Our topic for October is Wikis and the future of the Web. The first Wiki started getting page hits in November 1994. Wikis have been around for 15 years and we’re still unraveling their implications. Wikis influence at least some part of probably every important web startup this decade and the lessons learned from of the challenges of wikis–creating and tending to community, content, trust models and monetization–should be understood by all web entrepreneurs. For our October dinner, we have invited three CEOs to share their secrets and lessons learned from building businesses based on the Ward Cunningham’s elegant idea.
Jack Herrick
Jack Herrick is a serial entrepreneur and wiki enthusiast. Jack currently runs wikiHow, a wiki based how-to manual. wikiHow is a bootstrap funded start-up. With over 17 million unique visitors, wikiHow is the 105th most popular site in the US according to Quantcast.com. As wikiHow’s steward, Jack works with a community of thousands of volunteers who create, edit and maintain wikiHow’s 60,000 how-to articles.
Gil Penchina
Gil Penchina is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Wikia.com, the largest commercial wiki, whose users have written over 3 million articles in 100 languages in the last three years. The site now reaches over 14mm unique visitors per month according to Comscore. Prior to Wikia.com Gil was an executive at eBay for 8 years, most recently as a regional VP for eBay in Europe. Before eBay, Gil worked at General Electric, Bain & Co. and started two small technology companies. He has a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Kellogg. In addition, Gil is an active angel investor in companies such as Linkedin, Paypal, Flock, Koders, ZipRealty, FindWhat and other consumer Internet services.
David Weekly
A Boston native and son of a MIT engineer, David Weekly has been programming since he was five and has coded for MIT, Harvard, Stanford, There.com, atWeb, and Legato. David wrote the first layman’s description of MP3 in early 1997 and graduated in 2000 with a BS in Computer Science from Stanford, where he was a President Scholar and a finalist in the ACM International Programming Competition.
David started the company that became PBwiki (now PBworks) in 2003, along the way creating SingleStat.us and IMSmarter.
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