Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. I think I’ve got an ambitious person here with me today. I’ve seen so many interesting things that he’s said over the years about ambition, about wanting to build something big. Frankly, I’ve watched him over the years do it and I’ve read about him over the years and I’m so lucky to have him here today.
So, the reason that we had him here, that my team put together this interview is because Keith Teare is the cofounder of TechCrunch and we wanted to find out how TechCrunch was built and so on. But of course, once I saw his name and I saw his history, I remember him from RealNames. And for me, RealNames stuck out as a company that was going to ruin the internet or make it great, but it was such a gutsy move either way.
The idea was no one wants to have these long URLs that were really complicated back in the old days of the internet. URLs used to include tilde on a regular basis–swear, I’m telling you, it’s true. So, the idea behind RealNames is we’re going to give you a real word, a real name for your company. So, one example was Jeep. If Jeep wants people to go to Jeep Wrangler’s webpage, instead of sending to if they had some funky URL, they could just say anyone who types Jeep Wrangler in their browser’s address bar gets taken over the right page on Jeep’s website.
So the reason it’s impressive is it makes things more simple. The reason it was so dangerous is I said, “Oh my god, these people are going to change all domains. They’re going to own the whole naming structure of the internet.” That didn’t work out. I’m hoping to find out a little bit more about what happened behind the scenes there. There are so many other companies we could be talking about, but TechCrunch and RealNames are where I’d like us to focus.
I’d also like to hear about the company he’s running today. It’s called Chat Center. It’s a company he founded to make it easy for people to chat with each other. I’ll give you a couple of examples of how you could use Chat Center. Let’s suppose you’re really famous and you’re standing up at a conference and you know people are crying over how good you are and how much you’re making them laugh and you want them to be able to chat with you afterwards.
Well, with Chat Center, you can just give out a URL, really easy for people to hear and understand and they can chat with you afterwards and you’re just like instant messaging back to them, almost. Or if you have a website and you want your customers or visitors to chat with you, you can also embed chat center on your site and have it pop up.
So, this is a man who’s created lots of sites and businesses. I’m hoping we can talk about those three in depth. And about my two sponsors, which I’ll tell you about later, but for now they are HostGator–HostGator is an incredibly hosting company. I urge you to check them out. And Toptal–if you need top developers, guys that will run laps around everyone else’s developers, you’ve got to go to Toptal.com.
Keith, welcome.
Keith: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Andrew: You know what? I read this old Wall Street Journal article from 2005 where you said about Michael Arrington, the cofounder of TechCrunch that he is a very ambitious guy, that he is extremely focused on money. He wants to be rich. I know that was true. Do you feel that was true of you too?
Keith: No, actually. It’s nice to have the ability to live pleasantly, for sure. But that’s never actually been a motivation for me. It’s been an end product of other motivations, but never the sole motivation. That’s probably why I mentioned about Mike. We’re very different.
Andrew: What is your sole motivation? What’s the thing that fires you up?
Keith: It’s a kind of humanism. I was political back in college. I’m going back now to 1974 when the Vietnam War was drawing to a close. In England, where I was brought up, there were some big issues like Northern Ireland and immigration was a big issue there, similar to the way it is here now.
My view of the world was it’s a little bit messed up and we need to change it for the better. When we talked about that in the 70s, we were talking about changing the whole thing. We weren’t talking about getting a tattoo or a particular style of furniture. We were talking about changing the world.
The interesting thing is during the Thatcher and Reagan eras, that became very, very difficult through politics. I was very technical. Although I’m a sociologist in my training, I taught myself to code. I learned that technology allowed you to change people’s experiences of themselves and of each other more instantly than politics did at that time. But the common thread has always been doing something that makes people’s lives different.
Andrew: Give me an example of a way that you changed people’s lives early, early on. We’re talking about 80s and 90s through technology–early 90s, that you couldn’t have done with politics.
Keith: Well, let’s do both the 80s and 90s. They’re slightly different. The 80s were a period before Ethernet and before multi-user databases. The first thing I worked on technically was the ability–if you go way back it was allowing writers, journalists, who were using Commodore 64s in the those days to write and have what they wrote put into a typesetter to be printed without having to be retyped.
Andrew: I see.
Keith: That was something I did in political organization for a weekly newsletter called The Next Step. Me and a friend, who now runs a major part of PricewaterhouseCoopers in London, designed through an RS-232 cable and markup language something similar to XML, but simpler that allowed an author to say, “This is a headline. This is italic. This is bold.” And for a typesetter to interpret that.
Andrew: I see. I can see how that would have impact. And years later through blogging or through a blog, you’re able to have even more impact. There’s one other weird thing that I noticed about that Wall Street Journal article from 2005. You weren’t listed as a founder of TechCrunch. In fact, as I kept going back in time, I couldn’t find anything that said you were a cofounder of TechCrunch until most recently when you have your byline in TechCrunch, boom, you’re listed as a cofounder. What happened?
Keith: The place you can find is if you go back and read the very first articles where Mike refers to me as a cofounder. There was no masthead or about us section initially. So, it wasn’t testimonialized. In fact, it’s even more weird than that. Firstly, it is weird that I’m a cofounder because TechCrunch is Mike’s thing.
Andrew: Yes.
Keith: But even weirder still is TechCrunch was incubated at my incubator, Archimedes Labs, where I was a partner with Mike and Mike was the junior partner. So, there was a nanosecond in history which lasted a little bit less than a year where I was the majority shareholder at TechCrunch.
Andrew: Because… So, let’s go back to how it was. Archimedes Lab is your–I remember reading a post on your site on Archimedes Lab where you said, “Back in the bubble days, this would be called an incubator.” At the time that Archimedes Lab was created, incubators were so passé that people just didn’t see a future in them. It was the signal of a bubble.
Meanwhile, today, it’s like Y Combinator and TechCrunch and others have gotten even more deeply into the incubator space. So, that’s what that was. So, within there, you said, “I am going to incubate TechCrunch,” or was it created a little more organically?
Keith: Well, at that time, 2005, Web 2.0 was emerging out of the portal era. So, there were the first beginnings of the idea of content not living on portals, but being separated from portals and being able to a) be published by anybody cheaply and that went for text, images, video and the whole thing, and secondly be consumed somewhere other than where it was published through RSS.
Andrew: Okay. Yeah.
Keith: So, Archimedes Labs was formed at that moment in history and the founding document talks about the separation of content from its point of publication and readers being able to get the content they want without having to surf multiple sites. Then we applied that to text, to video.
Andrew: So, you guys were seeing that this was happening. Here’s how I read it. You hired him at, I guess it was Edgeio?
Keith: RealNames.
Andrew: RealNames first and then he was working with you at Edgeio, am I right?
Keith: No. Edgeio and TechCrunch were simultaneous.
Andrew: Okay. So, you hired him. You told him about what was going on. He wanted to do research because he didn’t understand enough about it. Actually no. This is from the Wall Street Journal article. Let me read it.
Keith: That’s correct.
Andrew: “Mr. Arrington got into blogging after Mr. Teare asked him to run a new online classified ad site called Edgeio Corp. Mr. Arrington didn’t know much about the newest web trend so he surfed the internet to catch up. When he didn’t find any central place to learn about new web companies, he started a blog to provide that resource for others.” So, did he start it for himself or did he start it as part of Edgeio for Archimedes Lab?
Keith: He started it for himself.
Andrew: So, he owned it. He created the domain and so on.
Keith: No, actually, because we were partners and everything we did was ours, whether we did it ourselves or not.
Andrew: I see.
Keith: That was our agreement for that time. So, whatever we did in technology was really an Archimedes thing, including TechCrunch.
Andrew: And there was no formal agreement there?
Keith: Oh yeah, totally formal agreement.
Andrew: Totally formal or informal?
Keith: Formal.
Andrew: So, you just said, “Look, we’re going to start a bunch of ideas. We co-own the ideas. We’ll experiment. If one of us doesn’t inform the other in the middle of the night we bought a domain name and blogged on it, it doesn’t matter. It’s still one and the same.”
Keith: It’s all ours.
Andrew: Why? What was it about Michael Arrington that drew you to him when you worked together at RealNames?
Keith: Well, he started life as a lawyer. He was my lawyer. I had just arrived in Silicon Valley from England after having done an IPO there of Easynet, a previous company. And I didn’t know anyone really in the valley except for Jean-Marie Hullot. Jean-Marie was the CTO of NeXT. He worked with Steve Jobs for many years. Jean-Marie was my cofounder at RealNames.
Wilson Sonsini were NeXT’s law firm. So, basically they became my law firm. Mike was a junior attorney there who was assigned by Jim Strawberry, his boss, to my account. So, I got to know Mike as a lawyer. He helped do the corporate formation of RealNames and a lot of the original stuff. He had written a book about how to do an IPO. He was one of those people that was larger than life, even then.
Andrew: How? How could you see back then that Mike was larger than life?
Keith: He was not just a lawyer. He was somebody that wanted to give you ideas, question ideas, give you shortcuts to achieve end goals. He was really–I called him a business development person more than a lawyer in my own head. In fact, I even though he was not as good a lawyer as he was a business development person.
Andrew: Do you remember one thing he said back then that illustrates his value as a business development person?
Keith: I got him involved in various negotiations. RealNames was a deal company. It didn’t exist without a deal because it was one of the very, very first web services platforms. This was in 1998, by the way, before the word web services existed. But we built a cloud service that was a naming service pointing, as you said, keywords to URLs.
A third-party would implement that service by sending a query to our cloud and saying, “Do you have a match for this?” And we would say yes or no. The very first company that did that was AltaVista. The second one was Google, with its I Feel Lucky product which was 100 percent RealNames.
Andrew: I didn’t realize that. So, when someone typed in a word and clicked I Feel Lucky, they were taken to a RealNames page?
Keith: Even if they didn’t choose I Feel Lucky, Google would look and see if we had a match for whatever you searched on. Literally in the first few months of RealNames, we were seeing every single query for AltaVista, every single query from Google, every single query from MSN in real time and we had 50 milliseconds to say whether we had a match or not.
Andrew: And with Google, from what I understand, they should your match at the top of search results.
Keith: At the top, same with AltaVista. We had the same implementation everywhere. If we had a match, it came at the top. In fact, the patent for that, which was keywords for search at the top, we patented–Bill Gross simultaneously patented a paid for version of that which become GoTo, which became, I forgot the name now, but Yahoo acquired them for like $3 billion.
Andrew: Overture?
Keith: No. Oh, yes. It was. So, we really were–Larry Page used to say to me, “You improved what we could do with the algorithm by about 20 percent. So, for exact matches, your stuff is better than ours. Therefore we’re going to make you first.” He was very gracious about that. That remained true throughout.
Andrew: You paid for those deals, didn’t you?
Keith: No. We did not.
Andrew: It was all free?
Keith: It was basically considered by the search engines as a way of improving their results. So, in fact, they would have been included to pay us for the data.
Andrew: So, I read an article from Danny Sullivan of the time after Microsoft pulled the plug on this and basically left your company to die, right?
Keith: Yeah.
Andrew: Where Danny Sullivan said, “Part of the fault lies in RealNames’ hands because what RealNames started to do was sell generic words. Like MP3 was bought a high price by MP3.com so that anyone who typed in MP3 got redirected to this site and by doing that and going after generic words,” I see you’re getting angry even as I’m talking about this, aren’t you. You were basically selling search results on other people’s platforms and selling your reputation as the name server of the internet.
Keith: Well, just to contextualize that, when Danny wrote that in 2002, RealNames had changed a lot. Almost our primary distribution through market was through the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. Most of the search engines had either been acquired, closed down. The last one was Google. So, we were in Google, still proving the I Feel Lucky data. But 90+ percent of all of the use of RealNames was by typing into the browser address bar instead of typing it into the URL.
Andrew: And if I do that into Internet Explorer, boom, I get the right result because you guys serve it up.
Keith: Right. As part of that deal, Microsoft forced us to define six boxes, if you like, that represent types of names. Box A was generic terms. We were not allowed to sell those. It was absolutely not allowed, like “bathtub,” any generic term, including MP3, by the way. Danny is slightly wrong. We never sold MP3.
Andrew: What was the part that he was a little bit right on?
Keith: Well, we had a thing called prefixes, which was a very forward-looking thing. So, a company could come to use to buy a prefix, followed by a space followed by anything. So, NASDAQ could buy NASDAQ (space) (ticker symbol). And then result would be a stock quote.
Andrew: I see.
Keith: So, MP3.com bought MP3 as a prefix.
Andrew: So, if I typed MP3…
Keith: Type “MP3 David Bowie.” But you couldn’t just type MP3. So, that was okay because in Microsoft’s world, that was not a generic. That was a search query owned by a specific destination. If you think about it, that’s kind of what Google does today. If you type in a FedEx number, you don’t have to go to a search result. You can go straight to a tracking number. We invented that.
Andrew: And DuckDuckGo now is doing it with their–what do they call it, the bangs?
Keith: Yes. So, RealNames really was the first semantic routing engine for search queries as well as a keyword engine.
Andrew: So then what was it about Michael Arrington in those days that made you say, “This…” You’re thinking sharply here. You really started to lock in a lot of players, including Google and AltaVista, which was a player at the time, obviously. And you got Microsoft to invest and buy 20 percent of your business. You guys had a valuation of over $1 billion.
Keith: We filed for an IPO at $1.5 (billion).
Andrew: $1.5 billion. So, what is Michael Arrington contributing that you couldn’t do on your own that you would partner up with him in the future? So far I’m seeing a lot of you, Keith.
Keith: So, Mike was the deal guy.
Andrew: He would go into Microsoft and work a deal out?
Keith: Yeah, on Realtor.com. Realtor.com wanted to buy every zip code so you could see the homes for sale from the zip code. So, “Homes 94306.”
Andrew: I see.
Keith: So, Mike was the deal guy. He brought in my first $1 million quarter. He was good in two ways. One is he could negotiate the terms of the deal. Two, he could do the term sheet that would reflect the deal and if required, could even do the full contract, although his boss, Jim Strawberry joined us as CFO and brought another guy over who became our legal department. By the way, Mike was totally pissed off about that because, like I said, Mike’s ambitious. He wanted to be the BizDev guy. I’m the general counsel.
Andrew: I get it. And I can see the value of doing it.
Keith: So, what I saw in Mike was I’m a product guy. I can tell the story of the product. I can also make sure as you go through the twists and turns of building a company that you stay true to the product. But I’m not a deal guy.
Andrew: All right. I’m going to come back. I’ve got to ask you a question that I’ve been holding off on asking you because it feels a little too gutsy, but now I think we have some rapport. I always ask the gutsy questions, but I don’t want to throw it in people’s faces when it’s too early in the interview. I’ll come back to that in a sentence.
First I’ve got to tell everyone who’s listening to me–if you’re looking for a developer, I know you can go and hire a headhunter. I know you can go online and start to place ads. I know and you know that you can go to freelance sites if you’re looking for the cheapo people. But there’s another way that you may not be aware of. It’s called Toptal.
When you go to Toptal.com, you have access to the top developers. Keith, you’ve worked with so many companies. How much better for a company is a top developer than say like the third best developer or the hundredth best?
Keith: It’s infinite.
Andrew: Infinite. Why?
Keith: On Chat Center, I work with one developer who’s awesome. And two would slow us down.
Andrew: Because what is it about the top guy that makes him so much better than the next five guys that you can’t say, “You know what? I can’t go for the top guy. I’m going to go for three poor guys and maybe they’ll work together.”
Keith: I think it’s because they combine what to do with how to do it and passion.
Andrew: Yeah. And the way they think, too, gets embedded in your business because they’re the people who are creating the products that powers your business.
Keith: Right.
Andrew: If you want to get the top guys, you don’t have to be in the know, you can just go to Toptal.com. This is what many, many companies are now doing. When you go to Toptal, you get developers who are vetted. They screen them. They work on them. I’ve told you before, the people who I’ve known who have gone really far in business, who are entrepreneurs in their own right were rejected by Toptal when they tried to work for Toptal because they weren’t the best developers out there. Toptal wants the best developers.
So, you go to Toptal. You tell them what you’re looking for. You tell them the kind of developer you’re looking for, the language you’re working in, how you interact with your developers, your little quirks, how you work. You want it to be a good match. Toptal will find someone for you to work with on a full-time basis, part-time basis, just a few hours a week, whatever it is that you need and we’re not talking about a process that takes months and months and months.
We’re talking about a process that happens fast. Within days, you can get started with your developer for the simple reason that Toptal has them in their network. They have pre-vetted, pre-screened and those developers don’t suddenly disappear because they’ve got Toptal behind you or you have Toptal behind you and helping you interact with the developer.
All that’s great. You don’t need me to tell you any of that. If you Google, if you ask good friends, they will probably at this point tell you about Toptal. So, what do you need me for? Well, if you go to Toptal.com/Mixergy, I will, in conjunction with Toptal, give you 80 free Toptal developer hours when you pay for 80.
We’re talking about getting you going so fast that you have 80 free developer hours. Who else is doing that who has quality developers? In addition, you’re going to get a two-week trial, which means that if you’re not happy, you don’t have to pay, but the developer will get paid. Toptal is going to take money out of their pockets and pay the developer if you’re not happy.
I’ve used them. I recommend them. I urge you to go to Toptal.com/Mixergy or write them down right now. I don’t know how many ads they buy. We always sell out. So, write the name down in case you need it in the future, in case someone who’s a friend of yours looking for a developer needs one, Toptal.com/Mixergy and you’ll get that offer for, frankly, I don’t know how long they’re going to keep it up, but for as long as they do, you got it. I’m grateful to them for sponsoring.
Keith, hey, as a business person, how’d I do with that sponsorship message?
Keith: That was pretty good. You held the listener through–I’m going to guess that was 60 seconds.
Andrew: Yeah. I think it was a little longer. I’m a little worried that maybe because I get so excited about them I go like minutes when I should be a minute. That’s okay if the ad was good. Here’s the thing I’m wondering–by that point, had you made it? Had you become rich enough to not have to work?
Keith: Well, that happened earlier when I IPO’d my British company, Easynet, which I was cofounder of. I was Mike in that scenario. My cofounder David Rowe was an 80 percent shareholder. I was 20. He paid for everything and I built everything. He sold stuff. I told the story of it.
Andrew: I see.
Keith: I had dinner with him last week. We’re still great friends and he’s a lovely guy. I was the ideas guy. When the company went public, especially in England, the boards of directors become extremely conservative and focus only on short-term goals. I brought in the RealNames idea to the board and they said, “Keith, no. We’ve got to focus on what we’re doing. Forget about it.” So, I decided that it would be better for all parties if I left and pursued my own goals. So, I left for the US and did RealNames. When I did that, I was obliged–although in retrospect I could have said no–but they wanted me to sell all my stock.
Andrew: They wanted you to sell your stock?
Keith: So, I sold my stock and for the first time in my life, I didn’t have debt.
Andrew: How much debt did you have up until then?
Keith: Oh, I was always carrying debt. Probably only a few thousand dollars, but if you’re not earning a lot of money, that can weigh you down quite a lot. I’m from a fairly poor family where we were in debt the whole time. So, I hate debt.
Andrew: How much did you net from the sale?
Keith: Probably about $7 million to $10 million, probably.
Andrew: Wow.
Keith: If I would have waited a year, the stock was priced at 50 pence a share.
Andrew: Wow.
Keith: A year later it was 20 pounds a share. So, if I would have waited a year, it would have been about $200 million.
Andrew: There was a period there where I was doing interviews with entrepreneurs who were worth $10 million, $20 million and they felt poor because their friends were worth hundreds and they had opportunities to earn more. So, they felt a little depressed. Did you get bummed about that?
Keith: Actually, I never got bummed about it. If you compare my life after to before, it’s night and day.
Andrew: What’s the best part afterwards? Not the best emotional part–what’s the best thing you were able to buy because of your money?
Keith: Probably a ticket to Palo Alto.
Andrew: Right, which changed everything, which is where you are now.
Keith: When I landed, it was April fool’s day in 1997 when I first landed as a tourist. I bought a Saab convertible for cash. That’s the only thing really…
Andrew: That’s got to have felt great.
Keith: I immediately drove it to Santa Cruz and had fish on the Boardwalk. My wife only joined me the next day. So, that was like a solo thing. Then I picked her up at the airport with a Saab convertible. That was like a $35,000 car, which would be like a Ford these days.
Andrew: And frankly a convertible at a time and a place where the sun is shining and you can actually enjoy the weather and feel what you’ve accomplished? What happened to Cyberia? Cyberia, right?
Keith: Cyberia.
Andrew: That was a Cyber café that you opened up. I read this old article about the launch of it. It sounded so quaint at this point to talk about a cyber café where people could go and sit with–
Keith: That was simultaneous with Easynet, same building. We got this building for Easynet. Easynet was the first ISP in Europe, so dial-up in those days.
Andrew: I like this note that you told our producer. You said, “I had two months to figure out how to even create an ISP when we opened up shop.” So, Cyberia was 1994 also.
Keith: Yeah, in August. It was the street-facing shopfront of the three-story building that was Easynet’s office. It was a cyber café. There were computers around the windows, tables in the middle and a cappuccino machine. Within a year, Maurice Saatchi and Mick Jagger were investors. What happened to it is it still exists. The company is called Cyber Café Limited. It’s now owned by a Korean company that does gaming competitions from live events.
Andrew: Ah, I get it because you need the high-bandwidth and they would have the high-bandwidth at the cyber café.
Keith: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. So, you do RealNames. I know you’re angry. When Microsoft pulls out and they say, “Okay, no more redirecting any traffic to RealNames,” you basically are thrown out by your partner, the company closes. You actually went and started blogging about how angry you were, right?
Keith: Dave Winer–I don’t know if he invented blogging, but he’s certainly one of the pioneers of RSS and blogging–came to me and said, “You’ve got to do a blog.” I said, “What’s a blog?” He kind of helped me get it setup. I was very angry, but I was angry not for obvious reasons. I was angry because I thought Microsoft were being dumb and short-sighted. If you think about RealNames, as you said, this was a scary thing if mishandled. We owned every word in every language in the world. Our partner in China was the government in China.
Andrew: I didn’t know that.
Keith: Who did Chinese keywords. They paid us $10 for a keyword per year. It was a global system, 200 something name spaces country by country. It was in the browser, so it was a monopoly and the default. And Microsoft said, “We’re jealous of Google and we want to do search pages.”
Andrew: And they started redirecting all those keywords to their own search page instead of to the sites that they pointed to with RealNames. I see.
Keith: Correct. So, we said, “You’ll never beat Google at search. But isn’t it cool to say, ‘Don’t search. Just go there.’ Isn’t this better than search?” Microsoft said, “No, we really want to be better at search than Google.” Plus, by the way, if we turn you off–at that moment in history we were doing 2 billion visitors delivered to a website every 90 days. So, we were bigger than Google measured by customers delivered to web pages. To them, that was $25 million in quarterly revenue if they delivered search pages with ads on them.
So, they put their 20 percent here and their $25 million here and they chose the $25 million a quarter, which is $100 million a year. They actually went to VeriSign, which was another investor, and said, “If you buy these guys and guarantee us $100 million, we won’t close it down,” which proves that Danny Sullivan was wrong to believe it was to do with the names. It was to do with money. And the money was not trivial. $100 million a year is a lot of money, even to Microsoft.
Sure enough, VeriSign couldn’t buy us and make that guarantee because our revenues were $34 million. It would have been a $70 million a year gift to Microsoft. So, they couldn’t do that. They’re a public company. So, we ended up being forced into closure. The next quarter, Yusuf Mehdi, who was at MSN and still is, reported $25 million of additional ad revenues in the same quarter that everyone else had a decline.
Andrew: I see.
Keith: So, it’s pretty obvious what happened. So, I was angry that they were so stupid. You know, that was the DOJ times when everyone was accusing Microsoft of being a bully. I was saying, “This is not a bully. This is a dunce.”
Andrew: It would have been, though, an all or nothing game. You can’t have real name. People were starting to actually in commercials, “Go to our website or real name whatever.”
Keith: Well, they called it internet keyword. We genericized it.
Andrew: Internet keyword, to go with like AOL keyword at the time.
Keith: Mark Andreessen copied that at Netscape, also called it internet keyword. Netscape and Microsoft both had this thing called internet keyword, but it was two different databases.
Andrew: That’s the thing. It’s all or nothing thing. Unless they get everything, everybody, it wouldn’t work unless everyone on the internet used your keywords. Advertisers couldn’t say, “Use this keyword in Explorer.”
Keith: Not really. There’s a thing in domain name history called an alternate route. That’s when somebody sets up an alternate domain name system. Bill Gross invested in one of these companies. It was called New.net. They created .shop and .web. But they were fake. If you used those ones, it turned off the real internet. We weren’t like that. If you typed in MP3.com, you’d go there.
So, we didn’t turn off the domain name system. We added a layer on top of it that only dealt with the query if it was intended for us. If it was a URL, we just passed it through to the DNS. So, it was very complimentary. I understand that people felt anxious because we were one company and we were basically the sole owner of those keywords. That kind of goes against the open internet. So, we better be good guys.
But in fact, if you really dig deeper, Tim Berners-Lee completely invented what we did. It was called universal resource names, URNs. And Berners-Lee made the point that you know when you get a 404 because you go to a webpage that’s not there anymore, he said the way to fix that is these URNs.
What you do is get a name that never changes, like Ford Explorer. The URL can change as much as you want and the name will always point to the latest URL. No one ever implemented it but we did. It became a standard called common name resolution protocol at the Worldwide Web Federation, the W3C. We actually standardized it and defined it so that anyone could build a server doing it. So, it even ceased to be a monopoly.
Andrew: Okay. Fair enough. I can see then how frustrating it was when the whole thing three years in goes away. We’re talking 2002 it ends. 2005–let’s fast-forward then to TechCrunch. You and Michael Arrington, this guy who you get along with, work well together, you guys are starting businesses and trying to figure out the next step–was it an 80/20 split between the two of you?
Keith: It was a 75/25, as I recall.
Andrew: So, he got 75, you got 25.
Keith: Yeah.
Andrew: He sits down, starts blogging, just like you at the time. His blog starts to take off because at the time, the internet was–I think he said at one point that he was just marching in front of a parade that already existed. But at the same time, even though the word was rediscovering the internet and people were getting excited about creating new companies, he also was leading that parade and growing it by amplifying the companies that were launching.
Andrew: Eventually. Although, it wasn’t like that at first. What really happened is that there was not a parade. There was a bunch of people standing around on the street corner looking for a parade, people like the YouTube founders, Chad Hurley, people like the Pandora founders–they didn’t even know each other.
What happened is Mike started interviewing them and then he had a party at his house where there was, I think, about 40 people. And they got to know each other through him and began to identify with him as a connector. So, he was raised up really by his own efforts. It wasn’t an accident. He worked real hard, by the way.
He was working 16-hour days loving it and incredibly interested in what these companies do, much to my dismay because it was not a conscious decision to do TechCrunch. It was an accident. And I was saying, “Hey, we’ve got this other company Edgeio, which could be way bigger. Why are we wasting our time on this TechCrunch thing?” By the way, I was very involved with him and helping him. But intellectually, I didn’t think it was a smart idea.
Andrew: How were you helping him back then?
Keith: Mainly through discussing very technology trends and putting a context around them.
Andrew: Teaching by giving him a context? You weren’t doing it on the site, were you?
Keith: No, through conversation. I think I did one post early on that had a lot of negative comments. He told me I was never allowed to post ever again.
Andrew: Why? What did you say that was so negative?
Keith: I can’t remember. It was probably something philosophical to do with where things were going and someone probably disagreed. I can’t remember.
Andrew: I see here that there was something called TalkCrunch, which you were going to be a regular of that show. So, you were on the site a lot, but he never identified you as a cofounder, at least not where I could see.
Keith: No. I didn’t want him to. I was very much in the background and was happy to be in the background, to be honest. I was running Edgeio, the other thing we were doing. He was on my board there. I was his kind of mentor in general. And to be honest, we never talked about me being a cofounder until after TechCrunch was acquired by AOL. That’s when we openly acknowledged it.
By the way, I let Mike take the lead on that. I’m not a big believer in taking credit for things you didn’t do. So, I’ve always tried to be extremely honest about my relationship to TechCrunch, not to deny it exists, but not to claim credit because it is absolutely Mike’s thing and always was. The only thing I can feel any credit for is being his friend and him talking him through various things and ten secondly I did set up TechCrunch TV.
Andrew: Years later.
Keith: Yeah.
Andrew: I remember I wanted to be on TechCrunch TV. I was doing these interviews and I said, “You know what? This thing is not working. No one is watching me. How about I just go to TechCrunch and I just do to whatever they’re doing there?” And I couldn’t get through to them. I think Neil Patel tried to make an introduction. That didn’t work. And then this whole Y Combinator, Hacker News community helped kick me off and I didn’t need to do anything.
Keith: Right. Well, TechCrunch TV is only now becoming what I thought it should be. You know, we as a community–and I include YC and Hacker News and everything in that as a community–lack our own voice in minute-by-minute daily news about tech. We let other people tell us what we’ve done and what to think about it.
The idea was to have a bottoms up live television studio that would be by us and for us. Therein lies that whole thing about journalism, which TechCrunch always–Mike at least always said, “I’m not a journalist.” He’s a participant observer. We’re part of the same thing. So, we’re observing from the inside.
Andrew: I do see an old shot of Edgeio here. It was at the top–where does it say it? Listings from the Edge is what it was. I could find listings for golf. I could find listings for IT configuration. I could find books for sale there. I could find DVDs for sale there. I could find podcasts. Two-hundred podcasts back in 2006 were listed there.
Keith: So, we had 20 million live listings. It was an audacious idea that didn’t work out very well because we didn’t get the time to do it. In fact, it’s a very good lesson for today’s’ entrepreneurs. We over-priced our A round and couldn’t get a B round done at a price that represented value to the investors. The investors vetoed us doing a down route. So, in the midst of this quite frothy market, we were able to raise money at a high valuation. That ended up being a really bad idea.
Andrew: I see.
Keith: We didn’t sustain. But we did do 20 million live listings. The idea was you on your blog could say, “I’m selling my MacBook Pro.” You would put the tag #classified on that blog post. We would see every blog post in the world that had the tag #classified and bring it into a marketplace. So, you were publishing on your own site, but we centralized. And then anyone could take an RSS feed from us to put those classifieds on their blog as for sale items or jobs available or whatever it was. So, it was Google AdSense for classifieds.
Andrew: The whole open web love fest that we all had at the time for RSS and people should be able to mix content. Let me do my last sponsorship message. That is for HostGator. Do you have any experience with them, Keith? They’ve been around for years.
Keith: I know who HostGator are. They’ve got a very good reputation.
Andrew: They do, right? So many people who I’ve interviewed here have said that they started their companies on HostGator’s site. HostGator is an incredible hosting company and incredibly cheap. How do they do it? Volume. Actually, that probably is how they do it.
One of the great things about HostGator is that they stand by their products so much that they have real human beings who will answer your tech support questions if you ever have them. Now, look, I’m a guy who feels like I could setup a WordPress site in his sleep. I don’t think I’m going to have tech support issues. You are listening to me and you probably think, “I’m never going to have tech support issues. Why is Andrew going on and on about this?”
Because at some point along the way you’re site is going to crash or something bad is going to happen and you are going to have to solve it or someone on your team is going to have to solve it. You can either try to do it on your own, or if you’re with another hosting company, you send in one of those support tickets, which nobody will get.
I’ve sent those out and there’s one hosting company I’d love to rip on but I’m a nice guy and I can’t ruin my reputation as a nice guy by ripping into them, but Michael Arrington would. If he had this experience, he would. I can’t bring myself to do it, but boy, they would make me file these support tickets. They would swear that I would get response the next day and I never did. You can’t wait until the next day to get a response. You need it immediately.
What HostGator does is they give you an immediate response. They are there 24/7, 365. They make it easy for you to install whatever you want on the web and it’s ideal for WordPress. So, if you’re looking for WordPress, don’t worry about it. They’ve got you covered up the wazoo. That’s part of their company logo. It says HostGator – Up the Wazoo We’ve Got You Covered. If you go to HostGator.com/Mixergy, for only–well, actually you get 30 percent off the regular price and you can get started for only $4.87 a month for web hosting, unbelievable. That includes unmetered disk.
I can’t keep going on with all the features. Let me instead ask you, Keith, if you were starting fresh today, I put you on a deserted island with nothing but a laptop connected to the internet and a HostGator account and you have to make money or build a website that changes the world and has more impact than even Margaret Thatcher did, what would you start with nothing but a hosting package?
Keith: What would I start? I would probably start with building a site called Cheat Chats, for husbands and wives who want to cheat on each other.
Andrew: Oh, Cheat Chat. Oh, I see. What you would do is you would use a service that you’ve created, Chat Center, and you’d create a place where people want to cheat on their spouses to connect and then you’d run ads, I guess. That’s clever.
Keith: I think I’d be a billionaire in about a month.
Andrew: I thought this would be you promoting Chat Center, but that actually makes sense. What I like about that idea is you’re right, you can just embed someone else’s tool on your site, come up with a crazy angle on it and see what happens. Frankly, guys, for $4.87 a month, it’s not that expensive to try your ideas out. If it doesn’t work out, you close up shop and you move on. If it does work out, you keep building and building and building and then you come on here and I do an interview with you.
Seriously, HostGator–great hosting company. If you hate your hosting company, they will migrate you over. If you don’t have one but you have a great idea, they will start you from the beginning. Go to HostGator.com/Mixergy and you’ll get all those goodies right now.
I like the direction–have you cheated on your wife?
Keith: I never have, which is weird because I was not a very single-type of a guy before I was married.
Andrew: What does that mean?
Keith: It means I was raised in a holiday town where there were new girls in town every one or two weeks all summer. So, you never had a girlfriend for longer than one or two weeks.
Andrew: And you had game? I feel like if you were both a good technologist and a good business person and you had game, that would just seem too unbelievable. Did you really have the ability as a teenager to go up to girls and even start a conversation?
Keith: I had kind of a turnover point between the ages of 17 and 18. I was very shy and I got a summer job working on a BINGO, a seaside BINGO where people would come in and play from the street. My job was to stand at the front and shout at people to come in.
Andrew: Okay.
Keith: My boss would fire me if I wouldn’t do it. He taught me to sing opera as a way of getting people to stop in their tracks. So, I would stand at the front singing Rigoletto. That changed me from a shy person to a less shy person. Pretty quickly I became a DJ at a nightclub and the rest is history.
Andrew: As a DJ at a nightclub, do women just come up to you and start hitting on you instead of you having to come to them?
Keith: Yeah. My particular thing was to go dance on my own before anyone else was drunk enough to dance.
Andrew: The records would just spin and you’d go out there, you’d dance on your own and someone would just come…
Keith: Dancing. I never had to hit on people.
Andrew: Do you remember one time you were especially proud of that you were able to suck up any insecurities, go up to a girl that you’re not especially confident going up to and talking to and you just were yourself?
Keith: I totally couldn’t do that in my young years. I absolutely could not do that. But you know, it’s a pretty binary thing. Once you’ve done that once, it becomes way less scary.
Andrew: Yeah.
Keith: So, to answer your question, I don’t remember a specific instance, but I remember my 18th birthday being a bit of a watershed between childhood and adulthood. Then I was kind of… I would not have–I’m the son of a single mom. My dad was pretty brutal. I used to have to fight him and then she kicked him out. So, I grew up loving strong women. I still do to this day. My COO at RealNames was Mary Burnside and then Teri Hulbrook.
I love strong women. They’re so awesome and way better than men. It isn’t that they’re not confident. It’s not that anyone’s overconfident. Everyone has security issues, everyone. But they’ve learned to deal with them through tough things. There’s no comparison for that. So, as I grew up, I didn’t really like sexism. But I did like sex. So, that fine line between liking someone and being obnoxious is really important to me. It’s also important that you’re allowed to like someone, otherwise we all end up not being honest.
Andrew: Did you reconnect with your dad years later?
Keith: No. Well, he died before I really made up with him. I kind of forgive him now because I can think of all kinds of reasons without excusing him.
Andrew: What kind of reasons? I’ve got a one and a half year old son. I remember my wife and I started suddenly arguing and he was sitting there. We caught ourselves like, “What are we doing? We can wait. This is about nothing.” What’s a reason why he would hit your mom?
Keith: He was a drinker. So, he would be physically violent. He was older than her considerably, 21 years older. So, he was probably jealous of her as he got older.
Andrew: I see.
Keith: He was just out of control. So, I was the oldest kid of five. Once I got big enough, I wanted to protect her. He probably was mainly insecure, ultimately. So, if somebody is insecure, you can kind of contextualize why they do things without excusing it.
Andrew: I get that. Still, a hard weight to carry that you had to fight your dad.
Keith: No. It wasn’t nice at the time. In the end, he was pathetic and she was strong.
Andrew: I hate to go from that back to tech, but–by the way, can you also center yourself in the camera. I want to make sure we don’t accidentally cut you off.
Keith: Yeah, sorry about that.
Andrew: There you go. That’s super. I like that you’re getting comfortable. Get comfortable but within boundaries of staying centered on the screen.
Keith: I’m actually sat on one of those bikes that you exercise with.
Andrew: Is that why you couldn’t lift the seat up earlier?
Keith: Yeah.
Andrew: I was wondering, “What kind of seat does this guy have?” So, as TechCrunch is building up, is there a point where Michael Arrington ends up owning a bigger share of it than you?
Keith: Oh, very quite early.
Andrew: So, how do you make the transition where you suddenly give him more of your shares of the business?
Keith: Well, number one, he’s doing all the work and it’s his thing. Now it’s successful. It didn’t really matter before it’s successful. But now it’s successful. Really, my contribution is tiny. But I own what I own. It doesn’t make any sense. So, two things happened. One is understandably he’s pissed off. Two, luckily I’m adult enough to recognize that that’s reasonable.
Andrew: He gets pissed off. I’ve heard so many stories about how Michael Arrington gets pissed off. How did he get pissed off at you?
Keith: You know, Mike has many ways of getting pissed off, from saying, “F-you, we’re done,” to just being upset.
Andrew: What’s the worst time that he yelled at you that made you almost say, “Look, I had a dad who was abusive. This is nothing.”
Keith: He was never abusive, but he was expressive. It’s a good thing, actually. He didn’t hold back what he really thought. Mike’s the person that if he really believes something is right–he’s really got a strong ethical side to him. Right and wrong and very clear to him. If he believes something is right, he won’t let it go. He’ll make very sure you understand that and the form of the expression is about are you face to face, is it on email, blah, blah. But he will definitely let you know. Then it’s up to you, “Is this okay? Is it not okay?” In my case, it was okay.
Andrew: And by the end, how much did you end up owning?
Keith: Ten percent.
Andrew: Ten percent?
Keith: By the way, that was my call. In fact, I said, “It’s okay for you to have 100 percent.” And he said to me, “No, I want you to have some.”
Andrew: Really. Who else owned a piece of the business at the end?
Keith: Nobody. It was just the two of us.
Andrew: It was just the two of you?
Keith: Yeah.
Andrew: Do you remember the day when it was sold to AOL?
Keith: I do. I had to sign documents and stuff.
Andrew: What did that feel like when you were turning this thing that gave you such a megaphone over?
Keith: You know, I was a little bit mixed in my thoughts. I wanted it to go ahead because Mike wanted it. He’s the hardest working person I have ever worked with. He was really done by then in terms of just energy levels. Plus, because he was forthright with his opinions, he had a lot of enemies. That began to weigh on him emotionally a lot. He really didn’t want that anymore. He was just not a happy guy being in that situation. He went from being a very friendly guy to being a guy that walked around with people to protect him from other people.
Andrew: Really? He had hired protection?
Keith: Not always but on occasion because he had death threats and all kinds of stuff. He was actually quite scared.
Andrew: What would get him a death threat? What would make people so angry they would threaten the guy’s life?
Keith: Well, no one would ever tell you that, so you don’t know. But it’s probably just that he was strongly opinionated about whether something sucked or didn’t suck. I remember when I did RealNames, you began to express some of it, there were a lot of people who thought RealNames was a conspiracy to arm the world. I remember as the creator where really it’s just your creative juices that are driving you. When somebody looks at it and says, “You’re a bad guy looking to do evil things,” emotionally it feels bad because you know it isn’t true for yourself. But you can easily understand why somebody might come to that conclusion, but they don’t know you.
So, Cyberia was very similar as well. Cyberia was TechCrunch circa 1994. We had a magazine. We had a portal. We had probably five or six TV camera crews in every single day interviewing us. Anyone who was anyone to do with the internet, came and hang out there. Sinead O’Connor was there. Johnny Rotten was there. Joe Strummer was there. So, it was like this melting pot of attention. It wasn’t nice. It isn’t nice. After a while, it gets a bit draining.
Andrew: It’s so good to hear you say that Michael Arrington was weighed down by people hating him, only because just last night I had Wil Schroter over to my house for takeout. Do you know will? Startups.co, he now owns LaunchRock and he just bought Zirutal and so on. I said to him, “Wil, I’m always so nice in my interviews. I should be poking the bear more. Michael Arrington pokes the bear all the time. Howard Stern does.”
Wil had to just say, “Look, it’s not really who you are. You think those guys go to sleep at night really being happy that they did it?” Look at what Howard Stern has said, how he’s in therapy trying to get rid of some of this anger that he has and some of this negativity that’s come back from the anger. He said the same thing about Michael Arrington and I guess I get it. That’s good to know.
Keith: Yeah. And I don’t think he thinks he ever made a wrong call. I’ve never asked him that. Maybe he does. But I think he mostly thinks he made the right call.
Andrew: What about with Jason Calacanis? When the two of them partnered up to created TechCrunch 50 and Jason Calacanis said that he basically had that thing ripped out from under him. I see you’re pursing your lips. What does that mean?
Keith: No. Jason’s basically–he’s full of shit, basically. What happened is Jason’s a great showman. He’s a wonderful showman and very smart. Mike asked him to front TechCrunch. And they had a contract. It was very clear. It was to do with profit shares on the outcome of the event. So, there’s no ownership in the thing. It was ownership in the outcome of the thing.
Andrew: Of the specific events.
Keith: The specific events. And actually Jason was fine with that all the way through. Eventually they fell out. You know, they both have the ability to be fairly hot-headed. I think it was one of those things where if you asked either one, they’d think the other was to blame but they probably accept there was some element themselves. When Jason really complained is when TechCrunch was sold. He somehow interpreted it that he should own some of TechCrunch.
Andrew: Right. I don’t exactly know how, but I think he felt that he owned the TechCrunch 50, which was the profit engine of TechCrunch, but that’s just me on the outside trying to understand it.
Keith: You know, that’s probably accurate that he thought that. But one is he didn’t. It’s not as if there wasn’t a contract. It was a very clear business agreement and money had changed hands many times. And it was very clear. So, it’s hard for me to fully understand how Jason got himself–
Andrew: What about when Jason used to go on camera and say, I think–this is all memory at this point–but I believe he used to say, “Here’s how much I spent on internet. We didn’t have internet last time. I spent this much money on internet.” I felt like he was part owner if he’s spending that money on internet.
Keith: Well, Heather Harde actually ran it from a business point of view. Anything that would be spent, she would have to sign off on. It’s entirely plausible that Jason would go to Heather and say, “I want this. I want that.” But it’s also plausible that Jason would claim credit for things he had nothing to do with.
Andrew: He was another guy I was talking to Wil about last night. He knows how to poke the bear. He knows how to draw attention. As an insider who was being poked by him, did at the same time have to smile and go, “This guy’s good at his craft?”
Keith: I’ve known Jason since 1994 when he was at Silicon Alley Insider in New York when we were thinking about owning a Cyberia café in Manhattan and he interviewed me. I’ve known him for a very, very long time. He’s never been different. He’s the same as Mike. They’re both true themselves, that they are who they are. You can only respect part of them and you can totally understand that self-interest drives confrontation. I’m pretty relaxed about it from the outside, to be honest. I saw it all. I don’t think–I’m very confident nothing bad happened to Jason but that Jason thinks it did is fine.
Andrew: Since you remember the magazine, tell me if you remember this. I always meant to bring it up to him in an interview. I’ve got interview questions for Jason for when he comes back here. But I believe when he ran Silicon Alley magazine, you couldn’t pay for it online. You had to send him a check. There was no online credit processing. He’s documenting the future of the internet. He doesn’t have credit processing, but he’s still holding himself out as the guy who’s leading this new charge and there’s something admirable about it and at the same time shocking when you’re in the industry.
Keith: Well, it’s audacity. He’s got audacity. It should be his middle name.
Andrew: There’s no credit card processing on the site. You have to send him a check or see him at a basketball game where he was walking around with the magazines.
Keith: By the way, that was normal when we opened Easynet. It was checks in the mail. That’s the way people became subscribers. Visa would not grant you the ability to take credit cards unless you had certain amount of history behind you. So, a new business couldn’t actually use credit cards.
Andrew: I see. AOL buys the company. You have mixed feelings about it. What did they pay for the business?
Keith: I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you that, but it’s widely reported and the reports are roughly in the ballpark of the truth.
Andrew: Widely reported was what, $20 million?
Keith: No. It was quite a bit more than that.
Andrew: Now I feel like I hate that I would get that widely reported number wrong. Gigaom reported it but they didn’t have the number at the time.
Keith: Yeah. I’m actually not allowed to tell you the number because it’s never been disclosed and I don’t want to be the guy to actually disclose it and it wouldn’t be right if I did. It was quite a bit more than that.
Andrew: It was more than $100 million?
Keith: It was less than that.
Andrew: Less than $100 million.
Keith: By the way, if it would have happened a year later, it would have been $200 million to $300 million.
Andrew: Right. Why do you think that happened? I get that sense also.
Keith: I just think it’s timing of where everything is at. It’s also factoring in if you’re a seller, it goes cheaper than if the buyer is chasing you.
Andrew: And at that point, Michael Arrington was ready to sell. I actually had heard from people he moved to Seattle to avoid taxes on the sale. He was really gearing up.
Keith: I think he moved to Seattle initially for personally reason to get out of the hothouse. I think not paying tax on the sell is a very fortunate byproduct of that. I don’t think it was his goal.
Andrew: Okay. I always assumed that’s what it was based on what I’d heard. Where is that? I’m still looking. Oh, there it is. I actually see Business Insider, “AOL Insider Says TechCrunch Price Only $25 Million.” Is that what you mean by widely reported?
Keith: That’s probably widely reported. There’s a range. That’s at a low end of the range.
Andrew: That’s a low end. Okay. And I see The Guardian also had $25 million, so my memory was a little bit off and you’re saying that’s the low end of the range but then range wasn’t crazily out of whack.
Keith: No.
Andrew: You know, I also heard from people who know Jason Calacanis that he also sold his blog network too early and that’s one of the reasons why he’s so fiery with them, that he doesn’t want to miss out again.
Keith: You know, maybe. I don’t know Jason well enough to say that’s right. He did sell it early and he probably could have gotten more if he’d have waited. That’s for sure. If you look at…
Andrew: He has Engadget.
Keith: What’s the one now with the English guy, Nick…
Andrew: Nick from Gawker. Nick Denton.
Keith: Nick’s British. He used to work at EFT and I used to know him back in those days. He’s held on. I think the value of his assets is now easily in three figures. So, later is better if you’re successful. Earlier is better if you’re going to fail.
Andrew: He did tell me, though, that he’s a guy that got to first base with Silicon Alley Magazine not because he hit to first base but because he was hit on the head by the pitcher essentially. He said, “Look, I just lucked out and this did okay. I’m not going to let this opportunity go.”
I do remember he once spoke at a conference that I organized where he said he comes from a background where his brother, I think, was a cop where this was a lot of money and for anyone to say that it’s not enough money, it’s really to not understand that this is significant money and you’re not just comparing to everything you see.
Keith: I’m with him on that. The money I made from Easynet changed my life. It was less than he made from Weblogs Inc. So, I would absolutely say these are life-changing events. Whenever you’re talking millions of dollars, these are life-changing events. What you cannot do is look back and regret your decisions because there’s no way of timing these things.
I’ve made both mistakes. If I would have waited with Easynet, I would have made $200 million from Easynet. If I would have sold RealNames, I would have made $200 million from RealNames. In both cases, I did the opposite but I’m still a happy guy.
Andrew: Yeah, you are. You’re one of the happiest people I’ve met. I’ve asked you questions that other people would have seen as jerky, but you’re seeing it in the sense I’m coming from, which is just like lighthearted conversation from a person who wants to get to know you. I think that comes from having a comfort with yourself.
Like I remember there was a period of my life where I’m going to go out and explore the world in different ways. And I backpacked and I looked at hippie communities and I went to cults to see what they were doing to see what made them happy. The happiest most satisfied people I saw in all those places were Berkshire Hathaway audience members. They were sitting there in I think it’s the Quest Stadium. You could hear a quarter drop on the floor if Warren Buffett is speaking. There’s no anxiety. They’re all happy people. I feel, this may be a jerky thing to say, I believe that money makes happiness to some degree.
Keith: Well, in my case, I became happy way before money. It’s a little bit in the way religious people strike you as happy.
Andrew: How do you mean?
Keith: I’m not religious, but when people come to your door and they proselytizing Christianity or–
Andrew: And they have that happy smile on their face. So, where did your happy smile come from?
Keith: My happiness came in college when I stopped taking acid and I started reading books.
Andrew: I see. What’s a book that made you happier than acid?
Keith: Well, I guess I think I was pretty happy on acid as well. But that was temporary. I would have depressions every now and then. But when I really got happy was when I thought I understood the world and could see a path through it. That kind of intellectual calmness that comes with thinking you understand, it’s not like in an arrogant way because of course there are always new things that you don’t understand and need to learn, but whenever you feel like you’ve got a mission and a vision for that vision, you suddenly become happy even through hard times because your world is in order.
I think that’s way more important than money as a holistic thing. Before then, the only thing that made me happy was girlfriends. If was lonely I was unhappy. If I had a girlfriend, I was happy. I think that’s most people, honestly. I think that is most people. Loneliness is a big variable. But I think you stop being lonely when you understand yourself and have some kind of a sense of mission.
Andrew: So, speaking of mission and loneliness, you said, “Hey, Andrew, you don’t have to beat this over your audience’s head, but if you want to mention something, I’m working on Chat.Center,” right? The URL is Chat.Center. Before that you working on another chat app. What is it with chat and communication that’s drawing you so much that you’re continuing?
Keith: Well, I always look at the world with an intent to get a sense of history. When I look at chat, I get the very, very strong feeling of unfinished history. I look at that from the point of view of how universal the communications medium is. So, if you think about phone numbers, they’re universal. What I mean by that is if you give me your phone number and I don’t know anything else about you, if I deal that number, your phone will ring. I don’t need any additional information. I don’t need anything other than your email address and I can get it through to you. Those are what I call universal communication platforms. Chat is not. Chat is, “Do you use WhatsApp or WeChat or…?”
Andrew: That drives me nuts. I have WhatsApp just for one person in Germany.
Keith: There you go. I’ve got WeChat for 20 people in China and WhatsApp for some other people and Skype for some other people. So, chat does not benefit from the concept of a universal address. Now, what if it did? What if you could take a URL, which works anywhere–mobile or desktop or laptop, it really doesn’t matter–but if you take a URL and put “chat.” in front of it, that would mean, just like www. means web, chat. means chat. Now I can say Chat.DomainName.com/Person. If I know that, your phone will go ding and you’ll get a message from them.
Andrew: I see. So, it would be Chat.Mixergy.com/Mixergy and it would come to me?
Keith: There you go.
Andrew: Chat.Mixergy.com/Ari would go to Ari on the team.
Keith: Yeah, or Chat.Mixergy.com/Applications if somebody wanted to apply. So, you can either have people or processes with names.
Andrew: I see. Why is chat so–what about text messaging? Can’t you just know that if I give you a phone number, you can text message me?
Keith: Yes, you can. That works. It cost money, number one. Number two, you’ve got to give me your phone number, which a lot of people don’t want to do. So, this is a way to create–if you like, it’s a name that invokes a service. So, mine is Chat.Center/Keith.
Andrew: So, everyone knows Chat.Center/Keith is you.
Keith: That’s me. If you invoke that in any browser or Twitter or Facebook, any app that can load a browser control, you will get what looks like an IM screen. You’ll be typing in. My phone will ding any minute if you do that over there.
Andrew: I’ll do it. I’m putting in my email address too so I can get notifications form you so you can respond afterwards.
Keith: So, we do that, we ask you for your email address so if I reply later, you get my answer.
Andrew: I like how you explained that. It didn’t feel like I was registering. It just said, “Hey, when Keith responds, where do we send it?”
Keith: So, that is Chat Center. It’s a cloud service, very like RealNames was gluing together in this case somebody wants to reach you with you on your smartphone or you can login on a web browser as well, either way. My phone isn’t with me. It’s over there. Let me get it. I’ll come back.
Andrew: I don’t know who your developer is on this, but he did a really great job on this, keeping it so light and fast and clear.
Keith: It’s Alex Komarov.
Andrew: You shouldn’t have given his name out. He’s too good. People should poach him.
Keith: Go to MinimumInc.com. Alex Komarov–he’s a designer, UI/UX designer, born in Moscow, 31 years old, physicist by training. He is awesome. He’s my cofounder here.
Andrew: Oh, I see. “We connect human behavior with intuitive design to create gorgeous apps that people love.” That is what he did with that app.
Keith: So, here we are, Andrew Warner, you said, “Hi.” And I got your gravitar, by the way, without your beard. I said, “Hi” back and you should get that.
Andrew: I have to leave. Which of my tabs did I…?
Keith: It will be there. If your sound was turned up, it would be a ding.
Andrew: No, I turn it off for interviews, but now I don’t know which tab I opened up on.
Keith: Don’t worry. You’ll get an email in about ten minutes if you don’t go to the chat.
Andrew: Okay.
Keith: So, Chat Center is really universal chat for mobile. We particularly sell it to businesses, especially small businesses, like developers. Let’s say you’re building an app and you want to give help to your customers. You can put a chat center link in your app saying help. It will invoke chat and your customer using your app will be able to chat with you on your smartphone.
Andrew: I see.
Keith: So, a lot of developers are using it. Web developers too, you can put it inside a website, say click to chat. It can be a widget or a button, whichever you prefer. Right there in the site, the visitor to the site can chat with the owner of the site, which is great for small businesses. It turns their smartphone into basically a call center.
Andrew: You what? I actually did somehow leave the page. So, I opened up a new tab and went back to Chat.Center/Keith and your response to me just popped up quickly.
Keith: Yeah. We do a cookie.
Andrew: Yeah. All right.
Keith: You can see it’s very powerful compared to the fragmented world of chat today. So, this sense of history, I believe the end of history with chat is every individual on the planet who wants to be is addressable through chat with just an address.
Andrew: I get that, without having to install a whole new app for every single person I’m talking to.
Keith: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. I like it. Now everyone knows what your chat account is. I’m curious about what will happen. But they should also check out Chat.Center. My name is Andrew, as I said. This interview was sponsored by HostGator. How did you think the interview went, Keith?
Keith: I thought you did an awesome job. You got me talking about things I had no intention to talk about. I only hope that my friend Mike likes it when he listens to it.
Andrew: I wonder what it’s like if he doesn’t like it. But you know what? He hasn’t been active lately. I miss having Michael Arrington be the ringleader of the circus of tech. It’s not nearly as interesting when TechMeme is leading it or when Product Hunt is leading it.
Keith: Yeah. I think we all miss him. There’s a blandness about tech right now because of the absence of attitude and opinion.
Andrew: Yeah.
Keith: I actually meet Ned Desmond, the CEO of TechCrunch quite often. My main point to him is TechCrunch needs an editorial voice.
Andrew: It doesn’t have that.
Keith: No.
Andrew: And frankly the whole industry doesn’t.
Keith: That’s not the same as having an editor. An editorial voice is an opinion.
Andrew: You know who has opinions are the venture capitalists, but they don’t have as strong an opinion because I think it was Chris Dixon who said to Kara Swisher in an interview, there are just too many interrelated relationships. You can’t really start to rag on anyone.
Keith: They’re scared to piss off people who might become rich later.
Andrew: Yeah.
Keith: To Mike’s credit, whatever you think of Mike–and I love him–but whatever anyone thinks of him, he was always true to himself no matter what the cost.
Andrew: I think that he was the most interesting person to pay attention to, the ring leader in tech. I feel like he’s dead, frankly. I don’t know what he’s doing because he’s not blogging much.
Keith: He’s doing a lot. He’s doing CrunchFund, which is a venture fund.
Andrew: I don’t know what’s going on with CrunchFund, but I wish that he’d go back and post. Here, look. UnCrunch.com, his personal blog, last post–this is a man who could post multiple times a day, an hour–February 23rd, 2015. We are now recording this at about October, ten months into the year.
Keith: But if you go to his Twitter, there’s more there.
Andrew: There is more there. It’s still not the same. He’s not poking bears anymore. I guess that’s for his own good. He’s got to move on.
Keith: You know what we really need? We need Mike and Om Malik to team up and do GigaMike.
Andrew: Yeah. Om is very nice. But I feel if he’s with Om for too long, it might calm things down. I feel like he needs an instigator.
Keith: Not a chance.
Andrew: No? All right. Fair enough. Thank you so much for doing this. I should say again–Toptal is my sponsor. HostGator is my second sponsor. If you like this interview, you like the attitude that I bring to these interviews and you’re not one of these people that thinks I go into people’s sex lives where I shouldn’t or ask questions that I shouldn’t–most people don’t think Mixergy is for them.
But if you happen to be one of the people who thinks Mixergy is your style, your kind of interview, please subscribe to the podcast and rate it highly–five, six, seven–however many stars they allow you in whatever app you’re using, please do that and then go to your friends’ phone because they should learn too. Why should you be the only one to know.
Thank you so much, Keith for doing this interview.
Keith: You’re welcome.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of it. Bye.
