Guy Kawasaki spoke at Xerox PARC yesterday, on How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09. He’s an entertaining speaker, and he had a very interesting point.
As background, he was Apple’s Evangelist, and then started a venture capital fund (Garage Technology). He recently chaired a panel of guys talking about how they built web businesses on the cheap and were making millions of dollars (in advertising), which got him thinking, and so he took a shot at it. He told how he got the site up and running, but of course he cashed in a lot of favors that he’d built over the years so it’s not clear anyone could do it for $12K.
However, it was clear that it’s not that much more. Say, on the order of tens of thousands of dollars (or, for those nerds among us, O($10K)), you could make a web play, even if you can’t program. That’s a far cry from the several million he gets pitches for in his role of VC. And that’s the real point. If it’s a lot cheaper to take a shot, then a lot more shots will be taken, and we’ve a very dynamic environment. Sure, there may be a lot of dreck (he talked about his site was called the ‘worst website ever’, which he loved since it drove huge traffic), but some good should come out.
By the way, if we take Pine & Gilmore seriously on the transformation economy, learning ‘experience’ sites could be big. Which might have been what Paul Saffo was saying to the eLearning Guild audience at DevLearn about their promising position. So, I’m getting my project ready. How about you?
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