Odeo CEO admits not practicing what was preached |
Liz Gannes at GigaOM reports that at the Future of the Web conference Evan Williams, Odeo CEO, admits not following advice he advocated to others (emphasis mine):
Last year Williams wrote a widely read, much-bookmarked post titled “Ten Rules for Web Startups.”1 “Be Narrow,” he said, “Be Tiny.” Today, he flat-out admitted “I was working on Odeo at the time I wrote that, and I was ignoring most of those rules.”
What I found most interesting about Ms. Gannes post is the last paragraph where she points out:
All in all, we can’t say we came out of the presentations convinced Odeo is set to conquer the universe, but Williams’ honesty and humility are admirable.
Bagging on your own company and admitting you posted a list of things that startups like yourself should be doing, but you aren’t doing at your company seems like good motivation to update that original post with that same honesty and humility.
In Williams defense it is his personal blog, not the company blog, but it’s vexing as a reader. What do we believe on this guy’s personal blog? As readers of this blog know, I’m very hard on writers keeping it real with readers. Do what you say, actions not just empty words. If you advocate doing something that you aren’t doing yourself then you owe readers the honesty to admit these are untried ideas, experiments or thoughts.
I just looked at Williams post and there is still no update.
People at a conference find out how honest Williams is but the people reading Williams post shouldn’t? Williams should look at the end of his list:
Overgeneralized lists of business “rules” are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything.
And add the following: “Exceptions like me at my company Odeo not following most of these, as told to the audience at the Future of the Web.”
As for Odeo and podcasting
Odeo has seemed like a boat without oars since it arrived on the podcast business scene. The fact that Williams didn’t feel like podcasting himself is very telling, as Williams himself also admits at the conference. The thing I can’t help asking myself with Williams new list is does he actually believe and want to resolve these flaws himself or is he just saying this as sort of a dying Odeo gasp, or to flex his speech skills, as he makes his way off to do another startup?
This reminds me a lot of the Kiko calendar folks writing about their failure. I think it’s great that they admitted their faults so it might help others in their position, but the timing of it all seemed very suspicious. Why weren’t they writing of their failures after the eBay auction? It seemed more about pumping up the price of the auction than something they intended to be helpful to others. (Update 11:43am PST: Richard from Kiko contacted me both below and privately on Skype and explained in more detail what their intentions were related to the Kiko eBay auction. He seems like a good guy to me, so I wanted to be sure and update this post to make sure that the word “suspicious” in this paragraph or my comments below doesn’t infer that I think they did anything dishonest. Maybe I should have used the word “coincidental” instead. I still don’t have the right word, argh.)
Though I didn’t hear Williams speech, the way GigaOm is reporting on it the message rings hollow to me. The company clearly doesn’t need leadership that is pointing to every zit and saying here, pop it. They need to be in the backroom fixing the acne problems and turning out a better product and saying: here are our solutions. Open up and embrace the community dialogue.
And Williams and company need to start podcasting yesterday. Start an Odeo company podcast with specifically how they are tackling each of the problems Williams outlined. Monetizing podcasting isn’t an easy business, which I’ve written about several times here before [see: The “Inside” on podcasting: show me da money!].
When or if the money dries up, what next? Does Williams go onto some other startup and we’ll hear and have faith yet again that he was the artist formerly known as Prince selling Pyra Labs to Google? Or will we hear he was the guy who couldn’t take Odeo to the promise land like he did Blogger?
I wish Williams and Odeo the best of luck in a very difficult business, but audience stroking CEO speeches are the last thing Odeo needs. They need action which rings the cash register. Now.
Update 10/26/2006 8:55am PST: Evan bought out the venture capital seeded to Odeo under his new company Obvious Corp. Not an obvious, although an impressive move. Will be interesting to see what happens.
- 11/25/08 3:44pm PST: original link broken, changed to cache link [↩]
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“Why weren’t they (Kiko) writing of their failures after the eBay auction? It seemed more about pumping up the price of the auction than something they intended to be helpful to others.”
If we had any plan for introspective posts on Kiko it would have been to write them *after* the auction. Simply because talking about the reasons why Kiko *failed* would probably *drive down* the auction. We (Justin and myself) put together our posts rather rapidly to combat the deluge of incorrect assumptions from industry “pundits”. You can find two posts on Kiko on my blog in rapid succession: the first is the planned “we’re throwing in the towel” one that’s pretty benign and very soon after is rushed the rebuttal post (which ended up going through many revisions because of the speed at which I felt it had to be delivered).
Sorry for hijacking the discussion, proceed to beatup on Odeo
Comment by Richard White — September 15, 2006 @ 11:51 am PST
There is no such thing as negative publicity hurting an eBay auction, Richard, but nice try lol
Comment by TDavid — September 15, 2006 @ 12:09 pm PST
I’m pretty sure in this case their certianly is. If we had the same blogger buzz but everyone was saying what a steaming pile Kiko was do you think it would have sold? If I had come out and said something to the effect that the codebase is a house of cards, would that have helped?
You’re conspiracy theorism is both flattering and depressing (in that you would acknowledge our honesty for posting but then turn around and question the honesty of our intentions). The least you could do is link it to our posts that you reference since there’s no such thing as negative publicity.
Comment by Richard White — September 15, 2006 @ 12:19 pm PST
Firstly, thanks for stopping by, Richard. I should have been more friendly in my first comment for you personally stopping by. I appreciate anybody who takes time to leave a legitimate, related comment.
Secondly, congratulations on selling to Tucows. I did link to Elliot’s post about why Tucows bought Kiko.
Thirdly, there isn’t any conspiracy theorism here or was intended, I merely suggested the timing was suspicious to me. Pull yourself out of the chain for a minute, and you don’t think this perspective is at all valid and reasonable given the sequence of events?
I didn’t link to any of your Kiko postings because they didn’t have to do with Odeo and were merely tangentially related to this post as a personal opinion aside as you, yourself, admitted with the hijacking part of your first comment. If this is important to you then why not link your postings yourself to reinenforce your point? This is welcomed activity here which you may or may not not be familiar with. We like when readers add additional context to something
Now with that housekeeping stuff aside, please let’s keep it real about eBay. I’ve been an eBayer for years and both bid and sold through eBay many times. I’m very familiar with eBay from both sides and have yet to see publicity ever negatively impact an eBay auction.
You wrote: “If we had the same blogger buzz but everyone was saying what a steaming pile Kiko was do you think it would have sold?”
YES! Please point me to one ebay auction where people have talked about something up for auction — good, bad or indifferent — and it has actually hurt the price of the eBay auction? People already knew the service was a failure and that’s why it had to be sold, so why didn’t that drive down the price? Becaue it was bought for the technology, not its ability to exist on its own. People buy all sorts of things on eBay for different reasons (some that make no sense at all) and if they don’t know something is for sale (no promotion or advertising or whatever you want to call what you folks were doing), then that’s less potential bidders.
People don’t believe everything they read. Yes, even negative posts/reviews from established, reliable sources saying that something sucks. But Kiko was vindicated in that regard when Elliot from Tucows pointed out that the technology behind Kiko was what interested them. You see, they didn’t care if blogger a,b,c said it was a steaming pile.
Congratulations on the sale.
Comment by TDavid — September 15, 2006 @ 12:58 pm PST
[…] I just registered for Twitter which is the unamazingly pointless service that allows anybody to quickly post the most inane details of what they are up to daily. It’s the brainchild of Obvious Corp. founded by one of the former Pyra Labs folks, Evan Williams. Yeah, that guy who still seems to be struggling somewhat to prove he’s not a one hit wonder since Google bought Blogger from Pyra Labs. Remember the rather odious Odeo? Yeah, that’s a Williams gig too that he has since bought back from the VCs. Keep swinging Ev, some people still fondly remember Aldo Nova’s first album. […]
Pingback by Twitter squatting » Make You Go Hmm — February 19, 2007 @ 1:18 pm PST