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Anil Dash is like the Kim Kardashian of tech. I keep having to look him up to find out what he created (I'm still not sure).

I followed him on Twitter for a while because that was the thing to do, but after (I felt like) he kept loudly co-opting celebrity deaths to increase his profile, I started to wonder why he had any to begin with.

I'm not trying to be mean, but I guess that's the disconnect between makers and marketers (evangelists?). He could be great for incubating ideas.

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I've made a few things over the years; I helped create Movable Type and TypePad, which were sort of the WordPress of their era (used to publish Gawker, HuffPo, etc.) and more recently built ThinkUp and Makerbase with Gina Trapani.

I don't think I've coopted many deaths, but certainly there are folks who found it off-putting how much I talked about Prince after his passing. FWIW, I've always talked about Prince that much. :)

Fortunately, the Fog Creek team is hugely talented and there's immense breadth to the ideas and execution that everybody can pull off, so my shortcomings shouldn't overshadow their work.

Excellent reply to an almost insulting comment.

I dunno, Kim Kardashian has brought multiple wildly-successful mobile apps to market with a consistency that exceeds most publicly-traded companies trying to make mobile games. As someone who aspires to make apps that reach a broad audience, I find no slight in being compared to her.

Exactly. I believe it was MEANT to be insulting, but Kim K isn't the joke everyone makes her out to be. I think she's a genius. Whether you agree with the image she puts out and how it may impact culture, she's totally in control at all times and has turned her fame into commercial success better than almost anyone in recent history.

I absolutely agree. She's done what many with far more resources and VC funding haven't been able to do. Just the way she was able to build her now incredibly strong brand over the years is a testament to her knowing exactly what she's doing. She then successfully leveraged that to build very successful apps and games that people love playing and using. Many many people with far more fame and brand appeal than her haven't been able to replicate this and probably couldn't if they tried.

She was briefly "famous for being famous", but not particularly famous at that point. Her empire was built based on her (and her family and her organization's) fantastic execution from then until now.

She probably is smart. Dig this:

She knew someone was there was a leak to the yellowrags of some of her privately circulated pic, among friends and family. So when her baby was born, she sent different pics to different friends. She did the equivalent of <email>.$site@gmail.com to smoke out the sellout.

He was involved in the Pax Dickinson affair a few years ago.

I am very tempted to write my own thoughts on the issue, but rather than start a political flamewar, I'll simply link to both men's side of the story:

http://anildash.com/2013/09/my-meeting-with-pax.html

https://paxdickinson.wordpress.com/2014/10/22/moral-panics-a...

(My 2c: though I'm on the political right and agree that tech is becoming increasingly hostile to non-liberal ideas, I think many of Pax's ideas are quite weird).

I sympathize with the GP...The first thing I think when I think of you is your blog post about what it was like to be verified on Twitter :)

http://anildash.com/2013/03/what-its-like-being-verified-on-...

Though now I see the timestamp for that post is 2013 and I definitely knew of your work before then.

Glad to hear you've been keeping busy since Cranky Geeks went off the air. You were great on that show.

https://archive.org/details/crankygeeks&sort=-reviewdate?and...

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do it. :-D

To your last paragraph, bravo!

Our industry is a lot smaller than it might seem. Anil has been around for quite a while and lots of us have had the pleasure of getting to know him to different degrees both online and off. He's generous, smart, and often outspoken but always thoughtful (IMHO). It's no accident that he keeps popping up on your radar.

Does he have the CEO chops? Nothing in the note speaks to his qualifications for this job in particular.

We'll see! For what it's worth, I've been a CEO 3 times and have spent years as a management consultant with most of the clients being CEOs of multi-billion-dollar companies, so there are parts of my experience that aren't as obvious from my public persona.

More to the point, I've been on the board of Stack Overflow for some years now, and have known Fog Creek's business well for quite a while, so it wasn't too big a leap. Fog Creek also has a well-established and very talented team; I'm just augmenting their existing strengths.

Thanks for chiming in. Good luck with your new job.

Is being chosen by Joel Spolsky not enough of an endorsement for you?

If anyone is the Kim Kardashian of tech it's Kevin Rose.

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