"gordon gould" Discussed on Techmeme Ride Home
"So two things still on this first issue and then we'll move forward. Number one in the oral history, people describe, well, we all read it because it was about us. Yeah, but number two, I believe that you had a scoop in there about Microsoft. Yeah, in the first episode, Microsoft was going to shut down Microsoft had a program that Laura Stein was running where they were investing a bunch of money. And we found out that it was going to be canceled, or was going to grow or something that had some numbers that we got. And people would just give me all kinds of information. So I was sort of like learning how to be a journalist. I was a psychology major in computer science, started as a computer science major, went to psychology. So I didn't have any experience in doing it. So I just printed whatever people told me. And I didn't really have much of a guide map to that. So we printed a couple rumors and that sort of made us notable. The New York Times picked us up for one of my events for the newsletter. I was on Charlie rose. People started to pick up on the fact that we had this magazine that was covering it. And it's really one of the great things that if you get there first and it's an underserviced demographic, you become the standard. And they think of you as the expert of this niche. We were the experts. There were a couple of other little publications at the time at New York. It was the most notable was a weekly email, and I tortured those poor guys, Tom Watson and Jason Trevor. Nice guys. Real journalists. And I was just more like going at it from a Vanity Fair. Spy magazine Rolling Stone. I was more like a January winner kind of approach to it, which was I'm going to be it. I'm going to be in it. I'm going to throw the party. I'm going to be the impresario. Precisely. And so that was the approach I took, and it worked. Well, so I told you on Twitter, I went to the library, and I looked at the collection. And so it's fascinating because you can see not only your ambition for the magazine evolve, although they don't have the first issues. I think they start at issue 18 or whatever. Oh, really? I'll get you the first company. It does start out where it feels more tabloidy more covering a scene. And then it evolves with the scene to now, listen, we're doing real news. We're covering a 75 people work there more than half were journalists. We had $12 million in revenue in the top of year. So it grew pretty quickly. Did you raise any money to do it? Not really, no. Just because my friend Gordon Gould had people didn't know this put a little bit of money in a couple hundred grand. But that was like in year three or something and he came to work there and he had a little bit of money and he put a little bit of money into it. It wouldn't really change the trajectory at all. We had Joanne Wilson was doing the sales, it was Fred Wilson's wife. Right. So that was another kind of funny thing. My first gig was reading business plans for Jerry colonna and Fred Wilson before they had flat iron that had some local acme ventures. So I read a couple of business plans for them. They pay me a thousand bucks to read business plans. One of them was for Beverly Hills Internet, which became GeoCities. She was cities. And another one was the spot. And so they were probably in their 30s. I was 20. And I just read business plans for them, but then I started the magazine and they're like, this is a little too cozy. And so you should probably pick one and obviously I made the wrong decision and went with magazine instead of being a venture capital. This is a total tangent. So let's try not to go too far off. But what was the VC scene like in New York? It was Jerry and Fred. That's it? Yeah. Okay. That was pretty much it. That really weren't a lot of UCs. Patrick Allen Patrick off. There were no angels really yesterday and was the only angel to speak of.
