SpeakerText, a scrappy startup that automates video transcriptions through a combination of clever algorithms and crowdsourcing, raised $600,000 from a group of angel investors led by Mitch Kapor. The other investors include Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Crowdflower CEO Lukas Biewald, Roy Rodenstein, Chris Yeh, and ex-Googler Georges Harik
The challenge most publishers face with video is that it is still hard to find. SpeakerText addresses this issue by automatically transcribing every video in a SEO-friendly format so that videos turn into searchable transcripts. The videos are put through a speech-to-text engine to start, and then broken up into chunks which are sent to remote online transcribers who fix any errors.
The transcription is synced to the video so that if you click on any word or sentence, you get taken to that exact spot in the video. Viewers can also share quotes with links to those spots via email, Twitter, or Facebook. It works pretty well. We tried it for the videos at our last Disrupt conference. I’ve embedded one below with an interview of Kevin Rose.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mike.
All right.
I am super stoked to have Kevin Rose will join us for his first ever tell all about the real secret of Digg and where it’s going.
Kevin.
It’s cool that you came.
That’s it.
Have a seat.
Last time I talked to you was over a year ago.
Your first told me about a new Digg that you were starting to create and think about, that time Jay was still your CEO, so lots have changed since the last time I talked to you, so.
A lot of people said, that you guys unfairly.
I’m sorry, just gonna jump right in if that’s right.
A lot of guys have you in fairly kick Jay to the curve, blamed everything on him when you fired him.
And I just wanna know like, do you have a reaction to that?
Like you know, just to publicly talk about that a little bit?
I mean Jay.
Can you hear me, all right?
Maybe your mic’s not turned on.
There we go.
So I think that is kind of a mutual thing.
I mean Jay was ready for something new and so are we me and Jay is now going off and doing new things and I never really wanted the role of CEO and so we knew we want to hire someone else and we went after the new CEO.
You were the CEO for what?
Four months or five months?
Something like that, four months.
Did you think at that time, was it a trial to see if you wanted the job or if you just knew —
You needed to bring in somebody.
I think that my day today is more a role of like a PM/Creative Director.
Yeah.
So, I work directly with designers on features and layout and usability and, you know, the idea of being the cheerleader and having to go and constantly keep every single org up-to-date with what’s going on and when you get to a size of a company that is Digg which is, you know, 67 employees, it’s just — It’s a lot of work that I really never wanted to take on.
So, I’m really good at teams of 10 to 15 and that’s kinda why I maxed out.
Are you at Digg everyday?
I mean, for the most part, you’re full time with it?
Except when I’m doing stuff like this or Podcaster, things like that.
What about a year were you at Digg everyday?
It seems like there was a period of time where you sort of weren’t anymore.
Yeah, I think that, you know.
you’re right.
It’s been six years at Digg and, you know, you kinda get burnt out and for me, it was a little bit of ups and downs over the years and you know, emotionally, it’s tough when you go through, you know, this crazy growth and then a bunch of acquisition offers and, you know, then you run in to problems with scaling, I like to shipwright.
I like to row new features and when you can’t do that, it’s really frustrating.
Yeah.
It’s a long — Seeing there at the office when we have, you know, five features backed up and we can’t role them out — Are you talking about now or —
That’s extremely frustrating.
You’re kind of sitting there on your hands, rocking back and forth and saying like, “When we’re gonna ship this?
It’s killing me,” you know and there was a lot of focus when the economy went sideways.
There was a lot of focus on revenue.
So, we built features like Digg ads and we took a lot of our engineering talent and put them on revenue and away from user facing features.
Yeah.
And I think that kinda hurt us.
We didn’t launch anything new for for a year and a half and so, you know.
So, with the benefit of Hinesite, you think it was incorrect to buckle down, focus on the revenue and maybe it was the time to do something else.
Absolutely.
I think that when I look back on things, I would have rather hired more engineers than put them on revenue than take our existing engineers and put them all on revenue.
And I think that, you know, we were in a mode launching new features and getting things out for the first couple years and that worked well for us.
We were able to launch something and see if it worked, modify it, you know, iterate on it, we release it.
But then there was a point in time where we didn’t do that, and then all of a sudden you know, as it is with these sites we have to keep launching new features and keep these site fresh otherwise your traffic kinda starts to get antsy and go other places.
That started to happen early this year.
So, you know, I’m kinda taking over the CEO.
The board and everyone else, you know, sits down and we have a really hard, frank conversation saying, you know, traffic is dipping down.
It’s kinda of flat.
You know, we need to do something big and bold and new and I think I agree with that and that was kinda part of what we did before, is that we tried a bunch of new things
Some of it was some kind of —
Some of it was some kind of —
Let’s actually talk with this more structured.
So, the old day, the way I would have described it is, I’m using your words, but democratizing news and, you know, if you describe it to me like my dad, say well, you know, if anyone could have a link and the viewers vote on the links and that becomes the homepage.
What’s the Carol Bartz one-liner on the new Digg?
Like what is it?
Yeah.
I never liked the democratizing news thing that was something — You know, that comes from PR people.
I think that, you know, we were Combination of politics during the election that was crazy.
Cats doing back flips on diving boards, stuff like that, and tech news.
And so it was kind of Geek Centric news.
I think more last with a little bit of of political slant as well and that’s what we are today and that’s we were.
So, What was your question on this?
What was your minor
Oh, yeah.
That’s a good question.
It’s not gonna change over the next few months.
I think what we were, it was just this unified homepage of kinda like the Zite guys that was the dig community.
For better or worse, that’s what we were, what that homepage represented.
Going forward we really need to figure out how curve about and inched for ourselves.
I think that, you know Tweeter and Facebook have definitely taking the chunks of out traffic And if we’re really gonna stand apart we need to you know, try something new and I think it’s gonna be a round of interest Okay so but the new version of Digg is a try at something new right?
It’s a lot of stuff that we should have done a long time ago.
I think ’cause
Yes and no.
There’s a little bit, I think that we.
There is definitely some mistakes there, so do you want me to take on the mistakes or do you want.
Yeah.
About the mistake real quick.
I definitely learned a lot when it comes to chronic stuff here.
I do think that the mistakes that I made is that I thought I had a better solution for people that consume news then, what was our upcoming section of the site which was our new embedded stories.
Yeah.
So, we came up with thing called MyNEWS which is essentially follow people and then you get the news pushed right directly into your feed.
Very Twitter asked without all the other talking with all the other chatter.
It’s basically just links right?
Yeah.
The mistake that I made is that we had a very passionate dedicated community that you can’t just say, “We’re gonna retire this features and here, this is your new home.”
You have to prove it to them, right?
Well, you can do it.
You can and then they’ll revolt on you and you have your home page stories of, you know, “We hate Digg.
Digg sucks.”
So, if I had to go back and I could change things, I would have kept a lot those features around and, launched these new features and said, “Hey, give this a try.
Don’t make them the defaults.”
Yeah.
Let’s slowly push people into them.
Make changes based on their feedback, iterate on top of that and, if they’re good enough, eventually retire the features that you have in the early days.
Okay.
Because it is a more efficient way to digg things today.
Diggs do happen faster.
Something can go from zero to several hundred diggs, a lot quicker than it could and just like this random clutch… Also, it’s not all or none.
It’s not, like, either you’re on the homepage or not because you…
Just having 10-15 diggs is better than nothing, well as before, it wasn’t better than nothing.
And that’s kind of what we’re trying to get to.
I mean if perfect world like 6 months now where we’ll be as a company.
You’ll be able to come into Digg and define your interest.
You’d be to say I’m in to Audi cars, I’m in to tee.
Whatever that is that you’re passionte about.
Yeah.
And then we’ll give you stories that we think are starting to be vended by other like minded people on those verticals.
You’ll be able to Digg them and then they eventually get extremely popular, they’ll get promoted to the front page.
Now, that would be that kind of the global’s [xx] of all things cool.
So if we can really tackle that long tail of content, that’s the Digg that’s 4 or 5, you know 10 times a size we actually we stays for traffic standpoint.
And where are you today, you are about 20 million [xx] around that.
A little over that.
We get about 1.2 million a day, something like that .
And what happened when you launch Digg 4, it dipped or.
It definitely took, we’ve had a spike up a dip down and now we’re kinda flat in billing on top of that.
But yeah we lost some people that we’re not very happy about some of the proposition that we had made.
You’re talking about changes in 6 months, I’m just curious, I don’t mean to imply anything but, what are the chances you’ll be with Digg in 6 months?
As in 100%
You seem a little tired so.
Like you, I’m you get a little burnt out over time and I think that not to say that I’m gonna sell to AOL but I think that… congrats by the way.
Congrats Erin 15 million dollars is insane.
So that’s a huge number.
So those of you who have seen Kevin and I interact on stage before know that unlike most interviewees he will, if I give him a jab, even a very small one that most people would notice, he comes right back with like you know, just like a hammer stroke.
So, it was unfair.
It was unfair I think.
Yeah, for what you just did.
I thought Kelly Kansas was gonna interview me so I didn’t… Cause backstage you said look, I’m gonna be leaving at the end of the year.
I’d love to sort of quietly start that rumor so it’s not a big surprise.
Nice try.
You know.
All right.
But I will say this this guy you hire, I mean when you hire the CEO, before you hire him, I thought there was like, who’s gonna be the perfect CEO and I thought — You know, somebody has been like doing payments for the last ten years, like that’s exactly who would be perfect to run Digg.
And then, you hire this guy, Matt Williams who was general manager of consumer payments in Amazon.
He did a lot of stuff at Amazon.
He was all over the place in Amazon, got a bunch of different groups there.
Why was he the perfect guy?
I think that, you know, when we are looking at different people for the CEO position, there were folks that — Consumer payments, web store, tech alliances, cross merchandising auctions and then before that, he was at LiveBid.
I think that when I was looking at Matt, one of the things that I was really attracted to is the fact that he had taken teams and products within the Amazon that we’re kind of not dead but just definitely needed some help, he was able to energize those teams and actually launch successful products.
So, that was cool.
He’s very well rounded, so he knows how to run large orgs of, you know, 200 plus people and he’s very passionate about Digg and social news.
He had like he came to me and said I didn’t messing around with this personally at home for a long time he’s been, like, created this easy developer as well, and he wrote this crawler that went out and crawled all this news stories.
He was highlighting the best ones based on this logarithm he wrote.
I mean, his mind is in the game.
And so that got me pretty excited about having him as a CEO.
I want to spend the rest of our time looking back a little bit and also looking forward a little bit if, you’re okay and then, if there are people who have questions, go ahead and line up at the microphones.
And then then Kevin will be signing autographs as well immediately afterwards backstage.
You talked before about the, you know, that you looked at acquisitions a number of times over the years.
What’s the biggest acquisition you ever turned down in terms of dollar size?
That, sort of, got to an actual formal offer stage?
That we actually turned down?
That would have been 60 million.
That’s not what you just said.
I mean, you said..
No, that we actually turned down?
Yeah.
That we want to wait from?
What was the 80 million dollar, what, was that something else?
Oh, there was an earn out on top of that.
So it would have been 80.
Oh, I’m sorry, okay.
With the benefit of Heinsite, do you wish you’d taken that now?
It’s tricky because, you know, when you’re kind of that the peak of your game and you’re breaking traffic numbers every single month.
Yeah.
You know, me personally, after I got past a certain point and the offers are coming in at, you know, 20, 30, 40 million dollars and you have friends that you’re buddies with from, you know, Joshua Schachter from Delicious that sold his company to Yahoo, to Garrett Camp from StumbleUpon.
And you’re watching all your kind of peers sell their companies.
And these guys make a lot of money and you know I come from a background that my family was very lower middle class growing up and so we didn’t have a whole lot of money, and it’s very tempting.
You’re sitting there and you’re like, holy shit.
Like I could personally put like, $20,000,000.00 in the bank.
That’s nuts.
So, it was really hard and I would talk to the board and talk to Jay, the CEO at the time, and I’d say you know this is difficult like You know, I kinda wanna do this, you know , it’s a big exit for me.
You know.
Yeah.
And I think that part of it is that you look at your traffic and you look at your product pipeline and you say I think we can continue to grow and keep doing this and then the part of is that you know, this come into table and say …They kind of also push you on that you know we wanna see a 10 and 20X you know return on our investment.
Yes
You know, you don’t know any better and you you just say, oh that’s what the boards saying and I think I’m on board with that as well.
But to be fair, they do, you know, those really cool things that happen as, you know, you’ll get to sell a little chunks of your ownership overtime…
It allows me to do things like that.
Because they want you to keep going and stay motivated, not freak out when this kinda deals come along, you know, and so that happens in further in rounds of funding and I think that that is very fair for the entrepreneur that has something that is taking off.
So, your Angel investing is Interesting because you are a fairly prominent angel investor and you’ve invested in, I don’t have a list here but, Twitter.
Both Foursquare and Groupon which is sort of awesome.
Not Groupon.
I’m sorry.
Gowalla
I’d forgotten Guala’s [sp?]
name.
Both Four Square and Gowalla and they don’t mind?
I started off with Four Square.
That was my first investment.
Yeah And then I got to know Josh from Gowalla and I called Dennis Sapp on the phone and I was like hey I’m think about doing this investment .
Well, would you see it as a conflict of interest.
And we worked it out and at that time, Gowalla was going in a very different direction.
They were doing, they are all about the virtual items being dropped off and they’re gonna pick it up at different locations and they gaming around that.
Who else?
There’s Pownce, there’s Ross.
Zynga, SimpleGeo, 3Crowd…
What was the evaluation of Zynga when you invested in it?
Uh, it, it was awhile a, it wasn’t too long ago, but it was like the last big round last year.
Yeah, so it was already fairly established, it was I can’t give away the evaluation but it was already pretty
Yeah pretty high.
You can’t give away?
You sure?
I actually think you could give it away.
NGMOCO CHAMP.
Is that right or is that yeah?
Yeah, it’s all in and the adviser yes.
So, are you planning on doing a lot I mean is this a hobby for you?
or is this ruptured?
It’s quite a portfolio now.
It’s, the form of the string is about a great one, I think that, I love trying to help entrepreneurs of what avoid a lot of mistakes that I’ve made because I’ve made a lot of them and so if I can get in there and sit down with them and help them from a marketing stand point or product stand point and from you know, raising capital, terms, you know where are the value I can add, hopefully they sit down with me and then I mean they say what we like, often times I’ll sit down with an entrepreneur.
Of course go out and, take like coffee with you and you say here are 10 ideas I think you guys should focus on.
you and you say here are 10 ideas I think you guys should focus on.
If they agree with it we aid then and like wow.
Okay.
We get to this could be a good relationship and yeah, we’d like to have you as an investor.
So I’m passionate about it.
I think it’s fun.
It’s amazing.
It’s cool to give people money and let them do of the hard work.
Oh Kevin.
I’ll say it’s just gonna wrapped up, but I know that it must be tough because a lot of your community right now is still angry with Digg and you care so much about that community, I know you do.
Absolutely.
I appreciate you coming on.
You’re always… There never any bullshit with you or [xx].
You just are what you are and and I really appreciate that.
You look a little down and I just want to say like I know this community, you know, looks up to you.
I look up to you.
You are a mentor of mine.
You just stated Digg 6 months before, and I just wanna say that you know you’re a very very important part of this community.
Thank you very much for coming
Thank you.
Thank you very much for coming
Thank you.
Also just an audible here.
We have a full panel for the last session.
The finals for the battle field of the committee.
I’d love to add you and your perspective to as a judge, would you be willing to stay for a few hours and Sweet.
Gonna live with that?
Yeah.
That’s awesome.
That sounds great.
Thank you very much.
Amen.
All right.
Cool.
Cool.
Thanks so much.
Thanks.
Thank you, Mike.
All right.
I am super stoked to have Kevin Rose will join us for his first ever tell all about the real secret of Digg and where it’s going.
Kevin.
It’s cool that you came.
That’s it.
Have a seat.
Last time I talked to you was over a year ago.
Your first told me about a new Digg that you were starting to create and think about, that time Jay was still your CEO, so lots have changed since the last time I talked to you, so.
A lot of people said, that you guys unfairly.
I’m sorry, just gonna jump right in if that’s right.
A lot of guys have you in fairly kick Jay to the curve, blamed everything on him when you fired him.
And I just wanna know like, do you have a reaction to that?
Like you know, just to publicly talk about that a little bit?
I mean Jay.
Can you hear me, all right?
Maybe your mic’s not turned on.
There we go.
So I think that is kind of a mutual thing.
I mean Jay was ready for something new and so are we me and Jay is now going off and doing new things and I never really wanted the role of CEO and so we knew we want to hire someone else and we went after the new CEO.
You were the CEO for what?
Four months or five months?
Something like that, four months.
Did you think at that time, was it a trial to see if you wanted the job or if you just knew —
No, never a trial.
You needed to bring in somebody.
I think that my day today is more a role of like a PM/Creative Director.
Yeah.
So, I work directly with designers on features and layout and usability and, you know, the idea of being the cheerleader and having to go and constantly keep every single org up-to-date with what’s going on and when you get to a size of a company that is Digg which is, you know, 67 employees, it’s just — It’s a lot of work that I really never wanted to take on.
So, I’m really good at teams of 10 to 15 and that’s kinda why I maxed out.
Are you at Digg everyday?
I mean, for the most part, you’re full time with it?
Except when I’m doing stuff like this or Podcaster, things like that.
What about a year were you at Digg everyday?
It seems like there was a period of time where you sort of weren’t anymore.
Yeah, I think that, you know.
you’re right.
It’s been six years at Digg and, you know, you kinda get burnt out and for me, it was a little bit of ups and downs over the years and you know, emotionally, it’s tough when you go through, you know, this crazy growth and then a bunch of acquisition offers and, you know, then you run in to problems with scaling, I like to shipwright.
I like to row new features and when you can’t do that, it’s really frustrating.
Yeah.
It’s a long — Seeing there at the office when we have, you know, five features backed up and we can’t role them out — Are you talking about now or —
No, I’m talking about — I mean, we still have backup now, but we’re getting better.
That’s extremely frustrating.
You’re kind of sitting there on your hands, rocking back and forth and saying like, “When we’re gonna ship this?
It’s killing me,” you know and there was a lot of focus when the economy went sideways.
There was a lot of focus on revenue.
So, we built features like Digg ads and we took a lot of our engineering talent and put them on revenue and away from user facing features.
Yeah.
And I think that kinda hurt us.
We didn’t launch anything new for for a year and a half and so, you know.
So, with the benefit of Hinesite, you think it was incorrect to buckle down, focus on the revenue and maybe it was the time to do something else.
Absolutely.
I think that when I look back on things, I would have rather hired more engineers than put them on revenue than take our existing engineers and put them all on revenue.
And I think that, you know, we were in a mode launching new features and getting things out for the first couple years and that worked well for us.
We were able to launch something and see if it worked, modify it, you know, iterate on it, we release it.
But then there was a point in time where we didn’t do that, and then all of a sudden you know, as it is with these sites we have to keep launching new features and keep these site fresh otherwise your traffic kinda starts to get antsy and go other places.
That started to happen early this year.
So, you know, I’m kinda taking over the CEO.
The board and everyone else, you know, sits down and we have a really hard, frank conversation saying, you know, traffic is dipping down.
It’s kinda of flat.
You know, we need to do something big and bold and new and I think I agree with that and that was kinda part of what we did before, is that we tried a bunch of new things
Some of it was kind of playing catchup on stuff that we hadn’t launched that we should have a while ago.
Some of it was some kind of —
Let me just stop —
Oh, go ahead.
Some of it was some kind of —
Let me just stop —
Oh, go ahead.
Let’s actually talk with this more structured.
So, the old day, the way I would have described it is, I’m using your words, but democratizing news and, you know, if you describe it to me like my dad, say well, you know, if anyone could have a link and the viewers vote on the links and that becomes the homepage.
What’s the Carol Bartz one-liner on the new Digg?
Like what is it?
Yeah.
I never liked the democratizing news thing that was something — You know, that comes from PR people.
I think that, you know, we were Combination of politics during the election that was crazy.
Cats doing back flips on diving boards, stuff like that, and tech news.
And so it was kind of Geek Centric news.
I think more last with a little bit of of political slant as well and that’s what we are today and that’s we were.
So, What was your question on this?
What was your minor
Looks like a one minor.
Oh, yeah.
That’s a good question.
It’s not gonna change over the next few months.
I think what we were, it was just this unified homepage of kinda like the Zite guys that was the dig community.
For better or worse, that’s what we were, what that homepage represented.
Going forward we really need to figure out how curve about and inched for ourselves.
I think that, you know Tweeter and Facebook have definitely taking the chunks of out traffic And if we’re really gonna stand apart we need to you know, try something new and I think it’s gonna be a round of interest Okay so but the new version of Digg is a try at something new right?
It’s a lot of stuff that we should have done a long time ago.
I think ’cause
But you see it more as a collection of small changes then there’s a whole new focus because.
Yes and no.
There’s a little bit, I think that we.
There is definitely some mistakes there, so do you want me to take on the mistakes or do you want.
Yeah.
About the mistake real quick.
I definitely learned a lot when it comes to chronic stuff here.
I do think that the mistakes that I made is that I thought I had a better solution for people that consume news then, what was our upcoming section of the site which was our new embedded stories.
Yeah.
So, we came up with thing called MyNEWS which is essentially follow people and then you get the news pushed right directly into your feed.
Very Twitter asked without all the other talking with all the other chatter.
It’s basically just links right?
Yeah.
The mistake that I made is that we had a very passionate dedicated community that you can’t just say, “We’re gonna retire this features and here, this is your new home.”
You have to prove it to them, right?
Well, you can do it.
You can and then they’ll revolt on you and you have your home page stories of, you know, “We hate Digg.
Digg sucks.”
So, if I had to go back and I could change things, I would have kept a lot those features around and, launched these new features and said, “Hey, give this a try.
Don’t make them the defaults.”
Yeah.
Let’s slowly push people into them.
Make changes based on their feedback, iterate on top of that and, if they’re good enough, eventually retire the features that you have in the early days.
Okay.
Because it is a more efficient way to digg things today.
Diggs do happen faster.
Something can go from zero to several hundred diggs, a lot quicker than it could and just like this random clutch… Also, it’s not all or none.
It’s not, like, either you’re on the homepage or not because you…
Righ t.
Because you prefer in sharing things more like in a Tweeter environment.
Just having 10-15 diggs is better than nothing, well as before, it wasn’t better than nothing.
And that’s kind of what we’re trying to get to.
I mean if perfect world like 6 months now where we’ll be as a company.
You’ll be able to come into Digg and define your interest.
You’d be to say I’m in to Audi cars, I’m in to tee.
Whatever that is that you’re passionte about.
Yeah.
And then we’ll give you stories that we think are starting to be vended by other like minded people on those verticals.
You’ll be able to Digg them and then they eventually get extremely popular, they’ll get promoted to the front page.
Now, that would be that kind of the global’s [xx] of all things cool.
So if we can really tackle that long tail of content, that’s the Digg that’s 4 or 5, you know 10 times a size we actually we stays for traffic standpoint.
And where are you today, you are about 20 million [xx] around that.
A little over that.
We get about 1.2 million a day, something like that .
And what happened when you launch Digg 4, it dipped or.
It definitely took, we’ve had a spike up a dip down and now we’re kinda flat in billing on top of that.
But yeah we lost some people that we’re not very happy about some of the proposition that we had made.
You’re talking about changes in 6 months, I’m just curious, I don’t mean to imply anything but, what are the chances you’ll be with Digg in 6 months?
As in 100%
Yes as in 100% percent.
You seem a little tired so.
Like you, I’m you get a little burnt out over time and I think that not to say that I’m gonna sell to AOL but I think that… congrats by the way.
Congrats Erin 15 million dollars is insane.
So that’s a huge number.
So those of you who have seen Kevin and I interact on stage before know that unlike most interviewees he will, if I give him a jab, even a very small one that most people would notice, he comes right back with like you know, just like a hammer stroke.
So, it was unfair.
It was unfair I think.
Yeah, for what you just did.
I thought Kelly Kansas was gonna interview me so I didn’t… Cause backstage you said look, I’m gonna be leaving at the end of the year.
I’d love to sort of quietly start that rumor so it’s not a big surprise.
Nice try.
You know.
All right.
But I will say this this guy you hire, I mean when you hire the CEO, before you hire him, I thought there was like, who’s gonna be the perfect CEO and I thought — You know, somebody has been like doing payments for the last ten years, like that’s exactly who would be perfect to run Digg.
And then, you hire this guy, Matt Williams who was general manager of consumer payments in Amazon.
He did a lot of stuff at Amazon.
He was all over the place in Amazon, got a bunch of different groups there.
Why was he the perfect guy?
I think that, you know, when we are looking at different people for the CEO position, there were folks that — Consumer payments, web store, tech alliances, cross merchandising auctions and then before that, he was at LiveBid.
I think that when I was looking at Matt, one of the things that I was really attracted to is the fact that he had taken teams and products within the Amazon that we’re kind of not dead but just definitely needed some help, he was able to energize those teams and actually launch successful products.
So, that was cool.
He’s very well rounded, so he knows how to run large orgs of, you know, 200 plus people and he’s very passionate about Digg and social news.
He had like he came to me and said I didn’t messing around with this personally at home for a long time he’s been, like, created this easy developer as well, and he wrote this crawler that went out and crawled all this news stories.
He was highlighting the best ones based on this logarithm he wrote.
I mean, his mind is in the game.
And so that got me pretty excited about having him as a CEO.
I want to spend the rest of our time looking back a little bit and also looking forward a little bit if, you’re okay and then, if there are people who have questions, go ahead and line up at the microphones.
And then then Kevin will be signing autographs as well immediately afterwards backstage.
You talked before about the, you know, that you looked at acquisitions a number of times over the years.
What’s the biggest acquisition you ever turned down in terms of dollar size?
That, sort of, got to an actual formal offer stage?
That we actually turned down?
That would have been 60 million.
That’s not what you just said.
I mean, you said..
No, that we actually turned down?
Yeah.
That we want to wait from?
What was the 80 million dollar, what, was that something else?
Oh, there was an earn out on top of that.
So it would have been 80.
Oh, I’m sorry, okay.
With the benefit of Heinsite, do you wish you’d taken that now?
It’s tricky because, you know, when you’re kind of that the peak of your game and you’re breaking traffic numbers every single month.
Yeah.
You know, me personally, after I got past a certain point and the offers are coming in at, you know, 20, 30, 40 million dollars and you have friends that you’re buddies with from, you know, Joshua Schachter from Delicious that sold his company to Yahoo, to Garrett Camp from StumbleUpon.
And you’re watching all your kind of peers sell their companies.
And these guys make a lot of money and you know I come from a background that my family was very lower middle class growing up and so we didn’t have a whole lot of money, and it’s very tempting.
You’re sitting there and you’re like, holy shit.
Like I could personally put like, $20,000,000.00 in the bank.
That’s nuts.
So, it was really hard and I would talk to the board and talk to Jay, the CEO at the time, and I’d say you know this is difficult like You know, I kinda wanna do this, you know , it’s a big exit for me.
You know.
Yeah.
And I think that part of it is that you look at your traffic and you look at your product pipeline and you say I think we can continue to grow and keep doing this and then the part of is that you know, this come into table and say …They kind of also push you on that you know we wanna see a 10 and 20X you know return on our investment.
Yes
And and when is your first time at the rodeo like it is mine, like you just kinda go with that.
You know, you don’t know any better and you you just say, oh that’s what the boards saying and I think I’m on board with that as well.
But to be fair, they do, you know, those really cool things that happen as, you know, you’ll get to sell a little chunks of your ownership overtime…
Yeah.
It allows me to do things like that.
Because they want you to keep going and stay motivated, not freak out when this kinda deals come along, you know, and so that happens in further in rounds of funding and I think that that is very fair for the entrepreneur that has something that is taking off.
So, your Angel investing is Interesting because you are a fairly prominent angel investor and you’ve invested in, I don’t have a list here but, Twitter.
Both Foursquare and Groupon which is sort of awesome.
Not Groupon.
I’m sorry.
Gowalla
Wow.
I’d forgotten Guala’s [sp?]
name.
Both Four Square and Gowalla and they don’t mind?
I started off with Four Square.
That was my first investment.
Yeah And then I got to know Josh from Gowalla and I called Dennis Sapp on the phone and I was like hey I’m think about doing this investment .
Well, would you see it as a conflict of interest.
And we worked it out and at that time, Gowalla was going in a very different direction.
They were doing, they are all about the virtual items being dropped off and they’re gonna pick it up at different locations and they gaming around that.
Who else?
There’s Pownce, there’s Ross.
Zynga, SimpleGeo, 3Crowd…
What was the evaluation…
What’s that?
What was the evaluation of Zynga when you invested in it?
Uh, it, it was awhile a, it wasn’t too long ago, but it was like the last big round last year.
Yeah, so it was already fairly established, it was I can’t give away the evaluation but it was already pretty
Yeah pretty high.
You can’t give away?
You sure?
I actually think you could give it away.
NGMOCO CHAMP.
Is that right or is that yeah?
Yeah, it’s all in and the adviser yes.
So, are you planning on doing a lot I mean is this a hobby for you?
or is this ruptured?
It’s quite a portfolio now.
It’s, the form of the string is about a great one, I think that, I love trying to help entrepreneurs of what avoid a lot of mistakes that I’ve made because I’ve made a lot of them and so if I can get in there and sit down with them and help them from a marketing stand point or product stand point and from you know, raising capital, terms, you know where are the value I can add, hopefully they sit down with me and then I mean they say what we like, often times I’ll sit down with an entrepreneur.
Of course go out and, take like coffee with you and you say here are 10 ideas I think you guys should focus on.
you and you say here are 10 ideas I think you guys should focus on.
If they agree with it we aid then and like wow.
Okay.
We get to this could be a good relationship and yeah, we’d like to have you as an investor.
So I’m passionate about it.
I think it’s fun.
It’s amazing.
It’s cool to give people money and let them do of the hard work.
Oh Kevin.
I’ll say it’s just gonna wrapped up, but I know that it must be tough because a lot of your community right now is still angry with Digg and you care so much about that community, I know you do.
Absolutely.
I appreciate you coming on.
You’re always… There never any bullshit with you or [xx].
You just are what you are and and I really appreciate that.
You look a little down and I just want to say like I know this community, you know, looks up to you.
I look up to you.
You are a mentor of mine.
You just stated Digg 6 months before, and I just wanna say that you know you’re a very very important part of this community.
Thank you very much for coming
Thank you sir, I appreciate that.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for coming
Thank you sir, I appreciate that.
Thank you.
Also just an audible here.
We have a full panel for the last session.
The finals for the battle field of the committee.
I’d love to add you and your perspective to as a judge, would you be willing to stay for a few hours and Sweet.
Gonna live with that?
Yeah.
That’s awesome.
That sounds great.
Thank you very much.
Amen.
All right.
Cool.
Cool.
Thanks so much.
Thanks.
