He could easily concentrate on Mahalo and and not reach back and motivate the people working on startups.
Or maybe he thinks Mahalo is not what it's cracked up to be and he is grooming himself to become an industry guru/consultant/visionary?
Or maybe he thinks Mahalo is not what it's cracked up to be and he is grooming himself to become an industry guru/consultant/visionary?
Mahalo 2.0 which came out in June gave us a major boost because we started giving ~40% of the revenue from topic pages to our page managers. This resulted in a LOT more page being created.
Mahalo 3.0 will be out on December 1st and it will do a better job of explaining what Mahalo is. We got a little drunk on the Korean Web design of www.naver.com and it confused folks. That was my bad... M3 will be MUCH more obvious as to what we're about (search, content and Q&A all on one page).
Best jason
I doubt he run Mahalo in long term, he will want to get it established and flip it in the next 5 years, if not sooner, and I've heard him mention on the show that he is envious of $100m buyouts for companies and he wants that for Mahalo.
I think he building connections for his next ventures and company. He is aware of a lot early stage companies, he can invest at very favorable rates and then give the company a much better chance of success by introducing it to key VCs that he knows - which could make some very good investments for himself.
If we do that we'll have a really nice business, and to be honest I'm not interested in flipping this one. Like Evan Williams with Twitter, I'm long on this startup after having sold my last one quickly.
No regrets selling Weblogs, Inc. after only 18 months. In fact, it was an amazing deal that set me up to raise $20M to build something on the scale of About.com (top 20 site), eHow (top 30), Yahoo Answers (top 20) or perhaps even Wikipedia (top 10!).
I think we have a good chance to grow as large as About.com or eHow... getting to Wikipedia level, well, that's a little out of my control, but I'm going to try really hard.
In terms of being a VC I've thought about it, but for now I'm just going to do 2-4 small invetments (25-50k) a year. So far I've done two this year: www.challengepost.com and www.gdgt.com. Both of which are really great ideas with big potential. I love the entrepreneurs behind each of these... hopefully I can find a couple of these a year.
all the best, @jason