Oct 8 Startup2Startup: What do Wikis tell us about the future of the Web?

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.

UPDATE:: And here’s the event interview with Jack, Gil, and David (special thanks to FutureWorks):

Sept 3rd CeWebrity DeathMatch: Jason Calacanis vs Guy Kawasaki on “Is Apple Becoming Big Brother?”

Our wrestlers speakers for September will be Jason Calacanis and Guy Kawasaki.  Jason and Guy will debate the topic of whether Apple is becoming “Big Brother”, whether they will approve your app for the App Store, whether Apple is now officially more Evil than Microsoft or Google, and whether Steve Jobs will let you know the next time he plans to have a checkup.  We expect nothing less than a good old-fashioned SmackDown and MudSlinging.  The fight debate is scheduled to go 3 rounds, or To The Pain (popcorn and lawnchairs cost extra).  We know you won’t want to miss it.

Jason Calacanis is founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine which launched in May 2007.  Prior to Mahalo, Jason was an “Entrepreneur in Action” at Sequoia Capital.  Jason is also a co-host and partner for TechCrunch50, a technology conference showcasing top new startups.

Before Mahalo, Jason was co-founder and CEO of Weblogs Inc, sold to AOL in November 2005. Upon joining AOL, he was appointed SVP and became GM of AOL Netscape. Prior to Weblogs, Jason was the founder of Rising Tide Studios, which produced Silicon Alley Reporter. The company was later sold to Dow Jones.

Jason is a frequent speaker at technology conferences, and his newsletter is published by Newsweek, The Huffington Post, and Nikkei Japan. He appears regularly in major news outlets including Charlie Rose, CNN, 60 minutes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others.

Guy Kawasaki is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an online magazine of popular topics on the web.

Previously, Guy was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer. He is the author of nine books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way.

Guy has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

For a look back at tomorrow, watch the original 1984 Apple Macintosh TV commercial:

July 30: Geoff Ralston on “Selling in the Age of Free”

Our speaker for July will be Geoff Ralston, CEO of Lala Media, and formerly Chief Product Officer at Yahoo.  Geoff will be speaking about “Selling in the Age of Free”.

Geoff Ralston is the CEO of Lala, a music startup in Palo Alto.  He is also an investor, board member, and advisor to several companies. Geoff worked at Yahoo from 1997-2006 after the 1997 acquisition of Four11 Corp where he was VP Engineering and led the creation of RocketMail (which became Yahoo Mail after the acquisition). At Yahoo Geoff was SVP and General Manager of the Communications Business Unit, and then served as Chief Product Officer from 2003-2005. Prior to Four11, Geoff was the creator of the popular LookUP! Internet white pages and do-it-yourself home page service.

Geoff holds a BA in Computer Science from Dartmouth College, an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and an MBA from INSEAD. He lives in Atherton, California with his wife and three children.

here is a quick interview with Geoff by Brian Phillips prior to his talk:

Mark Pincus On The Inspiration Behind Social Games And The Future of The App Economy

Last night Dave McClure interviewed serial entrepreneur Mark Pincus, who has run the social game development firm Zynga for the past two years, growing it to over 300 full-time employees and an estimated $50 to 100 million in revenue.

After speaking briefly about his past entrepreneurial experiences, which started in the 1990s with Pointcast competitor Freeloader and most notably includes the early social network Tribe, Mark dove into the inspiration behind Zynga and social games in general. He described how his experience with Tribe taught him that he was more interested in building extensions, or plugins, for social networks than the social networking containers themselves. So when Facebook prepared to open up to 3rd party applications in 2007, he jumped at the chance to become that network’s premier social games provider, even though many people – including Facebook’s own Dave Morin – doubted the viability of social games at the time.

[Mark Pincus at Startup2Startup: Part I of III]

Aside from believing that games were simply the “coolest thing” for people to do together on social networks, Mark believed they fit two particular insights. First, since Tribe had suffered from user engagement, with its most engaged members actually costing the site much more than they gave back, Mark was looking to build a product that aligned engagement with monetization. Gamers tend to spend more money the more they play, so Zynga was established with the idea that it could make money from the early days and enjoy even greater revenue as engagement increased.

Mark also realized from his own gaming addictions that people were willing to spend money to beat others in competition. Gamers who don’t have the skill to beat their online opponents without assistance are often eager to pay for advantages, or power-ups, that make it possible for them to win faster and save time. Zynga was therefore predicated on the notion that virtual goods should impact gameplay, not just add extra value around the edges.

[Mark Pincus at Startup2Startup: Part II of III]

So far these insights have paid off, with Zynga exploding in growth over the past year from about 60 employees to over 300. This has been a managerial challenge for the company, and it has required the institutionalization of corporate processes that were vital if irksome to many employees. He described how startups need to introduce delegation at around 50 employees and really start to bend under the weight of 200+ employees. For Zynga, this required painful changes to how things are run, but Mark says these changes have laid the foundation for another doubling in the company’s size.

Mark’s most intriguing remarks of the night were about how he predicts online distribution and monetization to change over the next 5-10 years. He believes that we’re moving towards an app economy where most internet services with be distributed over platforms. These apps will derive most of their revenue from digital goods and services, not advertising. Basically, users will begin paying for things online at a much higher volume, and developers will use metrics and game mechanics (even with non-games) to maximize engagement and profitability. A corollary to this trend will be making all consumer services more fun, since enjoyment encourage users to pay for more virtual goods and upgrades.

This paid goods vision of the web hinges on the availability of better and more pervasive payment systems. However, Mark thinks it’s still to-be-determined how the payments market will play out, and he anticipates that there will be many players at many different levels of the ecosystem. Because of his optimism for online payments and the app economy in general, he encourages all of the big players (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) to get more involved as platforms or risk losing out on the more private corners of the web.

[Mark Pincus at Startup2Startup: Part III of III]