fine with writing 150 words eight times. Totally.

SPEAKER_156: And I think, like...

SPEAKER_38: It really was the whole difference. Can you chunk it, or do you want to do long form? Yeah.

SPEAKER_103: And the chunking of it is the whole point of the medium, so I don't know why people, why some people still couldn't get over that, but it was remarkable.

SPEAKER_157: Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_05: So take me back to as the business was growing, because it had a pretty good tear. I mean, you went from two or three blogs to as high as 15 at one point? Yeah.

SPEAKER_87: I mean, when I joined Gawker, it was just somewhere right around five blogs. We were just launching a three-blog group that was Lifehacker, Gridskipper, and... Jalopnik, maybe. No, that actually launched the previous one. I guess it was those two. Jalopnik had just launched. So yeah, a lot of Gawker's best blogs had already launched, and the job at that point was to keep growing blogs, and so one of the first things I was supposed to do was we wanted to do a gambling blog, in part because we had a sponsor who was going to spend a lot of money on the idea. Sure. So they were like, find a gambling blogger, and we totally botched it.

SPEAKER_164: What was the name of that one? I knew it.

SPEAKER_87: It was called Odd Jack.

SPEAKER_164: Odd Jack, yes.

SPEAKER_87: And I hired an editor, a guy named AJ Delario, who's now the editor of Deadspin. He's become phenomenally successful in his second act at Gawker.

SPEAKER_165: Why didn't you work on gambling?

SPEAKER_78: People don't want to read about it every day? Yeah, something about gambling just didn't work as a blogger. Maybe we just didn't figure out the right editorial formula.

SPEAKER_87: In any case, it was like, I come on board, they're like, your first job is to start this gambling blog, and I totally blow it. Right. We completely like, we shut the thing.

SPEAKER_167: And what do you think Denton's going to fire you or something like that?

SPEAKER_87: Well, it wasn't like that because we had lots of other things going, but it's like, it's a little embarrassing to come on board and tackle a big project, and your first big project is like, you know, oh, screw this. Yeah, exactly. But what was great about Gawker, and the reason it was, you know, the reason it was, and I think Nick is a great entrepreneur, is he does, well, I mean, I think you do the same thing, see a problem and try and admit it really quickly and say like, okay, this isn't working. We shut that thing down within like, within four or five months.

SPEAKER_103: It was like, we didn't let it linger. It was doing like, you know, other Gawker blogs at this point, we're doing hundreds of thousands of page views a day. This thing was doing like 3,000 page views a day.

SPEAKER_170: I think you know a dog, when it's a dog, you know it's a dog, and the problem is, young entrepreneurs, I think, have ego about it. Totally.

SPEAKER_05: And then Nick, he had already made his bones, I had already made my bones. It's like, you know what, if it's not going to work, it's not going to work. I loved Gridskipper. I also loved the blog we did, Gatling. Yeah, Gatling. Travel doesn't work for blogging.

SPEAKER_174: No, it doesn't. And we, you know, curb now, we own Gridskipper.

SPEAKER_175: Right. It was given to you. I mean, it was a gift, right?

SPEAKER_178: Well, I mean, Nick Denton puts out his garbage, I pick it up.

SPEAKER_05: Right, exactly, but I mean, Gatling, great blog, great bloggers, love it, but I didn't even read it, and I was trying to figure out why, and I was like, you know what, travel is one of those things where you're intensely interested in it for a week, and then you go

SPEAKER_181: on your vacation, and then you don't care for six months or a year.

SPEAKER_87: Yeah, and that's, you know, Gridskipper, it turns out, has been a great blog for us to keep, we can run it at a very low cost. It does, Gawker was spending a fortune on it, and it was doing like a million one page views a month. We're spending not much money on it at all, and we're doing, just on Google traffic, five, 600,000 page views a month. Right. And it's a very, like.

SPEAKER_184: So it's a great SEO business.

SPEAKER_87: It's a great SEO business, and we also get some RFPs from big travel advertisers that will come in, they'll know, because Gawker did a good job selling Gridskipper, the brand, for a number of years. So we'll get a hotel group. They'll recognize it. We'll get a hotel group that'll come in, and we'll say like, oh, sure, you want to be

SPEAKER_122: on Gridskipper, but maybe you also want to be on Curb and our other sites.

SPEAKER_187: And that was the big innovation, I think, in blog networks, both between Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker, was selling the packages of blogs.

SPEAKER_87: Definitely.

SPEAKER_189: I mean.

SPEAKER_87: Definitely. And we have, I mean, our blog network, comparatively to Gawker, is so small, or comparatively to the big guys, you know, we, we're local based in New York, LA, and San Francisco, and we need, you know, it's when we can sell across the whole network, that's when we can, you know, our scale is never going to be the scale of 20 million uniques a month. We do like a million three uniques a month. And that's fine. It's highly localized, and advertisers want that highly localized.

SPEAKER_103: But, you know, we're never going to be, we're never going to be winning ad deals because we've got 20 million uniques. Yeah.

SPEAKER_192: And here we have it on the screen here, Curb.com, which, you came out with this while you were working at Gawker. It was actually just before I started at Gawker. Just before you started.

SPEAKER_87: Yeah, we're about to turn, Curb will turn five on May 24th. Wow. And Engadget just had its fifth anniversary, too.

SPEAKER_180: What did you, what did you, did Engadget do anything for its fifth?

SPEAKER_07: They had Peter and Ryan on the podcast. They got the band back together. Oh, that's kind of fun. And they did a whole podcast. You can listen to it.

SPEAKER_103: I'm trying to figure out what we should do for our fifth. It's like, what's the right...

SPEAKER_09: I think a podcast or a video about the history of it, 10 best posts of all time.

SPEAKER_196: I don't want to be too self-congratulatory, but you want to mark the moment.

SPEAKER_199: So, how did you get the domain name? Please tell me you didn't pay $8.95 for that domain name.

SPEAKER_176: Oh, a Curb? Yeah. I paid...

SPEAKER_122: Like it was just on GoDaddy, unclaimed? No, it wasn't. It was someone... Too good of a domain name.

SPEAKER_87: I made a list of like 50 domain names. Right. And I wanted to call the blog something totally different.

SPEAKER_76: And Elliot Shepard, who's now Curb's head of technology, he was a good friend of mine back then, and I sent around the list of names to, you know, three or four friends. Just said like, give me your feedback. Right. And Elliot wrote back and he said, there's only one good name on this list and it's Curb.com. And I kind of realized he was right. Right. So, this kid down in Florida owned it. Hello. And I was like, I'm interested in buying your domain name. I'll give you $250 for it. Right. He's like, I'm going to have to ask you for $750.

SPEAKER_87: So, we settled on $500. Perfect. This was 2004 when the domain name market was still like, you know...

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, people weren't going crazy.

SPEAKER_133: No, people weren't going crazy.

SPEAKER_05: And then we'll go back down to that. So... It's a fabulous domain. And this is, I mean, it's interesting. You guys went through this naming process. This was one of the big, I think, value-added processes at the blog networks was naming. Oh, man. Because before that, people were like, oh, yeah, I have a blog. And it's, you know, it's called this. And it was like, you know, this.blogspot.com. You know, like, they never, people, the idea of actually having a domain name for a blog and then doing a logo for it was like, really? You're going to spend $500 building a logo?

SPEAKER_87: If you talk to any one of us who worked at Gawker during that time when Gawker was in launch mode, the naming sessions were the most feared.

SPEAKER_76: They were our worst times because Nick was obsessive about making sure the name was exactly right.

SPEAKER_87: And a good example is Deadspin, Gawker's sports blog, which was the blog that I did right after we launched Oddjack. Which is awesome. It's an amazing blog. Will Leach used to work with you. He was the founding editor. He's a genius. A.J. Delario, who's now the editor, he's a genius.

SPEAKER_103: Most popular sports blog on the net in terms of traffic to a single-domain sports blog.

SPEAKER_210: As opposed to like Fan Nation. Exactly. Where they have like a thousand blogs.

SPEAKER_87: Daily Coast doesn't count. Right. We had hired Will Leach as the blogger in like May.

SPEAKER_76: And what we did at Gawker was we test blog you behind the scenes. Right. You know, kind of warm you up so that when we launch the blog, there's already an archive of content there. And you kind of work out the kinks behind the curtain before you put it out in public. Yeah. So Will started in May. And if you know Will Leach, this kid like, he writes more words in a day than is humanly possible. Right. He literally was, he wakes up at 3 a.m. during the baseball playoffs and writes a 600-word blog for the New York Times and goes back to sleep. That's not a joke.

SPEAKER_85: Right. So the kid is just, so he was, after a month, had created like 5,000 posts in a month. Right. And he's like, I'm ready to launch. Like, and it was. It was, the blog was great. It was ready to go. No name. Didn't have a name.

SPEAKER_87: So we're like, we can't launch, we don't have a name. And we kept going back to the well and kept going back to the well.

SPEAKER_76: And Will was like, Will was the biggest trooper ever. Like, we're trying to find work for him to do. It's like, I'll go to Macworld in Boston for Gizmodo for a weekend, even though I've never, even though I don't know anything about Macs. He's a good soldier, yeah. I'll take pictures. The only thing he turned down is he turned down when I was like, you know, you could do a week on Fleshbot. And he's like, hmm. Gawker's porn blog. He was like, I think I'm going to pass on that opportunity.

SPEAKER_222: No, I'm going to pass on that.

SPEAKER_223: But Will, being the guy he was, comes to me in like mid-July and he was like, Locke, I just want you to know, I know that the reason you guys aren't launching the blog is that you are going to fire me. And I just wish you'd have the, if you just want to just tell me that right now, that's totally fine. Like, we can just get it over with. I was like, dude, no, really. We don't have a name.

SPEAKER_228: It's two months later.

SPEAKER_225: You've done 18,000 posts.

SPEAKER_87: We don't have a name. Because Nick was always, and we played with like, we played with different parts of a name.

SPEAKER_76: Nick loved to, when you can see this on all the Gawker names or most of them, you know, most people naming a sports blog would name it like GrandSlam.com or, you know, Nick loves negativity. And to bring in a little bit of that, you know.

SPEAKER_234: Yeah, snarky.

SPEAKER_76: Snark, like dead spin. It's a made up word, but like it feels a little bit like dead ESPN, but it has some negativity to it.

SPEAKER_236: Yeah, and you're killing the spin because it's spin in journalism.

SPEAKER_76: But it's just a cool, like, all of the Gawker blogs always came at naming without, like, because everyone else seems to come at their own names with like, you know, besttips.net.

SPEAKER_239: Yeah, blogging baby, yay.

SPEAKER_240: You know, like, yes. Great. That was one of mine, blogging baby. Indeed it was.

SPEAKER_175: That was when I jumped the shark, officially.

SPEAKER_05: It became like one of the most successful blogs in terms of revenue. We had like so many insertion orders for that blog, I couldn't take it. Okay, so you started Curb when you were there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: Then you're leaving, you tell Nick, hey, I've got to go out on my own, this thing's blowing up. What was that project? When did you decide, okay, I've worked for two crazy entrepreneurs, now I want to be the crazy entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_90: And what caused you to...

SPEAKER_87: Well, first of all, Nick was amazing about letting me do Curb in my spare time at Gawker. He never gave a shit, and it was basically like, as long as you're doing your job, and we worked our asses off. So Curb kind of grew organically over the next couple of years while I was at Gawker. We launched Eater.com. That was a partnership with my friend Ben Levinthal, which is Eater.com is like food and restaurant news from a neighborhood perspective.

SPEAKER_103: Right. In the same three cities. And then we launched...

SPEAKER_250: Like we all been through with this time.

SPEAKER_103: Wow. There you go. That was exciting.

SPEAKER_251: They wanted to give you a little intro for Curb.

SPEAKER_103: A little Eater magic there. A little shout out to Eater. And then we launched Rack.com, which is shopping and retail news, also on the local level, on the neighborhood level.

SPEAKER_252: So our blogs are, you know, oh, this is all happening while I'm at Gawker, and it's kind of growing, growing, growing.

SPEAKER_05: This is what's going on in your neighborhood in shopping, food, and real estate. Exactly. And just keep it really focused and tight on transactions.

SPEAKER_125: Exactly.

SPEAKER_87: Like, and it's just, it's the fun, gossipy stuff that's going on in those worlds, you know, and for Eater, that's restaurants that are opening, closing, chefs moving, who's fighting with who, who's suing their distributor, you know, Curb, it's the real estate transactions, it's funny neighborhood stories, it's what's going on down your block, why is this building being torn down, and racked, it's like...

SPEAKER_58: What the hell is that building? Why is there a ditch on that street? Exactly. We're going to get to the bottom of it.

SPEAKER_76: Exactly. That's the kind of stuff we do.

SPEAKER_58: Underreported stuff.

SPEAKER_87: Yeah, and it's fun, kind of stuff people really do care about, but it's too small potatoes for even the New York Times to do, like, a metro brief on in most cases.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and they're also going to, like, if they do it, you get back to that whole journalist thing where they feel like they have to do this epic 1,200-word article, as opposed to, like, take a camera phone photo and be like, what is going on with this restaurant that hasn't been open for three days?

SPEAKER_76: Yeah, totally. And then somebody gives you a tip, and they wrote the story for you. Well, that's it, and we have the readers make our sites, but we'll come back to that.

SPEAKER_87: So anyway, and Curb at this point, the real estate developers and real estate firms in New York City kind of discover us, and suddenly we're making, like, five figures a month in revenue. So it's, like, it's turning itself into a little business, kind of, like, under...

SPEAKER_122: Yeah, if you make $30,000 a month, all of a sudden you've got almost a half-million dollar business.

SPEAKER_103: That's it, and, like, I sort of woke up at the beginning of 2007 with that sort of becoming the reality. Like, hey, I'm working really hard at Gawker. Gawker's only getting bigger. Right. And the job at Gawker's only getting more challenging because there are more writers, there are more sites.

SPEAKER_263: You have a little bit of equity. Yeah, well, actually, I loved working at Gawker.

SPEAKER_103: I mean, a lot of people, different people have different issues with it, but I think it was one of the most fun jobs in the world. Yeah. We were on the front lines of, like, defining this whole genre. Absolutely. And no part of me was in a hurry to leave. Like, if I... It's a dream gig. It was a dream gig for me.

SPEAKER_76: I loved it.

SPEAKER_38: And you grew from the bottom up. Yes. So it's like, this thing became a huge mountain, but it was a hill when you got there.

SPEAKER_76: Exactly. So you get a lot of personal pride. Well, also, you feel like, you know, I think at that point I felt like we were partway up the hill. You know, you want to... Right, you're there. There's something fun about seeing a project through to its end, which if you leave, like, you know, I think I left at a time where I was able to say, like, okay, we did grow to, you know, a much larger level. But they've kept growing it in my absence.

SPEAKER_122: And it's like, you look back a little wistfully and say, like, hey, it would have been fun to continue to be part of that journey.

SPEAKER_05: Truth be told, they may have grown in page use, but in terms of what's been accomplished, it's incremental. I mean, the major innovations and all that kind of stuff, 90% of that's done. And now they're just making it bigger and making it more profitable. That could be true. Yeah. I mean, and that's not a dig to anything. That's how businesses work. That's exactly right. YouTube is at scale. Yep. What is YouTube that's done that's innovating? It's incremental stuff. Yeah. Wow, it's HD now. Really? Okay, that's great. But it's not, like, the same excitement of YouTube launching.

SPEAKER_122: Yeah, yeah, no, that makes total sense. So I woke up in early 2007, literally on New Year's Day 2007.

SPEAKER_103: Right. And I realized that Curb was growing and Gawker was growing. And I was trying to run both these things.

SPEAKER_223: And I was going to probably, I hadn't yet, but I probably was going to lose my mind in six months or 12 months if I didn't make a proactive move to change that. Yeah, it's kind of stressful.

SPEAKER_08: And also the job of running a blog network with all those bloggers who are totally unmanageable by definition or they wouldn't be in blogging. Right. And then an insane boss, which anybody who's going to start a blogging business by definition is insane because they want to do something that's just incredibly challenging. Right. So you're getting it on both ends, I would imagine, right?

SPEAKER_85: Well, totally. And that's, like, you know, that was when I realized, like, I can't keep getting it on both ends for much longer or I'm going to split.

SPEAKER_103: Right. So I made the decision just in terms, made the decision myself, you know, I'm going to move on. In the next six months. You told Nick? I told Nick. How did he take it? Nick was great. Nick was like, I probably figured this was going to happen at some point. My boy's all grown up. You know, Nick is very clever about playing these things for PR, so he's like, let's keep it quiet. I want us to announce the story when we're going to announce it. Sure. He said, you know, what are you going to do? I said, I'm thinking about the only thing I'm going to do curb professionally. Right. Are you going to raise some money? I said, yes. He's like, we'd love to put in some money. Fantastic. You know, so that worked. And then Gawker ended up investing in the company.

SPEAKER_171: And gave me a great skipper.

SPEAKER_87: So, it's nice. You're still associated. It was a happy. I see those guys all the time. Right. And they're killing it right now, by the way.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah. In the down market. Yeah. Killing it. So, let's talk about Curbed for a second. Just the site. Maybe we can pull it up here for a second.

SPEAKER_08: My relationship with Curbed is very interesting. I come in and out of Curbed, but I have these moments where, like, I feel like I have to

SPEAKER_05: read every single post on it. And then I sort of maybe forget, like, I'm into it, but then I go crazy again. And it's very detailed. We can pull it up on the screen for a second here about, like, I'm looking at the LA one

SPEAKER_08: here. And it's just every, it's real estate porn.

SPEAKER_223: Yeah. Lots of real estate porn.

SPEAKER_08: Lots of real estate porn. And then just covering the real estate run up and the run down, and then local news about

SPEAKER_294: stuff, construction, about the 405. I mean, it's really a fantastic blog in that way. I'm sure a lot of people who are in the chat room read it.

SPEAKER_76: Yeah. We have, we're very lucky. Our readers, so many of our best tips come in from readers. Yeah. And the commenters on the site, Curbed LA actually has some of our craziest, most interesting commenters. Yeah. They just organized, you know, self-organized a meetup, you know, because they all wanted to get together to talk real estate. So, like, when you have things like that happening, that's when you feel like, wow, the audience really gets it. Absolutely. And that's really what it's about.

SPEAKER_08: And then Eater, of course, tracks stuff. And it was great, because I was reading Eater, and they're like, oh, my God, there's this whole Brentwood, I live in Brentwood, obviously.

SPEAKER_05: And there's a whole, like, Brentwood restaurant that's opening. And, like, I find out about all the restaurant openings from there. You've really taken, I feel like with the product, you've cherry-picked New York Magazine. Right. For the sections that I used to want to read. I used to want to read Gail Green, I used to want to read the real estate porn, and maybe a little shopping. Right. It's like the three best things in there. And it's, you know...

SPEAKER_43: Was New York Magazine and those kind of things an inspiration? Definitely.

SPEAKER_85: I mean, or, you know, on the real estate side, I think, like, we did something really different. Because one of the things, one of my goals at Curbed was, and this actually came when

SPEAKER_103: I was writing for that Hamptons Magazine, because I was writing the real estate column. You realize how much real estate coverage out there is really boring.

SPEAKER_310: Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_103: And people are generally fascinated by real estate. Sure. And yet, like, so much of the writing about it is just, you know, makes you want to cry. It's so dull. Right. And so the point of Curbed was, like, let's make it fun, let's make it accessible, and let's make it so you don't have to have a Ph.D. in real estate economics to understand what the heck we're talking about. Right. And I think in that sense, we did something pretty new. In terms of, you know, Eater and Racked, we were the first blogs in that space to really make, you know, Eater in New York was the first blog to sort of attack the restaurant world from that perspective. You know, New York Magazine now, for instance, has, you know, has knocked off a very successful restaurant blog of their own. Right. And you see this, you know, that's great. Like, I'm a huge believer of the more blogs that are out there in these categories, the more, the bigger it is for all of us. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_313: Then you have more flow of stories.

SPEAKER_85: But Curb remains kind of its own, you know, uniquely weird thing.

SPEAKER_07: How does, I mean, you have advertising on it. Mm-hmm. Fantastic. But you are in a unique position because it's real estate. Right. Is there, do you have any kind of advertising program that, like, specifically showcases

SPEAKER_09: the stuff? Because sometimes when I'm scrolling through, I wonder, are some of these paid or not? Totally. Yeah. How does that work?

SPEAKER_87: So we'll go over to Curb New York for a sec because we've just started up, like I said, we're never going to have the scale where we're going to do, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars a year in display advertising. Right. So one of the things we want to do, and we heard from our brokers, go ahead and click on that green banner right there. Ah, okay. Right up there. This is our marketplace section. Here we go. Perfect.

SPEAKER_103: So the idea here is that we were hearing from brokers, like, hey, it's easy for a developer to come in and spend, why is that not loading? There we go.

SPEAKER_321: Oh, just the Wi-Fi here, probably.

SPEAKER_103: So, you know, why are people not, or it's easy for developers to come in and say, spend five grand or ten grand with us on an ad package, and that happens all the time. Sure. We were hearing from smaller guys, like, hey, I want to spend $25 or $50 to promote my listing on Curbed. Right. And so we built this sort of, and yet there also are some already, for anyone out there who follows the sort of real estate space on the web closely, there are great companies like Trulia. Redfin. Zillow, to a degree. Redfin. New York City has a phenomenal site called Street Easy. Each of those has done a great job aggregating real estate listings. Sure. Sort of every listing. So that game had already been won. I didn't want to play. I don't want to play a game that someone else has already won. Right. It's over. So our idea here was, let's not try and get every single property in. Let's pay for placement. No one's in here for free. Right. So that's a big differentiator right there. Right. So these are people who are looking for sale. And one of the things that people can do that you're not seeing here is, go ahead and click on one. You know, we wanted to do nice, big, giant, beautiful photos, because I think that's like part of a lot of the real estate sites, particularly in Manhattan, still are, you know, really...

SPEAKER_333: It looks like they took them with their camera phone, or they took good ones, and then they sampled them down to the level of observing. Well, that's it.

SPEAKER_103: And part of what I think you want to see on the web when you're looking at listings is big, beautiful pictures. Yeah.

SPEAKER_335: And a floor plan, perhaps. Yeah.

SPEAKER_103: And so that's what we've tried to build this around. And one of the things that brokers can do for an upgraded price is they can drop a little blurb about the property right into the blog flow. And it's labeled as an ad. We call them quick listings. Perfect. But it actually, it's just like a blog post, starts at the top, and like works its way down the blog in the course of a day. Sure. And it gets tons of clicks, because people come to curb.

SPEAKER_339: Because they're in the stream, too, and people are there for that.

SPEAKER_85: And the great thing is, the great thing about real estate media, as contextual advertising goes, is that you come to curb to look at properties. Right.

SPEAKER_87: So we're not dropping an ad for like Pepsi Max in the blog flow. No, of course not. Right. We're saying like, hey, here's a cool apartment.

SPEAKER_05: And there's something to be said. If the person's willing to pay for it, then, you know, if they're willing to pay for it, it must be of some higher caliber than something dorky.

SPEAKER_345: Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_05: Or they're desperate to get it off their hands. Either way, it's interesting to look at. Right. And how much does it run somebody to drop that into the stream like that?

SPEAKER_87: It's $250 for a one-time insertion.

SPEAKER_05: Great. And I'm sure you get like a couple of those a day.

SPEAKER_87: We get a couple of those a week right now. I mean, it's been...

SPEAKER_346: Why wouldn't somebody be... I mean, if I was a broker, I'd be doing that every day.

SPEAKER_103: The New York City market in particular in real estate is the transition online remains a little bit fitful for some of these big firms.

SPEAKER_170: But for $250, I mean, if you're selling these townhouses and stuff like that, it's like...

SPEAKER_87: We're seeing more and more of it. And I think we're finally in a market where, and part of the reason the downturn has actually

SPEAKER_76: turned out to be good for us, and people always... One of the funny things about running a real estate site in this downturn is people, you know, come up to me all the time with a look in their eyes. And I was like, oh, it must be crushingly hard being in. Now they have to work harder. Well, and that's like... And now what we've seen is, you know, our revenues have held up, have held up, you know, as well as last year. We may end up this quarter up over last year. Right. In part because so many of these firms, I think, that spent, you know, $75,000 on a page in the Sunday Times magazine, you know, are now going to say, like, rather than spend $75,000 with the Times, we'd rather spend $7,500 with Curbed.

SPEAKER_278: How about $75,000 for the year having one thing per day? Exactly. You know they're going to get more sales from you than they're. I mean, it's so obvious.

SPEAKER_05: You're absolutely right.

SPEAKER_355: From your lips to their ears.

SPEAKER_05: Well, I mean, what will happen is, you know what's going to happen? Some smart person's going to do it. They're going to come in and lock up the inventory, which is exactly what happened on blogs.

SPEAKER_08: The smart people say, Samsung, Woot, whatever. Totally. They came in early and were like, can we have that in first-run refusal, and we'll get that for the year? I mean, somebody will realize, gee, this is a pretty good, sweet deal.

SPEAKER_103: No, it's, you know, and we're seeing that sort of piece by piece happen. But, you know, sales is always a... Yeah, it's a grind it out. It's a grind. It's a grind. And in this economy, we're doing fine, but, boy, nothing comes easy.

SPEAKER_07: No, but that's, this is, I mean, the good news is, you don't have 17 knuckleheads knocking off your idea and trying to compete with you. No. And even the knuckleheads at New York Magazine who are finally realizing, gee, Curbed is good, and they're going to try to bite your style, they're going to not put that much effort into it. It's going to be like a bastardized, like, side thing.

SPEAKER_103: Well, New York Magazine, actually, they, unfortunately, are very good at doing it. They're killing it? Oh, okay. They're very good at doing it.

SPEAKER_366: Well, anyway, sorry about that, Andrew Moss. I didn't mean to diss you. Is he still in charge of that thing? Andrew Moss? Adam Moss, yeah. Adam Moss, yeah.

SPEAKER_317: And then Elizabeth went to work there, and then she went to do her own blog network, and...

SPEAKER_87: I just saw Elizabeth a few weeks ago. She's getting ready to launch another, she has a... Another blog. She's going to be doing something in the women's blog space.

SPEAKER_76: Good for her. It's something in the sort of...

SPEAKER_38: Always felt she was a tremendous talent.

SPEAKER_76: She is. No question.

SPEAKER_38: Something in the women's space.

SPEAKER_76: Well, something in the, like, what, Jezebel, you know, Gawker's Jezebel blog. Right. I think she has some ideas about how that could be more relevant to women than Jezebel is.

SPEAKER_360: Cool. Well, she was always very talented.

SPEAKER_378: Elizabeth, do your own thing. Keep fighting the good factor. Tried to hire her, like, 20 times.

SPEAKER_223: Yeah, Jason famously offered her jobs, like, here, there, everywhere. Didn't you offer the... Well, I always had a great strategy. The free laptop model. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_333: Well, I thought you ever remember, in those days, people were so broke, and nobody's making any money that you'd come in and be like, I'll pay you $5 a blog post and give you a laptop. That was like...

SPEAKER_366: First of all, it was $2 more than Nick was giving you per post. Right. And the last thing he's going to do is give you a laptop. It's true.

SPEAKER_175: At that time. Everything's relative, you know? Amen. I offered $4 million for Dig when Dig was very tiny.

SPEAKER_05: That was a lot of money at that time. It's so small now. Yeah. But she was very talented.

SPEAKER_08: But my strategy always with you guys was, if I can't have them, at least I'll make you pay more for them.

SPEAKER_102: Yeah, no, we hated that strategy.

SPEAKER_366: I would send... What was her name? Gina from Lifehacker. Oh, Gina Trevani. I'd be like, hey, Gina, here's an offer. I know you're not going to take it, but please print this out and hand it to Nick.

SPEAKER_223: Luckily, Gina was one of the nicest, greatest people on the planet, but your strategy might have worked with other people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_392: Yeah. Well, it was always a good time. I always felt the competition made everybody better.

SPEAKER_87: Well, that's how I feel still. Like, you know, talking about something like New York Magazine for us, like, it really keeps you on your game when you have competitors and you're, you know, in the blog game, we're fighting for scoops and, you know, if somebody beats us by three minutes for a story, you've probably, you know, you certainly remember this in the Gadget blog wars. Oh, my God. It's like the end of the world. You know, it's the end of the world. We lost by three minutes. Like, oh, my God.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, Peter Rojas would be going crazy if we lost. Like, oh, my God. Gizmodo got this out. But that's why in Gadget it was always bigger than Gizmodo. I mean, I always do have that.

SPEAKER_401: But we had Peter, so I can't take credit for that.

SPEAKER_400: But it was always bigger. Gizmodo now is doing, like, 100 million pages a month, so I think Gokka is pretty happy with where it's at. I'm sure. And Brian Lamb, who edits Gizmodo now, is fantastic. He's great. He's great.

SPEAKER_175: That was a big win. Big win on that one. Yeah. All right. So let's do the news.

SPEAKER_187: And in this segment, we're just going to, like, read the news. And you can rev on it with me. So we've got to bring in Andrew. Richard Murrow is not here because of the short notice. But Andrew Warner is going to come in. And we're going to read the news stories.

SPEAKER_38: So, Curved, it's doing great. You raised, what did you raise? Raised an A round?

SPEAKER_206: We raised, really, an angel round. A million and a half bucks back in 2007.

SPEAKER_405: Which would be, like, a full A now.

SPEAKER_103: Yeah. Well, exactly. Right. And the goal was not to really raise any more. Like, we, you know, this is a company that's never probably going to be a VC-type play. You're never, no one's going to look at Curved and think, like, this is going to be, this is never going to be a $500 million exit.

SPEAKER_176: Could be $25 or $50.

SPEAKER_407: Exactly. And so that's, you know. So you work towards that goal. That's exactly right. And keep it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_90: All right. So Andrew is here. Andrew Lockhart. Hello. Nice to see you, sir. Good to see you. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_05: Here we go. Do we have Andrew's slide and his music? Can we play it already? I may have missed it. Usually they play like a little slide. Look at this.

SPEAKER_412: Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_05: So professional. And now the news.

SPEAKER_40: Andrew Lockhart. Andrew, you are a social media consultant. Is that, what is your title? You're a blogger?

David Friedberg: So I don't even, I mean, I know you interviewed me at some point, but I don't even know what you do. What do you do? So somebody recently called me a fun employed because I had an internet company that I sold a few years ago,

SPEAKER_416: and I've been living off that for the last few years. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_418: Spending a lot of my time, though, interviewing entrepreneurs like you and learning from you how you built your business and hopefully passing that on to startups. Right.

SPEAKER_420: And that's your website, Andrew.

SPEAKER_418: Mixergy.com. Mixergy.com.

SPEAKER_422: Where you get to see people like Jason. There you go.

SPEAKER_421: Does he make you wear the tie?

David Friedberg: He actually did, and you know what? It got me great. It's always the idea.

SPEAKER_141: The concept is the newscaster who he's sitting in for Richard Murrow wears a tie. I mean, read the news legitimately. My fiance loves it. I feel underdressed. We don't need to wear a tie.

David Friedberg: We're not a newscaster. Okay. And so here we go. Read your first story. All right. First story is Facebook. They won't allow mothers to breastfeed on their website.

SPEAKER_416: No pictures of breastfeeding mothers. But they will allow Nazis and Holocaust-denying content on their site.

SPEAKER_423: Right.

SPEAKER_416: So it seems that the only way that a Nazi can get banned from Facebook is if she breastfeeds. How did I do with that line?

SPEAKER_391: You killed it. I killed it, right? I've got to stop with the jokes. Well, the idea was to read the news, but if you want to add a zinger, that's okay. So, Jason, this seems to be... Never again. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

SPEAKER_418: All right. So hand it off. Here we go. So this seems to be an issue for a lot of community sites, right? You allow community content on your website, but at the same time you want to make sure that they don't irritate your users. What do you think? How can Facebook handle this?

SPEAKER_08: Well, you could replace Facebook in this equation with AOL and date the story in 1998 and say chat rooms. You could say this is MySpace and forums. You could change this to Yahoo groups, to Google groups. You could say this on YouTube. I mean, this happens in every single medium. You have hate speech people, and then you have the debate of what is actually obscene and is a boobie obscene or not. So the first mistake that Facebook made was they actually said boobies and breastfeeding are obscene, which maybe some people consider nudity obscene, but to say nudity in motherhood is obscene kind of makes you look like an idiot. It actually doesn't kind of make you look like an idiot. It does make you look like an idiot. So it's a horrible, horribly stupid move on their part to not understand the difference

SPEAKER_317: between pornography and breastfeeding. So what they should have done was, on the breastfeeding one, when you go to that group,

SPEAKER_187: they should have said, potentially, you know, you may see some adult material in here or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, click here to continue. Then it would have been a non-issue. Everybody's happy.

SPEAKER_317: Hate speech, kind of a borderline problem because people have the right to be idiots. People have the right to be bigots. And, you know, banning them, you have to get into like, okay, is this the moment where you, you know, you're allowed to scientifically, you know, deny the Holocaust. I mean, you'd be an idiot too, but who's going to stop you? Hate speech is when, you know, is a very blurry line. So they basically got into the whole idea of censorship.

SPEAKER_08: They should have just said, these are official forums where you can have these behaviors. And this is Facebook. It's on our domain. And if you'd like to discuss these other topics, you can do that here and give them a whole list of other places. Or they could have Facebook unmoderated groups and let people click through there. So, I mean, it's just poor judgment. But every company goes through this. And the problem is, once you open that can of worms, you get into a bunch of problems, which is exactly what happened with Apple and Baby Shaker. Apple should have official Apple Store apps. And then they should have the unauthorized Apple Store where you can load anything you want, porn, baby shaking, inappropriate stuff, let people go nuts. But they have to click through that big warning that says, I want to go nuts.

SPEAKER_294: So, Facebook is just, either that or Zuckerberg is against boobies. I don't think Zuckerberg is against boobies, actually.

SPEAKER_388: What do you think? How do you deal with it? You don't have any hate speech on Curbed.

SPEAKER_86: We actually, people in the comments on real estate sites, you get a lot of like.

SPEAKER_388: You stole my listing?

SPEAKER_87: No, you get neighborhood, we get neighborhood debates where people, you know, people on the internet are stupid. You get racism, you get homophobia, you get all the usual crap. We deal with it, we deal with it Craigslist style. You know, someone sees something inappropriate, flag it, our editors check it out. Yeah, boop, gone. Give readers a lot of room to be crazy, but there is a line you can cross.

SPEAKER_442: Yeah, when you call somebody and have the fat, you turn it off.

SPEAKER_444: Exactly. Right. Exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_317: So, they're growing up. Facebook is growing up.

SPEAKER_175: It's also the problem where a lot of times technology driven organizations, they don't really think about things in a empathetic way.

SPEAKER_08: So, they don't think, oh, you know, this might really hurt a mother's feelings for us to say that breastfeeding is unnatural and there's a whole history of people being against breastfeeding and women being repressed. And breastfeeding being, you know, stigmatized, just natural birth being stigmatized versus C-sections, all this stuff. They don't even take that into account. They just say, well, it's a naked boobie, therefore it has to be turned off because we don't allow naked boobies. It just shows a little bit of immaturity as an organization. But, they have adults there now, so somebody at Facebook, please make a right decision.

SPEAKER_418: Moving on. Speaking of boobies, it turns out that Tumblr's secret to success might be porn sites. 16 of the top blogs on Tumblr's blogging system are porn sites. They've got names like 69.tumblr.com and fleshworld.tumblr.com. So, porn's sending them a lot of traffic. Do you think this is intentional that they're using this to grow their business or is porn just an issue like boobies on Facebook?

SPEAKER_08: Of course, it's intentional to allow those adult things to grow the site. It also becomes a freedom of speech thing. They want to be a platform. Ning had this recently. They had a ton of private communities, social networks around porn. And then what happens is, eventually, as an organization, you grow up and you have non-pornographic traffic. And then you have to make a decision. Do I want to have the headaches that come with porn, which is stigma, advertising problems, hosting problems?

SPEAKER_317: And inevitably, people just say, you know what, this is not worth it. And they let it go. Or they hide it really well. And so, probably, I mean, if you go on StumbleUpon, StumbleUpon has the same big secret. Like, there is a ton of porn on StumbleUpon. You have to dig, like, seven levels deep to find the porn filter. And the same thing with, probably, Ning. Because I remember when Mike Arrington was covering the Ning porn scandal, he was like, well, I can't find the porn.

SPEAKER_08: Where is the porn? I keep searching for it. I can't find it. And then, if you want to find it, type in a dirty word in Google. You'll put site, colon, Tumblr.com, site, colon, Ning.com, site, colon, StumbleUpon.com. And you'll find it through the indexing in Google, which is exactly how they get the traffic. Yeah, it's a business decision. It's a little bit of a game. But you, again, run into the same issue, which is, do you want to be in the censorship business or do you want to be in the platform business? How much of YouTube's traffic is, you know, aging over?

SPEAKER_317: I didn't even know that when you registered, if you do a search, you're going to see all cleavage.

SPEAKER_08: That's the experience of people who are not registered for YouTube and registered. For those people who are at home who haven't registered for YouTube yet, if you register for YouTube and you start doing searches,

SPEAKER_294: you'll be, like, looking for Pink Flood the Wall, and you'll see three Pink Flood the Walls, three boobies. It's pretty crazy. So, yeah, who cares?

SPEAKER_04: What do you think?

SPEAKER_103: You know the Tumblr guys. I know David Karp, yeah. I think he's trying to probably secretly run a porn business. No, I doubt it.

SPEAKER_198: I mean, actually, we both know David, and David actually is, at night, a pornographer. He really is. He really is. He really is. David, we've been telling you.

SPEAKER_317: You can't do both. Pick one. No, we're just kidding. David's not a pornographer. What are you going to do? It's a blog platform. It's a platform, that's right. I mean, in related news, somebody sent a naked photo by Gmail.

SPEAKER_08: Now Gmail's a pornography platform, you know? In related news, somebody loaded pornography in their browser. Guess what? Google Chrome is a pornography haven. You know? It's like, there's a dial tone on the internet. How people use it, in general, is up to them.

SPEAKER_416: Next story. Sproutbox is launching an incubator focused on helping startups make money. They want to tell startups, instead of building a business and building your audience first

SPEAKER_418: and then trying to figure out where the profits are, go after the revenues right away. So is this a new direction for internet entrepreneurs to start looking for revenues in the beginning and forget about the Twitter model of build it first and then profit later?

SPEAKER_294: This really depends on where you're at as an entrepreneur and how your funding is.

SPEAKER_08: When Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker were built, they had owners who had a little bit of seed capital, but in general, it had to make money. And that gives you a level of focus that you don't see in a venture-backed business, which is by definition going to be a little less efficient with capital because they have more to spend and try different things. So if it wasn't working on a Gawker blog, Nick Denton would look at that $3,000 or $4,000 monthly bill for the bloggers or $5,000 or $6,000 and it went on and cancel it pretty quick, right?

SPEAKER_133: Yeah, absolutely. And that's how we run it, Curb, too, is like we, you know, I would love to spend money.

SPEAKER_103: I'd love to expand to 25 markets, but actually I wouldn't. Like I like the fact that we're, you know, in our markets and we make good money in our markets. There's always time for that later. We'll grow as we grow.

SPEAKER_317: You know, as you get older as an entrepreneur and you have more success, you can get more funding to try bigger things. So Lockhart now has his first company. He had credibility from Gawker, was able to raise $1.5.

SPEAKER_08: He sells Curb for $25 million. Guess what? Now he's Jason Calacanis circa 2006. He's going to be able to raise...

SPEAKER_464: Oh, dare to dream.

SPEAKER_08: No, you're going to be able to raise $10 million on the next one. Trust me. When I was in your position, I had the same issue with Weblogs, Inc. I was raising hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of, you know, millions or tens of millions. And it's, yeah, so in some ways it's a good idea. Y Combinator has the same idea. Keep it small. Keep it focused on revs. It's okay. But you know what? Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.

SPEAKER_141: I mean, if you look at the greatest brands on the web, they actually weren't built that way.

SPEAKER_08: The big scale brands were built, go for scale, then go for revs. So you can find equal number of examples of small companies that became nice boutique businesses or whatever. And you can find equal number of examples of people who blew it out with that. That's really not the key issue and the success of it. The key issue is who's the entrepreneur, the team, and what's the market? Great team in a great market is going to have a big win. Bad team in a great market could have a great win. A lot of idiots will do well in an up market. Bad market, great team?

SPEAKER_294: Great team can't make, you know, sell sand in the desert.

SPEAKER_416: Sirius XM lost 404,000 subscribers in its first quarter.

SPEAKER_418: That's 2% of its user base. They're losing audience to iPhones and iPods, so they're planning on releasing their own free iPhone app. Do you think that that's going to help them? If Howard Stern didn't help them, do you think the iPhone will?

SPEAKER_08: Well, Howard Stern is the reason they got like 5 million of their members, supposedly. So, I mean, he definitely, maybe he wasn't worth the hundreds of millions of dollars they paid for him, but he definitely brought audience. Yeah, they're losing to Pandora, of course. Pandora's awesome. I mean, half the time I take out my iPhone, I hit Pandora, not the music. My iPod has been sitting on a shelf. I would much rather put on Pandora, hear a couple songs by Kanye, and then hear a couple songs that they think are related. Yeah, this is definitely a Pandora issue.

SPEAKER_474: What do you think, Locke?

SPEAKER_76: Yeah, I mean, Sirius XM, I mean, I thought all along that the model would never work, and then you sort of had to give in and realize, oh, that model is going to work,

SPEAKER_450: and now you realize, oh, actually, no, the model's not going to work. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: It's nice when you're in your car to have CNN and all those things available. So, as a car technology, it's awesome. But, you know, guess what? You're going to have internet-enabled cars very soon. The Tesla Model S has a 3G persistent connection. The Kindle has a persistent connection. The idea of paying $45 a month for a persistent broadband connection mobily is going to go down to pay one time or per year, $100 for your car to have an internet connection because they know you're not going to use it so much or it's factored into the cost of the Kindle. So you'll see a lot more of those bundling-type deals with certain devices.

SPEAKER_294: It's quite possible you'll have Pandora on your computer, on your car's computer, in the next car you buy. Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_481: You're a Howard Stern fan. Would you pay for Sirius Radio to get to listen to Howard Stern?

SPEAKER_474: I have, well, I have, in three of my cars, we have satellite radio on all three.

SPEAKER_187: It's one subscription and it's not that much money now because they charge you like $4 extra. So it's totally worth it for the convenience of it. But if I had the internet on there, if I have iTunes on there and I'm downloading This American Life and Car Talk and PR podcasts, maybe I don't need it. So, free wins again.

SPEAKER_416: Google is starting to have a monopoly issue. They have 78% of the search market and now regulators are starting to look around

SPEAKER_418: to see if they have an unfair advantage. The Justice Department is looking at its book search deal with publishers. The FTC is wondering if the board of directors are a little too close with Apple's board of directors. You're competing in this space, Jason. Do you feel they have an unfair advantage?

SPEAKER_08: The switching cost from one search engine to another is zero. So it's kind of hard to say they have lock-in when if Mahalo suddenly becomes better than Google searches, June 15th, M2, if it suddenly becomes better, people will switch. And so it's really up to the entrepreneurs to make a more compelling mousetrap. They took market share from Yahoo. They took market share from...

SPEAKER_187: And Yahoo took market share from Lycos. I mean, this is the way of the world. So they don't have an unfair monopoly right now in search. They have an earned monopoly. If you want to talk about unfair monopolies, the unfair monopoly might be in their advertising network getting too powerful. But even that, they don't have the majority of the ad, you know, space on the Internet. So I think this is a little bit misguided. If they really want to fight the real enemy, that's Apple. The fact that Apple doesn't let you use an MP3 player of your choice with iTunes, that is seriously anti-competitive. The fact that I can't load any application I want on my iPhone, seriously anti-competitive. The fact that Apple has dodged this bullet is a miracle. I don't know what pixie dust Apple is spreading

SPEAKER_08: around Washington, D.C., but if somebody from Washington, D.C. is watching, really? I mean, really? You can only get your AT&T on your iPhone? You realize in Europe they're not allowed to bundle services like that?

SPEAKER_187: I mean, they really have to crack Apple's monopoly. I think Apple gets away with a lot because they're so loved.

SPEAKER_317: You know? Bill Gates, he's not as loved. Microsoft, I mean, it sounds crazy, but Apple people love the products. I mean, look at all these Apple fanboys

SPEAKER_08: who scream and shout about DRM and this, and they're also open culture and open source. All these open source knuckleheads, no offense to the open source knuckleheads watching, they're all Apple fanboys.

SPEAKER_418: And girls. But Google used to have this kind of love. We all loved Google. We talked about them. But now it seems like there's a shift. Do you think that the government's starting to think that there's a monopoly?

David Friedberg: People are...

SPEAKER_08: I think that Google is going to have 90% of the search market share. And whenever anybody gets that amount of market share, the government should take a look.

SPEAKER_317: If you look at Microsoft's case, Microsoft was doing bundling deals and all kinds of anti-competitive stuff. So it was worth it. But when they pull back the curtain on Google

SPEAKER_08: and they look at their search deals, it's like Microsoft is buying search on Dell computers or whatever by default or Firefox or this and that. People type in Google.com.

SPEAKER_317: There's no bundling of Google and there's no gun to your head or forcing you to use it. So, you know, sorry. I mean, trust me, I'd be the first to tell you I'm competing in the search base. I'd be the absolute first to tell you if I thought they were doing something nefarious. They're not. There's nothing nefarious about having a great product. Apple, great product, and nefarious behavior.

SPEAKER_08: Why can't I plug in a Zune or a Rio player or a commodity hardware player into iTunes? That's some seriously anti-competitive stuff. The fact that I can't put any application on iTunes, I've got to wait for them to approve the application, that's seriously anti-competitive. So, no, it's people just hating on their success. I don't know. What do you think, Locke?

SPEAKER_458: You've said it all on this one.

SPEAKER_08: What do you think about Apple? I mean, you're an Apple fanboy, too, as well?

SPEAKER_450: Fanboy? I don't know. I mean, I have an iPhone. Does that make me a fanboy?

SPEAKER_474: Well, I mean, do you have an Apple computer as well?

SPEAKER_450: I do, yeah.

SPEAKER_474: Do you have a time capsule at home?

SPEAKER_450: I do.

SPEAKER_366: Okay, you're a fanboy. Yeah, okay. How many iPods are in your drawer right now? Four? Greater or less than four? Greater or less than three iPods?

SPEAKER_125: Fewer than three iPods.

SPEAKER_234: In your life, you've purchased fewer than three iPods?

SPEAKER_125: Well, I've been through four. I've already been through four iPhones, so if you count each of those separately,

SPEAKER_223: I guess I'm in trouble. Four plus three is seven, yeah.

SPEAKER_192: How many iPhones, how many iPods have you purchased in your life, either for yourself or for another person?

SPEAKER_76: That's a great question. It was a go-to Christmas present for members of the family for years, and then everyone needed the second generation. It's probably close to a dozen.

SPEAKER_493: I think I've bought 15 iPods. Yeah. At least 15 iPods in my life.

SPEAKER_494: I have two. They make great gifts, like you say.

SPEAKER_317: And you know what? I don't care that it's not... And this is the goof of... This is why Apple is so stupid in this case. And Steve Jobs rarely does something stupid, but the stupidity of this is he actually thinks that the product can't stand on its own. I would still buy my wife the iPod Touch. I would still buy the iPhone, and I would still buy an iPod over the other players, even though it might be 30% more. And so would a lot of people, because they want... You can buy $9 running shoes, but people still buy $100, you know, Nikes. There's something about that brand that's loved. You're not going to lose it, and you would only gain more people buying MP3s.

SPEAKER_08: So it's actually really stupid on their part. And they just make themselves a target, and rightfully so. You should not be able to bundle hardware and a service, a phone service. That is seriously anti-competitive. Seriously anti-competitive. And in Europe, they don't allow it. You should be able to buy the iPhone and then put it with any service. And now that we have Obama in and maybe some other people who actually are not in the pocket of these telecoms and tech companies, maybe they'll crack that. And that would be a great outcome, actually, for Apple and AT&T. There would be more iPhones out there today if you could plug in any SIM card. Apple would sell more. Apple is shooting itself in the foot for short-term revenue to keep their stock prices. Why?

SPEAKER_496: How would Apple sell more if you can take your phone away from AT&T?

SPEAKER_08: Well, they're getting a piece of the AT&T in action, right? So that's nice. But if you can buy one for $4.99 or $3.99 on an iPhone and plug in your T-Mobile, which you already have a contract with that you can't get out of, you know how many kids would be going running up there doing that? Or if I could take a prepaid SIM card or any SIM card and plug it into any iPhone, even like one of those to-go ones, people around the world would be buying them. They'd be selling 10 times as many. I don't get it. I mean, it just seems like a very short-term play. And I guess they're getting all these upfront fees. So I think Apple wants to keep the revenue train going now to get those quarterly profits. And then I don't think they're thinking long-term. I think Google's thinking long-term. Buy the Google phone. Use it with any service you want. Hack it. Go crazy. And Apple's got that control freak thing. They don't want anybody to change the experience but them. And what they should do is when you want to put something on that's not yours, it should be a big warning, like we were talking about before for the hate groups or the porn groups. You are going to screw up your user experience if you load these applications that are not tested and it could drain your battery in 15 minutes and it could crash your iPhone and make you start over. Okay, I am willing to take that risk. I'm an adult. I paid 500 freaking dollars for the device. I want to crash it. But they're so... They don't want to get into that whole... They have the commercials with Microsoft freezing and them not freezing. The second they let it be a free-for-all, now their phone's going to start crashing and Bill Gates can say, oh, look, an Apple crashes. Whatever. You get the idea.

SPEAKER_416: I get the idea. All right, Twitter is getting deeper and deeper into the search business, it seems like.

SPEAKER_418: They announced recently that they're going to start crawling all those links in their search results. As it is, before I walked in here, I did a search on Twitter to see what people were saying about the show and not on Google. So more search business going over to Twitter. Are they starting to become a threat to Google? No.

SPEAKER_317: No. You can get sentiment from Twitter search, but it's not going to solve your problems in most cases. So you can get the sentiment of the Knicks game or the Lakers game last night or what happened on Lost. But in 140 characters, you really can't do too much. The indexing of the URLs, quite interesting. You know, now I search for... You know, you do your ego search for Lockhart, you know, and, okay, I see all the tweets about me, but somebody Twittered something that has my name in it. Oh, now it's become like Technorati because you basically have taken... You're indexing everything that's been on Dig or Technorati or blogs or whatever. It gets a little more interesting.

SPEAKER_294: Again, I think it's like 5% of search or 10% of search, which is a lot. It's a multi-billion dollar business. So search is going to be their business. TweetSense is what I'm calling it. You're going to... I like that. TweetSense. When you do a search, it's going to have, like, you did a search for Starbucks and here is Coffee Bean or Starbucks.

SPEAKER_504: Yeah, you did a mock-up of that on your blog, didn't you? I did, yeah. That was cute.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it's going to work. I showed it to them.

SPEAKER_504: Your Photoshop skills are exceptional.

SPEAKER_08: No, that's Tyler's. Oh. But actually, when I showed it to them, they were, like, close.

SPEAKER_05: I think it's pretty close, accurately. So, yeah, great job for them. I think they're continuing

SPEAKER_187: to stick it to Google

SPEAKER_503: and I think Google will buy this business for $2 billion in the next 18 months.

SPEAKER_418: You mentioned TweetSense. What if instead of PageRank, which is Google's system for figuring out how valuable a page is, what if they create something

David Friedberg: called PeopleRank where they have people tweeting? People have been talking

SPEAKER_187: about PeopleRank for years and years. It's interesting, but it's super gameable. So then, you know, basically I get 100 people together to tweet this and then all of a sudden we're the number one for MortgageRank. I mean, then they could do how many followers you have.

SPEAKER_08: They can do all kinds of things. Social search is a really interesting concept. I've worked on it a little bit. Delicious worked on it. StumbleUpon's working on it. It's interesting. I mean, ask yourself

SPEAKER_187: if you do a dig or StumbleUpon or Delicious search for Paris hotels if you get something interesting. You might find a nugget or two here that are interesting, but it's not generally going to be as good as a Google search. You might get interesting pieces like, oh, I didn't know that Gridskipper did a review of cheap Paris hotels that didn't rank in Google for some reason, but it did come up in Delicious. That's 1,700 people bookmarked because it was funny. Okay, interesting, but it's complimentary, not replacing. You see? Social is probably 20% of the search problem. Experts are another 30%, and then algorithms the other 50%. That's my world view. I don't know. I'm slightly biased.

SPEAKER_418: I've got another story here about Facebook. The Facebook platform developers looks like they could see half a billion bucks in revenue this year. That's about as much as Facebook itself is expected to get in revenue. Yep. And it turns out a lot of their money is coming from virtual goods, these Facebook developers. Sure, of course. Things like Igon for the, for Mob Wars. Zanga.

SPEAKER_460: Zanga is selling a lot of poker chips.

SPEAKER_418: Is this a fad,

SPEAKER_496: or is virtual goods a good revenue source?

SPEAKER_503: SciWorld in Korea, all the social networks over in China and Japan, they're making a fortune.

SPEAKER_187: Virtual goods are real. It's hard for us as Americans to get our heads around it. It's hard for people over 30 to get their heads around it because the idea of buying something virtual seems like a waste of money because physical money is usually traded for a physical object.

SPEAKER_294: But no, it's not crazy. I just wanted to take a point here. If you have questions for Lockhart or comments, put them on Twitter, pound twist.

SPEAKER_05: And I see Reifey agrees about the iTunes and iPhone being anti-competitive. Will W. Net is saying

SPEAKER_187: we have some interesting arguments against the Google antitrust claim. Blah, blah, blah. Oh, it turns out Earl Wallace says that you can pick up broadband broadcasts on the BlackBerry with Pandora. I didn't know that. I'll put Pandora on my BlackBerry. And other comments. So pound twist if you have a question. Okay. Any thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_517: Twitter search?

SPEAKER_516: Or Facebook? Which one?

SPEAKER_517: Which one of these fantastic social networks were we talking about again? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_518: Facebook and virtual currencies and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Do you have any sense or real? I think it's very real.

SPEAKER_223: I mean, I'd like to be able to start selling virtual real estate on Curb.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Absolutely. Has either of you bought virtual goods online? I see you tweeting about everything you do online and you try every service but I haven't yet seen you buy a virtual good online. I have not.

SPEAKER_518: I don't think I've ever spent a virtual good. I have bought video games.

SPEAKER_05: I've bought Bejeweled 2 and a poker game on my iPhone. Does that count? Yeah. But I never bought the chips in it.

SPEAKER_223: Gmail just made me upgrade to a larger account size.

SPEAKER_05: It's a service more than a virtual currency. So yeah, I've paid for digital assets but there hasn't actually been a currency that I've felt compelled enough. Like playing poker, buying $100 of the poker chips online when I can play poker here in LA and actually win back real money doesn't make sense to me. So it's an over 30 thing.

SPEAKER_43: I think it's if you play World of Warcraft or if you play Call of Duty or some of these games or if you live

SPEAKER_08: in your social network and it really matters to you what your page looks like in MySpace, you might want to buy a new song for it because your friends go and you see it. But for the rest of us, we don't care that much about giving virtual flowers or how our Facebook page is because we've got kids or families or work to do. When you're younger you have more free time, this makes more sense.

SPEAKER_418: All right. Business Week is reporting that the jobless rate has climbed to 8.9% and might climb to 11%. How is this going to affect entrepreneurship?

SPEAKER_187: Well, there's a lot more talent out there for a much lower price and their expectations are lower. Just like in 2003, 2004 when Lockhart went to his whatever, Hampton's gardening magazine, his expectations were probably modest. He was more interested in learning than probably cash compensation when he went to work for Nick. He was more interested in learning than cash compensation. Then at the peak, 2007, 2008 when he was hiring bloggers, a lot of those guys were like, I want to make max money. That's right. Give me a max contract.

SPEAKER_534: Damn right.

SPEAKER_187: It changed, you know, in blogging from 2004 to 2008. Guess what? Now it's all reset again. People don't have jobs. Their conception of what's important in life changes which is good for the entrepreneur. He could hire literally bloggers for $5 a blog post on Curb right now and have a line out the door. He's probably paying them $10 or $12 right now. Previously, five years ago, people would do it for free.

SPEAKER_103: The other thing you see finally is some of the great mainstream journalists of this generation who we've wanted to get online blogging were so against it and for basically no good reason. Just like, oh, blogging is beneath me and you finally are seeing that sliding a little bit.

SPEAKER_537: John Markoff and Saul Hansel and the New York Times are like Bits and Wall Street Journal has theirs. Who's your favorite

SPEAKER_540: mainstream journalist who's become a blogger?

SPEAKER_539: I just love,

SPEAKER_103: I'm reading someone like, well, Andrew Sullivan's my favorite blogger in the entire world

SPEAKER_87: but I guess he's almost like the pioneer of the whole thing. Someone who's made the leap recently. Gawker's made some good hires in its space. Someone like John Cook was a great reporter who we wanted to get blogging at Gawker years and years ago and he went to Radar Magazine. A lot of people are still in love with the idea of the print publication and I get it. You're a print guy too. There's something wonderful about having the print publication at the end of the day but now these people I think realize that hey, I can actually online. The freedom that these people have to write for these sites is amazing.

SPEAKER_544: Yeah, you can't discount that. And the ability to have an opinion

SPEAKER_87: and be honest. I don't understand why people have fought it so much. And sometimes when there have been a few people who have quit Gawker and other blog companies where they sort of leave with a, you know, saying the company was a salt mine and working here was hell and it's like Will Leach,

SPEAKER_103: the Deadspin guy and I, we used to joke until you've toiled for years at a trade magazine you have no idea

SPEAKER_87: what hell is. You hear you were being paid to write about celebrity gossip and other things that delight you on your own terms

SPEAKER_216: with your own voice like, as writer can go that's a pretty good gig. And I think like that's being acknowledged more now which is good.

SPEAKER_294: I can remember many times at Venture Reporter or Silicon Air Reporter being like, I'm sorry, whose opinion is this? Okay, hold on.

SPEAKER_187: Take that right out. Okay, no opinions please. Stick to the facts. I've got three pros here. I need two cons. I only have one con. I need a second con. Take it back, kid. This is how people

SPEAKER_294: would think at Train Pops. And here's your story for the day. Here's our advertiser. That's how a lot of these trade pubs work. Like here, write a story about these guys. Oh, you know, this isn't good enough. Make it nicer.

SPEAKER_554: Yeah, totally. Yeah.

SPEAKER_294: So anyway, it's going to be great. The great companies are built in the down market. Less competition, more talent available.

SPEAKER_555: What's your view of sales hiring right now, Jason?

SPEAKER_187: I think that there's a lot of sales talent out there, but they have to calibrate to lower expectations.

SPEAKER_07: They probably still have this like 2007, 2008 high base salary.

SPEAKER_103: Because we're seeing that. We're in the market right now for some sales people and we're seeing that the expectations are still a little out of whack. Not across the board, but in certain cases.

SPEAKER_187: Interesting you say that. Any good sales person is going to come in with that and you have to counter with I know that you're used to getting that. Right. We can only hire somebody who is probably like a little bit less than what you're used to getting. However, I wouldn't offer you the job anyway just in case because you might like to work here. So I know it's half of what your base was, but you could probably beat what you made there with the commission. So I just want to offer it to you. I know you're not going to take it, and you'll see. They'll all take it anyway. So think about it this way. A good salesman, of course, is going to go for the moon and that's the person you want to hire. So maybe they shoot it for the stars, you give them the moon kind of a situation. I know a lot of people who are hiring people on commission only or very low draws. And that's going to become a trend because you know what? Sitting at home doing nothing, really bad. And then you want to, so the salespeople who are out there

SPEAKER_08: who are out of work, and there's a lot of them, you want to get into a place because when the recovery happens, you want to have the accounts so that you make that killer year.

SPEAKER_559: Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_08: So you want to get in your sales force or your act or whatever that you have those accounts, that you're working. Yeah, sure, it's flat and round right now, but maybe when it comes back, you'll have developed those relationships

SPEAKER_317: with those accounts. Here's a question coming to you from I Ansley who says, what's the minimum you would sell curved for?

SPEAKER_175: Well, that's a very easy question. What's the number?

SPEAKER_561: Six million dollars.

SPEAKER_175: Six million dollars. There you go. Put it on eBay. Make me an offer. Make me an offer. I have a feeling six wouldn't do it.

SPEAKER_294: What do you think of this follow Friday trend? Seems to be impersonal and spamming lately.

SPEAKER_565: Follow Friday on Twitter? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_567: I like the people who do follow Fridays when they recommend one person and tell you why they're recommending them. That's a better trend. Can we do that from now on? Because I get

SPEAKER_05: so many ego alerts on Fridays from Thursday into Friday of like, follow, you know,

SPEAKER_570: Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Mike Arrington. It's like the same

SPEAKER_87: I think pick, I like pick one, Jenny A. Lee, the Times, maybe who is it? One of the Times reporters who I follow does a good job of every Friday picking one interesting person and explaining

SPEAKER_283: to you like, hey, if you're interested in this area, follow this person.

SPEAKER_572: Here's a great one from M. Cruthiem who says,

SPEAKER_175: how does Lockhart feel about the rumor he's trying to buy 4chan? How's the 4chan acquisition going?

SPEAKER_76: Well, it's funny, I met Moot at a party in New York about, he's responding

SPEAKER_103: to something I put on my Twitter and it was the highlight of... Is that a 100 party? No, it was, Dig had a little like get together in New York City a couple weeks ago and so I meet Moot and he's like, oh, I read Curb all the time and racked and I was like, this is the highlight of my life on the internet. I can now, I may as well now quit and it's all over because the fact that

SPEAKER_76: Moot reads my website is like... For those of you

SPEAKER_09: who don't know, 4chan is a website which developed

SPEAKER_05: a lot of memes. Memes are trends, it's a fancy way of saying like a buzzy trend. Marshall McLuhan, look it up, blah, blah, blah. And on 4chan, I think they came out with...

SPEAKER_578: Like they created Lowlcats. Lowlcats,

SPEAKER_187: Rick Rowling was created there. A lot of those trends are there. It's also absurdly obscene if you go to the B forum.

SPEAKER_103: It's also absurdly impenetrable to outsiders.

SPEAKER_187: Yeah, no, if you go, basically expect to see the worst of the internet.

SPEAKER_450: And not even to understand what you're seeing.

SPEAKER_187: It's like a message board from 1997 that nobody shut down and nobody's moderating.

SPEAKER_76: Right. But now the founder of it, Mood, is one of the Time Magazine's most 100 important people.

SPEAKER_08: To the Time 100 editor who put them on the list, no offense, did you actually go to the website?

SPEAKER_374: Because I don't think you can link to 4chan from Time. See, I give Time some credit for I think playing in the deep end of the pool on that one. They're in the deep end of the pool.

SPEAKER_584: Somebody's going to get fired when somebody links to that and takes a screenshot.

SPEAKER_587: And they also said when the 4chan crowd manipulated all the online polling, they basically said, okay, you win, which I don't think is the worst response to that. No,

SPEAKER_05: that is totally the great response. It's the right response. 4chan was trying to crash Twitter when they were doing the race between Ashton Kutcher. They were trying to get that guy who was torturing people in his basement to win. They've done all kinds of crazy insanity on that website. So I guess, yeah, but I think it's also known for child porn, so maybe not so much.

SPEAKER_590: That's a fair point.

SPEAKER_05: I hate to bring it up,

SPEAKER_187: Time, but you're linking to a place that hosts child porn in your Time 100.

SPEAKER_175: Maybe a little lack of judgment, although I do give those guys credit for that whole anonymous Scientology thing, which just as pure

SPEAKER_08: performance art, it's pretty funny. That's them, right? Yeah. Or it's hosted there or something?

SPEAKER_593: I think that's right.

SPEAKER_08: I mean, it's pretty brilliant.

SPEAKER_593: I'm not saying anything negative about Scientology.

SPEAKER_08: I'm not saying anything negative about Scientology either. Although Gawker actually...

SPEAKER_314: Oh, Gawker went full at it. Yeah, I mean, that was...

SPEAKER_07: And Scientology came to you guys and tried to get you to take stuff down.

SPEAKER_103: I'll be honest and say this is after my time at Gawker, so I can only speak from the gossip I pick up at Manhattan.

SPEAKER_595: But Nick loves that stuff. Well, Nick is not... He loves the takedown notice.

SPEAKER_103: One of the things Nick is greatest about is not being afraid to go after people who are in power, who a lot of other people would seriously just be afraid to go after. He goes right at them. Right.

SPEAKER_598: Kind of likes it.

SPEAKER_103: He kind of loves it.

SPEAKER_598: What is that about his personality since we're... Well, I mean, he's from Britain

SPEAKER_103: and I think he's from a tabloid culture that frankly like is much more aggressive and goes at stories much harder and I think in his mind actually does a much better job ultimately reporting the news than America. I think Nick looks at American media and sees a bunch of sissies who kept all their best stuff out of print. You know, Nick's whole idea behind Gawker in the first place was all the best stories that newspaper reporters know about. They're talking about over beers with each other at the end of the day but oh my god we could never put that in the paper. We couldn't trust anyone with that information. Right. And the whole idea of Gawker and of course the internet in general is hey let's just put it out there and I think Nick just had contempt

SPEAKER_565: for the American media's inability to put it out there.

SPEAKER_253: What is it about him on his personality basis where he can be so brutal to people savage them on the blog

SPEAKER_374: or the blog savages them and then when you meet him he's so nice to you.

SPEAKER_87: Because I think less of it is like I don't think Nick Denton is sitting around there ordering hits the way that's I mean that's how people feel. People sometimes think he's in a godfather chair there you know taking people out like that's just not how it works. It's just not. I mean I'm sorry to ruin this and if you guys have never heard it

SPEAKER_76: Kalkanis has a fantastic Denton impression that Andrew Krukoff told me I should urge you to do on this show.

SPEAKER_605: Really?

SPEAKER_76: He said make Kalkanis do his British Nick impression. I don't.

SPEAKER_608: Anyway. Anyway. Next topic.

SPEAKER_418: Anyway there you go. Venture capital investment is down this year. We're at $3 billion in investment in the first quarter. That's half of what it was last year. We talked earlier about how the great companies pushed off revenue until later. Yeah. Can you do that without venture capital investment and if you can't are we going to start losing great companies?

SPEAKER_07: No. We're going to start losing bad companies. I mean you may lose some good companies in the mix

SPEAKER_187: but you're not going to lose the great ones. Great companies will survive. VCs have to invest in something. They're still going to invest in the great ones. So the great ones will survive. The bad ones will go away and the good ones flip a coin. It really depends on how their management runs them. It's the way of the world. People over invested in 2007, 2008. They maybe invested more money than they should in some enterprises. That's okay. People get a little excited. Now maybe they're a little bit too tight but in general that swing

SPEAKER_08: is one of the great things about U.S. entrepreneurship. If we didn't bet so heavy we wouldn't win so heavy. That's why eBay, Yahoo, Google are global brands. Microsoft. And if you go name the internet company from another country that is a true global brand that has a dominant position in the U.S. Name one. There is one. Very hard to guess but it's now owned by a U.S. company. But Skype. There is only one brand on the internet built outside of the United States that has become dominant in the United States in their vertical and it's Skype which got bought by eBay for $2 billion which is not really a lot of money. So if the biggest example of the most successful company outside of the U.S. is Skype on a global basis

SPEAKER_503: not on a local basis on a global basis that says something about what's great

SPEAKER_317: about our entrepreneurial process. It's wild. You bet big. You win big. That's how you win at the World Series of Poker. You take big swinging bets that get you a big chip lead so when you're at the final table you can bully people.

SPEAKER_08: That's American entrepreneurship. If you play safe poker guess what? You make it into the top 20% every time but you never win.

SPEAKER_612: Did you play in the main event this year?

SPEAKER_187: I'm going to play this year I think. Nice. I don't think I have much of a choice at this point. I have to feed the addiction. Thank you to our sponsors Ustream. Thank you to Lockhart Steele. Thank you to DNAmail, DNAmail. Everybody should on Twitter thank DNAmail.com and thank Ustream for being the sponsor of the show. They make it possible for us to put this together. I don't think we're going to have a show on Friday but we have a show the following Friday. Do we know who the guest is? Is it Mark Pincus the week after? Or Tony from Zappos? Or the guys from Gamefly? Not confirmed yet. Not confirmed yet.

SPEAKER_08: Possibly Mark Pincus from Zanga. We'll be on a week from Friday hopefully. That would be a good get.

SPEAKER_614: It would be great.

SPEAKER_08: He's making a lot of money. I don't want to talk about it but people say he's making $100 million right now. That's not true but he probably is making $3 or $4 million a month which is like $30 million a year. It's a pretty big deal. Pretty big deal for a brand new company.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Jason, can you talk about what DNAmail is? I keep hearing you talk about it.

David Friedberg: Am I putting you on the spot here to ask you more about it?

SPEAKER_187: Well, no, you're not putting me on the spot. DNAmail is hosted exchange and Google App solutions. So you know when you start a company you can like

SPEAKER_317: some IT guy is like oh I've got to set up a server and we've got to spend all this money and da da da da. When you're running a startup company you really don't want to get into that nonsense of IT.

SPEAKER_187: Put every dollar you can into the product. IT is a drain

SPEAKER_08: just like you outsource your accounting, your legal, you don't hire a staff account and staff legal, staff HR person, you outsource all that. I'm sure you outsource all that at...

SPEAKER_619: Outsource, outsource, outsource.

SPEAKER_08: Exactly. Just focus on your core competency. It's the same thing. You don't need to host your own mail server. You don't need to deal without starting new accounts, getting extra hard disk space, et cetera.

SPEAKER_294: You outsource it to DNAmail and Ustream is the other sponsor. Very cool. We have one sponsorship slot open if you want it. Email contact

SPEAKER_05: at This Week in Startups and we'll read your live commercial two or three times during the show which is a pretty good deal considering there's dozens if not hundreds of people watching the show. I'm still holding out from Audible. Nobody can understand why Audible is not sponsoring the show. Audible, you got the number one fan right here. I know, it's crazy. I know Audible because of you. All right, there we go. All right, no Audible. Great show, everybody. Thank you to everybody there. And anything we should know about with Curbed coming up? Any plugs or anything we should look out for?

SPEAKER_567: What are the cities now? We're in New York,

SPEAKER_85: we're in Los Angeles and we're in San Francisco. We're going to be doing a Hampton site this summer. That'll be fun for those people in New York who enjoy that. That market is going to be a fun real estate market to write about because it's been absolutely gutted. Oh, prices are down 50%, 60%. Nice. Mansions that were going for $20 million are going for $8 million. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_420: I rented my mom a house for two weeks in Montauk. It's beautiful out there. That's her 60th birthday present. It's beautiful out there. So I will be there for a week

SPEAKER_294: this summer in July. So if you're in Montauk, hit up JCal and we'll go grab a... What do you do in the... I don't even know. I've never summered out there.

SPEAKER_194: You go to the beach. What do you do anywhere where there's a beach nearby?

SPEAKER_633: Why is it such a big deal, Hamptons?

SPEAKER_194: It's just a pretty area near New York. That's the only reason it's a big deal. And you drive out there three or four hours to get out there? It's like two hours

SPEAKER_85: if you time it right.

SPEAKER_207: Really? Yeah, two and a half.

SPEAKER_85: I'm going to have to take the month. It's pretty out there. The natural beauty is remarkable. No, it is incredible.

SPEAKER_207: And Montauk's the furthest out. Montauk is the most beautiful. As far as it goes, exactly.

SPEAKER_635: Well, it's the most rugged.

SPEAKER_187: Most rugged? Yeah. Well, I'll be taking the Mahalo helicopter out there

SPEAKER_05: if anybody needs a ride from Manhattan. I need a ride. Thank you for another great show. Or Wallace, Tim, Niccolo. Thanks, D and Amal. Wow, it's amazing. This is how, like, to run a new podcast. You just thank the, tell the audience to thank the sponsors. And then the sponsors get, like, their alert, you know, like, their ego alert goes ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And it's just all these people in real time thanking everybody. Keep rotating the news anchor spot. That's a good idea. Thanks, Ustream. Thank you for another great show. You're welcome. Awesome. Okay, so we'll see you all in a week. Thank you, Andrew, for sitting in for the news. You did a great job. Thank you. Everybody rate the show from 1 to 10 on Twitter.

SPEAKER_277: Give it a score between 1 and 10. Show me. I'm at Lock. Oh, yeah, at Lock.

SPEAKER_641: L-O-C-K, so I can see it.

SPEAKER_05: So everybody rate the show on a scale of 1 to 10. I do this every show, and we get, like, 20 people to rate the show. It's pretty funny. Rate the show. Tell us what you liked about it. 1 to 10. And also, if you have ideas for guests, contact at This Week in Startups, and we take requests. But don't send us somebody who, let me say it this way. I'll say it a gentle way. If you have somebody who's not, like, a seasoned entrepreneur

SPEAKER_187: that tens of thousands of people who download the episodes wouldn't want to hear from, that's a good person for Ask Jason. So put them on the Ask Jason segment, have them call in and ask a question. That's for, like, the two-person shop that maybe hasn't done anything yet, or they've just sort of scratched the surface. We try to, the prime interview slide is for somebody who's doing a blown-out thing and has a more established business. Okay, so we'll see you all next time. Oh, here we go. 7.5, 9, 12 plus. Hey, right on. There you go.

SPEAKER_518: And we'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_00: Like we always do with this time Let's go and throw your hands up