Digg Founder Kevin Rose Launches Private Newsletter Called Foundation

I know there's not a lot of love for Kevin on HN, but I think this is a great fit for him. For better or worse, Kevin is pretty well-connected in the tech scene and thanks to Diggnation, has a pretty strong personal brand. Doing something like this allows him to leverage both his connections and his personal brand in a way that doesn't require him to also have a great product sense, which I think is where Digg went off the rails a little.

You really think you've seen all the stupid names and URLs, and then Rose drops something like http://foundat.io/n in your lap.

Aside from that, it sounds like a very interesting project that, as compelling and simple as it sounds, I don't see a lot of people pulling off but Rose.

Feels like an attempt to remain relevant after Digg became a case study about how to destroy a community.

Was I the only one a little disappointed to see Dorsey/Twitter? Since I heard about the project many months ago, I was really hoping that the content would be more geared towards smaller upstarts. Small SAAS companies, bootstrapped companies, single-founder hackers, etc...

I'm tired of hearing from all the "stars". I want to listen to interviews with normal hackers like myself who are either struggling to find themselves online or starting to experience a bit of success.

I want to hear from people who are building small online businesses - charging money. I'm so burnt out on social/advertising/big exit plays.

I enjoyed listening to Jack Dorsey. Kudos to Kevin for letting Dorsey tell his story, mostly uninterrupted.

Kevin though... so many of his questions have the word 'like' in them.

"Like, what was that like?" or "Like, a working prototype?, like you and a buddy or something like that?"

Good for Kevin Rose, seems like it's a good way for him to do what he really loves doing and that's connecting the tech community, like everyone else here mentions.

Whenever founders evolve into tech-scenesters though, I think it's a good time to be bearish on their startups (I'm thinking of a lot of other names here too).

As Picasso said, "Without great solitude no serious work is possible."

In the TC article Mike Arrington references Dave Morin's use of Letter.ly (a 'premium content' subscription service) as the inspiration for Rose to set up Foundation.

What's interesting is that 3 months in and only 5 posts later (remember, at $3.99/month) Dave has most recently published a post simply titled "Apology" (http://letter.ly/davemorin). No idea exactly what it contains because of course you have to subscribe but one can speculate and it does seem telling.

BTW this isn't a slight at Dave M - he took a chance on this (I think Letter.ly founder Sam Lessin and him are good pals) and it didn't work out - esp with the launch of Path. No biggie.

However, I fail to see how this is a good inspiration on Roses part to set up Foundation.

Finally, producing video is expensive (he probably has a camera man, there's editing time, hosting, etc) - I can't really see how this pays off either. You are in that weird position where $3.99 is going to create a chasm for many folks yet you'd have to sell quite a lot of subs to make it work financially.

I was more of a Diggnation fan than I am of this style of show (it reminds me of Carson Daly's new interview format), but I will say that there were some good takeaways from this episode. Especially the one about getting a sketch or prototype made as soon as you have the idea, and then showing it to someone. I have a "brilliant" (and I use the term very loosely) idea that could be prototyped in a day probably about once a month, and I usually buy up the domain name. I usually get started on the code, but I never end up finishing the prototype because the initial excitement wears off after a few days. In the few cases where I was able to actually finish a prototype and show it to someone, I was motivated enough after that to keep improving it.

I'm not a huge Rose fan. However, I think that this is a really good idea.

I would much rather pay $4 per month for exclusive content, so I'll likely wait until it's free.

However, this resurgence of e-mail newsletters (of sorts) is timely and valuable.

Someone should build a mailchimp clone that makes it easy to distribute and charge for audio and video in addition to text.

For those that don't like the choice of the first guest, Kevin has investments in at least Square, but Crunchbase also says Twitter.

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/kevin-rose

I wonder how the investors in Digg feel about this and other diversions Rose has taken?

This reminds me of Diggnation's paywall a few years back.