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Thursday, April 5, 2007
Being of (continued) service 
| | David Sifry always greets me with "Hey big guy!" when he calls. In a less generic sense, David has been the Big Guy at Technorati ever since it first came to life on a Linux box in his basement, in late 2002. |
| | Now David is looking to replace himself as CEO. As an advisor to the company since months before Day One, I have constantly recommended that David stay in the CEO role himself, even as he contemplated candidates for the job. I still remembered how he and the other founders of Linuxcare yielded their leadership roles when that company's VC brought in a new CEO — with terrible results. |
| | But sometimes growth requires new leadership, and that's the case David makes at that last link. |
| | Every successful fast-growing company with global reach goes through three stages we can abbreviate with three short words: |
| | There are sharp distinctions and transitions between the three. Many companies fail to survive the transition from New to Hot. Many more fail to survive the transition from Hot to Big. Many more, if they survive, essentially become different companies. Linuxcare is still around, only now it's Levanta. Another company I worked with long ago, Farallon, became Netopia. Linuxcare could have been a killer huge service and services company. Farallon could have been a great networking company. Both could have re-defined what we know about their fields, and how we work in their fields. Didn't happen. |
| | Was it just because the founders left? Surely that wasn't the only reason. But it was certainly one big reason. |
| | Google made the transition from Hot to Big with the help of Eric Schmidt. I wasn't sure he could do it, frankly. Eric is a good and smart guy; but I wasn't impressed with what happened at Novell. Of course that may not have been his fault, since Novell has been essentially headless since Ray Noorda (and other significant contributors, especially Craig Burton) left. (And that's not a knock on current leadership, either. My point is about carrying a founder's leading mission and nature forward, not who's running a company now.) But Eric made the Google transition to Big work well. Significantly, the two founders are still highly involved with the company. |
| | David addresses some of my concerns with his closing sentences: There aren't that many people in the world who get the chance to work with such a wonderful, smart, energetic, and results-driven team like the one we have here at Technorati. I'm constantly humbled by the wealth of experience, energy, and smarts that surrounds me every day. This all flows from our credo, which is to Be of Service, something which, no matter who sits in the CEO chair in the future, will never change. |
| | In my first meeting as an advisor to Technorati, I asked two questions: "What's your equivalent of PageRank?" and "What's your equivalent of 'Don't be evil?'" The answer to the first question was technical. The answer to the second was foundational. That answer was Be of service. Good to know it still is. |
| | For all the problems Technorati has had, and overcome (and had again, and overcome again), over the last four years, it has served us all eagerly and to the best of its abilities. More importantly, there is not another company, or another service, that does as well — even though Technorati changes constantly. A blogosphere without Technorati would be significantly diminished. |
| | Several years ago, somebody from Yahoo told me "We have more people working on blog spam than Technorati has people". Now Yahoo doesn't even have blog search. (Or if it does I don't know about it.) In the summer of 2005, Google came along with Google Blogsearch. It was fast, clean and (in my opinion) much easier to use than Technorati. In some ways it still is. But it hasn't moved forward very much. It looks and behaves much the same today as it did when it went up. Meanwhile Technorati has grown and changed with the Live Web and adapted to it. |
| | For all that I credit everybody at Technorati, but I especially credit David Sifry. |
| | David is the Sam Walton of Technorati. The company might as well be called Sifryrati. If the company gets a new CEO, he or she would be wise to know that, should the company survive the transition from Hot to Big, the portrait on the wall of the headquarters lobby will be David Sifry's. |
| | And David should know that too, and stay involved as long, and as well, as possible. |
| | Here's to you, Big Guy. Keep on serving. |
Translating from the Lego-Bureaucratarian
| | ReadableLaws is a wiki that makes legislation readable. Killer idea. |
Remembering Jim McClarty
| | I didn't know Jim McClarty well. He was one of the guys in a large circle of friends and acquaintences in college, long ago. I liked him. He was a smart, fun and very creative guy, especially with photography. I think he gave me my first lessons in photography, by showing how to use a telephoto lens not just to bring the distant close but to close the distant: to make the faces of people walking toward you from far down the street seem next to each other rather than separated by many feet or yards in real space. I still use techniques I learned from him almost forty years ago. |
TBIF
| | Too Bad It's Friday, that is. |
| | This is my last day of a busy and fruitful week at the Berkman Center. (I fly home early tomorrow.) There's progress and fun with every meeting, phone call and IM session. I'm here early this morning, freshly fueled by a double cappuccino from Peet's, to prep for a 9am meeting that will pick up where our Wednesday VRM & Public Media workshop left off. Which is with plans to provide public radio listeners with something (or some things) that let them participate in whatever is that public radio (and radio in general will become). I have much to write and say about this, but no time yet. Stay tuned. |
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