Monday, November 13, 2023

Startup Story

 Just about the time my three-year appointment as a visiting professor at Stanford was wrapping up in 2005, a Silicon Valley billionaire invited me to lunch. We met at one of Palo Alto’s finer restaurants. He asked me to come work for a new company he was starting up with his own money.

The offer was intriguing — the idea was to structure the content from world’s leading media sites into a manageable taxonomy that would provide a topic-based news and information service to paying customers — all curated by a small team of editors.

Soon thereafter, I started getting off a few freeway stops earlier on my commute down the peninsula to a high-rise office with a splendid view of jets approaching SFO. I assumed my duties as Editor-in-Chief of this new company.

Virtually everyone else in the venture was an engineer save for me, a two-person marketing team, a research director and a customer service director. I was to supervise the latter two plus hire a couple assistant editors who would help me sort through the global media and select our content.

Our boss and founder was himself an engineer and a man of meticulous habits. He arrived precisely at 9 a.m. at the office every day, departed at noon, came back at 1 p.m. and departed for the day right at 5 p.m.

I suspected that he was the only person in Silicon Valley to maintain such a rigid schedule since the normal routine at other startups I was familiar with resembled a mid-morning to late-night work schedule.

But we patterned our culture after our boss’s tastes. Meetings began precisely at the top of the hour and wrapped up one hour later, without exception.

Soon into my time there, a couple issues came to my attention. The research director told me that the vast majority of our visitors chose the free view version of the service as opposed to the paid.

And the customer service director told me we were constantly getting complaints that the overwhelming majority of our paid customers had been essentially tricked into giving us their credit card numbers during an initial six-week free period that we heavily promoted.

After six weeks, unless they opted out, they were automatically converted into paying customers and their accounts were dinged monthly going forward.

When I explained all this to my boss, he was shocked and said that sounded unethical and that we should change it into an explicit opt-in model.

I was gratified that he wanted the company to function in an honest, up-front manner as opposed to the under-handed system somebody before me had put in place.

But it soon emerged that there was a new problem. Once we’d made the change, practically nobody opted to sign up for the paid service once their free six-week period had expired. So our venture had no way to make any money.

The company sputtered along for a few years anyway, including during an exhaustive, year-long rebranding exercise, but increasingly we all knew it was doomed. 

Meanwhile, Google released Google News to the public, effectively ending any chance our little product had to survive in the new media landscape anyway.

I hate to say it, but that was more or less typical of my years migrating from one web-based startup to another from the years 1995-2012. Then, early in 2013, at the age of 66, I retired.

That lasted around a month before, bored out of my mind, I went back to work at KQED, the largest Northern California public media company.

But that is a story for another day.

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