From his early days of learning to code on a Commodore PET, to sitting in AOL's boardroom table during its hay days, and bluffing with venture capitalists, Dave Sifry has worked the networked machine since it was a two bit connection right up to, and through, the social media explosion. The software entrepreneur spoke to ITWeb about the experience from the Silicon Valley offices of his latest creation - Offbeat Guides...
The year was 2003. Thirteen years after the Web had come online thanks to Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau. Friendster clocked over a million users, Netscape was three years away from losing the browser wars, and Dave Sifry was in his basement coding. Something he'd done since he was a kid. Since that very first night his dad brought home a computer and he'd fallen in love.
“I've always been interested in the incredible power that computing brings. When I was nine years old and my dad brought home the firm's computer and I taught myself to programme it, and I found it fascinating. Having control over this world, where the mistakes you made would bite you. And, when you did it right it was all your influence too.”
Open mind
Sifry's genetic code must have been open source because at that tender age he started learning the philosophical lessons that underpin peer production and collaborative software models. “My early experiences taught me that more voices are a good thing; that putting power into the hands of the powerless is a good thing. I had my first introduction to the Internet at university and immediately recognised that it would create huge power shifts, and I wanted to contribute to that,” says Sifry. “I started contributing to the free software movement way before it was known as open source. I was amazed at the Internet's ability to distribute software to millions of people with just a couple of keystrokes. In a way it was about giving back to people who had made my life better.”
But back to 2003 and the little science project Sifry was creating in his basement. At the time Sifry had a mail list of news, trends and snippets that he used to send out to friends and colleagues. “I was the CTO of Linuxcare (later bought out by Levanta) and in many ways I thought my role was more aptly described as the chief talking officer. I was going to events, conferences, evangelising the company, as well as talking to customers and employees. I established a mailing list at Linuxcare that proved very effective for me. I would write up news and information into what I called 'CTO alerts', and send it out to everyone. The response I got from the mailing list was far better than my input and I eventually found myself addicted to the conversation. Rather than give that up when I left Linuxcare, I thought it would be better to make the mailing list available on the Web.” Free software called Weblogs caught Sifry's eye, or as he says, “jazzed all my buttons”. He started his blog Sifry's Alerts and remembers the adrenalin rush when someone he didn't know in Romania or Brazil found his blog and left comments, sharing commonalities of interest.
“It was an extraordinarily addicting experience and I kept blogging. In those days the big problem was how difficult it was to find people online, or for people to find me if they didn't already know me. Back then you had to use Yahoo or AltaVista and they were both very slow in indexing articles.” This scratched Sifry's personal itch and very soon he was thinking about how he could build a search engine that tracked blogs in real-time.
Profitable pastime
That's how Technorati was born. A year later, so many people were using Technorati that the venture capitalists were calling, but Sifry was firmly ensconced at a budding WiFi company, convinced that Technorati was just a hobby. “Every time the venture capitalists called I would try to convince them to invest in the WiFi company I founded called Sputnik. I just wasn't interested in building a business out of Technorati. But one day I was in my basement with my dog and the two servers I bought at eBay to host the blog search engine, when I got a call from the VP of communities at AOL, which had just bought Netscape.”
AOL was about to roll out journals and they wanted Sifry's 'team' to come in and talk about how Technorati could be built into the offering as a search engine. “I looked at my dog and said to AOL: 'Well, the team's just busy putting together another release, maybe I can come in.'” That's when Sifry realised that Technorati would have major potential, and he started calling the venture capitalists back.
We must learn to do both - to make a profit and to make the world a better place.
Dave Sifry, creator of Offbeat Guides
Sifry's career has taken him through all the key iterations of the Web and open source movement. Besides founding Technorati, Linuxcare and Offbeat Guides, Sifry created Projectdocs, and Hoosgot. He has also served on the founding Board of Directors of Linux International. Here are some of the big lessons he's learned along the way.
Create a conscious business culture:
“A lot of start-up founders think that building a successful business is purely about the dollars and cents. Profit is like oxygen - if you don't have it you will quickly go out of business. But as important is building a company culture that enables you to scale, and grow your methods of interacting with people as you grow. Some companies get lucky because even though the culture is not written down, it is organic and grows on its own - however, I don't know any of those companies. Work hard to build measurable systems that create and maintain your unique culture.”
You are running a business, not a religion:
“With open source software it was easy for us to lose the business focus. Remember you are not a clubhouse or a religion - you are there to build profit for your investors. That is an important lesson that I had to realise coming off what was a fairly idealistic path.”
Money isn't everything:
“I don't think making money is the most important thing in business. It is incredibly important and you can't dismiss or ignore it. But if you focus solely on money you're building a zombie. Sure, it can go around and eat things, but it doesn't necessarily make the world a better place. Profit is like oxygen. You must have profit or you will suffocate. However, we are not here on this earth just to breathe. We are here to do something much bigger than that. We must learn to do both - to make a profit and to make the world a better place.”
Have a human voice:
“Blogging is not a panacea, but it can help you get your message out in a very human voice. It is a different way of engaging the people formerly known as your consumers. If you only look at demographics and consumption profiles then blogging isn't for you.”
Rise above the noise:
“Don't look at blogging in terms of being one tiny percent in a massive sea. Look at connecting to and reaching that deep core of people who care about you. It is more about micro-targeting than mass media. It is about creating exclusivities and a clubby atmosphere, about developing a communicative interface between yourself and your followers.”
Show value, quickly:
“The one thing I learned with Technorati is that if people don't see the value immediately, you will lose them. Creating value for people at that first click is critical. Speed is underestimated in terms of getting people to engage. At Technorati, people would engage the search box and immediately get results. Because of that we constantly strove for sub one-second responses. Google responds in milliseconds, and that has now become the gold standard. At Technorati our experience was that more speed created more engagement and this was obviously always better for us. Companies focus on building more features when what might be the right thing is to do less but to do it well. Keep it simple and make it fast.”
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