201 lines
8.8 KiB
Markdown
201 lines
8.8 KiB
Markdown
---
|
||
created_at: '2011-03-22T04:47:07.000Z'
|
||
title: Foul-Mouthed Blogger Ted Dziuba Tells Why Most Startups Fail (2007)
|
||
url: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/10/dzubia_qa#
|
||
author: helwr
|
||
points: 41
|
||
story_text: ''
|
||
comment_text:
|
||
num_comments: 15
|
||
story_id:
|
||
story_title:
|
||
story_url:
|
||
parent_id:
|
||
created_at_i: 1300769227
|
||
_tags:
|
||
- story
|
||
- author_helwr
|
||
- story_2353159
|
||
objectID: '2353159'
|
||
year: 2007
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
[](https://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/10/#)
|
||
\* Photo: Julie Sloan \* There is a certain gentleness to most Web 2.0
|
||
coverage. Even when startups sound flat-out dumb, we all root for the
|
||
little guy.
|
||
|
||
Not Ted Dziuba. He's the blogger behind [Uncov](http://www.uncov.com/),
|
||
and he brutally dismisses most companies with a single word: Fail.
|
||
|
||
Dziuba is the
|
||
anti-[Arrington](https://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-07/ff_arrington).
|
||
Of the startup Stixy, an online bulletin board, [he
|
||
writes](http://www.uncov.com/2007/10/5/thanks-stixy-i-didn-t-need-that-browser-instance):
|
||
"It's virtually the same product as Wixi, with virtually the same name.
|
||
Don't get me wrong, both products are steaming shit heaps; it's just
|
||
harder to tell them apart now."
|
||
|
||
Of [LingoZ](http://www.lingoz.com/), a user-written dictionary, [he
|
||
says](http://www.uncov.com/2007/10/3/what-s-a-cincinatti-bowtie): "These
|
||
guys take themselves waaay too seriously to have a term like alligator
|
||
fuckhouse in their lexicon. Now where's the fun in that?"
|
||
|
||
The thing is, as scathing as he is hilarious, Dziuba tends to be
|
||
spot-on. Strip away the bombast, and Dziuba is a guilty pleasure that's
|
||
actually worth reading.
|
||
|
||
Despite diagnosing Silicon Valley woes with the vinegar of a crotchety
|
||
old man, Dziuba, it turns out, is only 23.
|
||
|
||
After getting his math degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology
|
||
in 2006, the Connecticut native spent a year at Google, He left to
|
||
create his own startup, [Persai](http://www.persai.com/) (rhymes with
|
||
Versailles) with college buddies and occasional Uncov bloggers Matt Kent
|
||
and Kyle Shank.
|
||
|
||
Persai, Dziuba says, will launch its first product – a sort of
|
||
intelligent newsreader – in beta before the end of the year.
|
||
|
||
With all the [debate over
|
||
Bubble 2.0](https://www.wired.com/sterling/2007/09/print-is-dead-a.html),
|
||
we figured whom better to ask than a critic whose tagline is "What. The.
|
||
Fuck." Lord knows he isn't afraid to be honest. So we sat down with
|
||
Dziuba at San Francisco's Caffe Centro, epicenter of Bubble 1.0, to talk
|
||
about where Silicon Valley is still getting it wrong.
|
||
|
||
**Wired News:** In your opinion, where is Web 2.0 going wrong?
|
||
|
||
**TD:** What I'm seeing now with a lot of these Web 2.0 companies is
|
||
that they're not based on technology, but on a dog-and-pony show. Under
|
||
the surface, there's nothing noteworthy going on. The majority of them
|
||
are just rolling the dice, and they know it. These are the people who
|
||
will go to parties just to suck up to Arrington and say, "Hey come look
|
||
at my startup. Please plug me." For these guys
|
||
[TechCrunch](http://www.techcrunch.com/) is going to make or break the
|
||
company. If you look at a company's traffic graph on
|
||
[Alexa](http://www.alexa.com/) when it hits TechCrunch, there's a huge
|
||
spike that day and then a month later it's down to almost nothing. In
|
||
this world it's all about creating the buzz. It doesn't matter about
|
||
revenues or profits. It's just about how many users you can get.
|
||
|
||
**WN:** How do you personally differentiate between what's worthy and
|
||
what isn’t?
|
||
|
||
**TD:** You know you're a bullshit company when your core technology is
|
||
Ajax. If the business is every widget under the sun conglomerated into
|
||
this giant application, there's no real technology there. There's no
|
||
noteworthy computer-science problem being solved. The Ajax stuff is
|
||
pre-written. You just have to go to the libraries and put it all
|
||
together.
|
||
|
||
When Gmail came out – and Gmail is a pretty kick-ass product – it was
|
||
like, "Ha\! Ajax for dynamic web apps\! We can use it for everything\!"
|
||
So now you have companies like [Zoho](http://www.zoho.com/), for
|
||
example. Their sole goal is to take every desktop app that ever existed
|
||
and reimplement it in Ajax with no added features or functionality. It
|
||
irritates me as an engineer that companies with no engineering merit,
|
||
first off, are getting funded and, second off, are getting bought out.
|
||
|
||
**WN:** Why aren't more Silicon Valley bloggers trashing startups?
|
||
|
||
**TD:** I'm guessing they don't want to piss off advertisers. Or it
|
||
would illegitimize them as a blogger to say something remotely critical
|
||
of someone. The whole scene is like a little league game where
|
||
everyone's a winner and everyone gets a trophy at the end. You've got
|
||
people like Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble who are the coaches of
|
||
the team and handing out the trophies, and then Uncov is like the creepy
|
||
guy in the trench coat sitting in the stands.
|
||
|
||
People accuse us of saying negative stuff to get traffic. Honestly, I
|
||
don't give a shit about the traffic. People could stop coming tomorrow.
|
||
Great\! I don't have to satisfy you vultures anymore. We don't have ads,
|
||
although we're talking to a couple advertisers now because we have to
|
||
cover our hosting costs. But it's by no means a profit center.
|
||
|
||
**WN:** Where do you stand on the whole "Bubble 2.0" issue? Is the
|
||
bottom going to fall out?
|
||
|
||
\_\_TD: \_\_ It's going to happen slowly over time. It's not going to be
|
||
like the first dot-com crash where the sky was falling within a month,
|
||
only because it's all private-equity deals. There have been very few
|
||
IPOs.
|
||
|
||
Google didn't do the world any favors when it overpaid so much for
|
||
YouTube. That set off a surge in the expected value of a startup. A lot
|
||
of people think that if you put $10,000 into enough of these, eventually
|
||
one will pay off. But this whole thing is eventually going to cave in on
|
||
itself. All these companies will keep getting bought up, but the
|
||
acquirers are not going to see great returns.
|
||
|
||
**WN:** We've talked a lot about what you don't like. What types of
|
||
companies do you like?
|
||
|
||
**TD:** Things that have actual technology behind them. Take
|
||
[Joost](http://www.joost.com/), for example. That is a really cool
|
||
program, because the company spent a lot of time working on the quality
|
||
of the picture. It looks really good. It also has exclusive content from
|
||
big-name providers like Comedy Central that's actually worth watching.
|
||
It's not a guy riding his bike into a tree on YouTube. Going out and
|
||
getting licensing deals for content is hard work, and I'm pretty sure
|
||
they're going to be well-rewarded for it.
|
||
|
||
**WN:** What did you do during the year you were at Google?
|
||
|
||
**TD:** I worked on internal apps. I got bored pretty quickly there and
|
||
left to do something interesting.
|
||
|
||
**WN:** That's my cue. Tell me about Persai.
|
||
|
||
**TD:** The three of us are doing a company based around machine
|
||
learning and artificial intelligence on an unreasonably large scale. We
|
||
essentially want to automate the understanding of all the information in
|
||
the world.
|
||
|
||
**WN:** (Pause.) What?
|
||
|
||
**TD:** We want to build machine programs that can learn things from
|
||
information that's out there on the web. In the first application we'll
|
||
come out with, you tell us things that you're interested in, and we'll
|
||
continuously go out and find stuff on the internet that's related to
|
||
that. There's a positive feedback loop where you tell us what you like
|
||
and don't, so the machine gets progressively better in learning what you
|
||
like.
|
||
|
||
**WN:** Is it going to be like, "I like unicorns; give me news about
|
||
unicorns"? That sounds like a search engine.
|
||
|
||
**TD:** Search engine implies somebody's actively going out and looking
|
||
for information. We're more passive than that. It's more like a
|
||
newsreader. It's like you have some time to burn, so you go to Digg and
|
||
see what the top headlines are. In that same style, except you take the
|
||
community part completely out and leave all of it up to a machine.
|
||
|
||
**WN:** That's the opposite of what's trendy right now.
|
||
|
||
**TD:** Exactly. We're hoping that the tenet of "automation is key"
|
||
still holds.
|
||
|
||
**WN:** Valleywag has commented that your ad-free blog is something of a
|
||
bait and switch – build up attention without monetizing it and then
|
||
introduce your for-profit startup.
|
||
|
||
**TD:** We're pretty good friends with the Valleywag people, so we bust
|
||
each other's balls all the time. We all recognize that it's just the
|
||
internet. At the end of the day you still go outside and nobody knows
|
||
who you are. Valleywag is like Uncov: We both force people not to take
|
||
themselves too seriously.
|
||
|
||
**WN:** Well, I hope you don't fail.
|
||
|
||
**TD:** Yeah, I hope so, too.
|
||
|
||
[Beyond Ramen: A Cookbook for
|
||
Entrepreneurs](https://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/07/cookbook)
|
||
|
||
[How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second
|
||
Life](https://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-08/ff_sheep)
|
||
|
||
[TechCrunch Blogger Michael Arrington Can Generate Buzz ... and
|
||
Cash](https://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-07/ff_arrington)
|