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Wharton alums, students blast into the "blogosphere"
I blog therefore I am.
Apologies to French philosopher Rene Descartes. But if today's young entrepreneurs had a slogan, that would be it. As anyone who has a computer and a modem knows, blogging is one of the hot areas on the post-Bubble Internet. Especially in tech centers like Silicon Valley and Boston, writing a popular blog—short for "web log"—confers a coolness quotient that little else can match. Blogs like TechCrunch and GigaOM draw hundreds of thousands of readers daily, and their writers are minor celebrities. Blogging has become so popular that even established journalists like Andrew Sullivan and Michelle Malkin have migrated to the "blogosphere."
Blogging may be even hotter in Wharton's entrepreneurial community than the world at large. Several Wharton entrepreneurs publish blogs in which they reflect on everything from technology to the hassles of frequent business travel. Often, their blogs serve as a low-key form of marketing, giving potential partners and customers a glimpse into their passions and values and, by extension, those of their firms.
Several Wharton undergrads have taken to producing tech-savvy blogs, too. Theirs are more informal and personal—they'll riff on hobbies or write paeans to sports stars—but often just as sophisticated commentary about technology and its role as an economic engine.
Perhaps the best-known Wharton-bred blogger is serial entrepreneur Josh Kopelman. Kopelman's Redeye VC weaves together reflections on his career with his analysis on the latest developments in the venture-capital world. [Learn more; read the "Get it Started!" article on Kopelman, Take Your Fouls]. The name is a winking acknowledgement to the amount of time that Kopelman spends on airplanes. Though he's based in Philadelphia, he typically invests in companies on the West Coast.
A recent Kopelman post, for example, rued the number of young entrepreneurs who seem obsessed with building ventures solely in hopes of selling them to Google or Yahoo. After toting up the puny number of acquisitions by those web giants, Kopelman dismissed that kind of thinking.
"An exit opportunity only exists if you build a company that has differentiated technology, a strong team, offers customers real value, demonstrates traction in the marketplace, and/or solves a real need for the acquirer," he wrote. "You can't build a company to sell it—I've never seen it work. If you are playing the odds for a quick flip to Google or Yahoo, buy a lottery ticket."
Vivake Gupta, who graduated with his MBA in May, mostly blogs about business, too. His company, Lab49, sells financial-services software. He and his co-founders started their blog as way to publicize their firm. "The more it gets read, the more people know about Lab49," he points out.
As employees have joined Lab49, the founders have invited them to contribute, too. They've found that the sorts of people they aimed to hire—software engineers and other technophiles—often had blogs of their own and were happy to roll their efforts into the company blog.
This "blogging by committee" has led to an unexpected benefit, deepening and re-enforcing Lab49's corporate culture. Gupta and his co-founders, for example, encourage openness and the frank exchange of ideas. The blog has become a real-world manifestation of that, with the founders letting employees write without prior approval or internal review.
"Our one rule is don't release client confidential information," he says. "Other than that, we let people write about everything. The people we hire are intelligent and responsible enough to produce content that isn't egregious."
Personally, Gupta has found that blogging helps to clarify his thinking. "It definitely forces you to think more deeply than just pondering in the shower," he says.
Like Gupta, Ravi Mishra, a junior in the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology program, a dual degree offering from Wharton and Penn's engineering school, writes mostly about technology. He calls his blog 3000 Miles of Virtual Insanity, underscoring the distance—both physical and psychic—between his home in Silicon Valley and Wharton's in Philadelphia.
Mishra's style resembles that of take-no-prisoners political blogger. He loves to play the contrarian, blasting away at the giants of the tech world—Microsoft, Google, Apple, you name it—for their shortsightedness and, at times, half-baked products. If Lab49's blog is a flashlight, illuminating a specific technological niche and one company's role in it, Mishra's is a flamethrower.
In one of his recent posts, for example, he chided Google for failing to improve its basic search engine, which remains the product that most people seek from it. "Like many Silicon Valley titans with a once-groundbreaking product, Google has chosen to diversify their business rather than focus on what makes them good," he writes. "Their basic offering hasn't really changed in 8 years, and it's now ripe for replacing."
Mishra
doesn't expect Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to read
his critique and modify their strategy. Rather, he says that he writes
to spark conversations, even arguments, with his friends, family members
and the occasional person who just happens on his site. "I have
fun putting a spin on the news and getting reaction," he says. "If
I'm wrong on my blog, someone will call me out on it. And I definitely
enjoy taking the devil's advocate role."
His best
recent post, however, wasn't an analysis of the news, but a reflection
on how consumer-friendly the world has become, thanks to the Web.
"How much do we get for free in today's world that we paid for just a decade (or less) ago? Contacting relatives on the East Coast (or across the pond) took a phone call or, at the least, a letter… The Web has drastically altered the value we assign to a vast majority of services. There's free wifi in Mountain View and London and coffee shops; free music and movies on the internet; free text messages, emails, and calls… The question really is what are people still willing to pay for? Most startups can't come up with a coherent answer…I mean, iTunes does quite a bit of business, but free file-sharing sites are thriving. People got a taste of free(dom) with Napster, and most never went back. And why should they?"
Laura Bennett's blog manages to blend the personal reflections—like Mishra's, though mellower—with her professional life as founder and CEO of Embrace Pet Insurance in Cleveland, Ohio. Bennett, who earned her MBA in 2003, started Embrace with fellow Wharton alum Alex Krooglik after they and two classmates won the 2003 Wharton Business Plan Competition Venture Finals with a proposal for a pet insurer.
Bennett uses the Embrace blog both to publicize the company, which started selling policies this summer, and educate people about pet insurance and animal health. She mixes informational posts with jokes and trivia about pets and their owners. A few recent nuggets:
- More than a third of pet owners have more photos of their pet than their spouse or significant other.
- Cats don't meow at other cats, only at humans.
- Cats sleep an average of 16 hours a day, more than any other mammal.
"The blog is all about communicating with people interested in pet insurance in an open and honest way," she says. "Apart from a phone call, there's no better way for people to gauge your honesty and sincerity."
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Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology