This is getting a bit out of control. Yesterday, I wrote something in response to this post by Joe Stump:
Each of these entrepreneurs have done something great. Naturally, it would make sense that their collective talents could “save Yahoo!” but that’s far from the truth. In fact, many of these entrepreneurs have had many failures in the past and not every one of their ideas was a billion dollar idea. Asking that person from Instagram to lead Yahoo! Photo doesn’t guarantee its success. Gruber can’t run Yahoo! News. Maybe he can but you just don’t know that. Gruber’s analysis works well in what he does but applying his style of reporting to gossip news or the obituaries would be insane. It wouldn’t work.
I guess no one feels like I do.
I’d fully support Joe Stump as CEO of Yahoo and all the moves he intends to make — even though I’m not sure Yahoo could afford Twitter or Square in its current weakened state, let alone both.
Not entirely serious, obviously — particularly his suggestion at the end regarding yours truly — but some of his ideas are undeniably on a solid foundation. How did Instagram eat Flickr’s lunch, for example?
Thank god Gruber took a conservative stance to this idiocy. Sure, I get that Joe is kidding but a lot of people, mostly those who suck the teet of every tweet and post from every bay area cool kid, have publicly stated, “You have my vote!” It’s absolutely sickening.
What’s up my ass? I’ll tell you.
It’s that I honestly have no idea how guys like Kevin Rose become famous. I GET that they have done great things but, to many, Digg was a failure and Revision 3 didn’t fare too well either and Pownce was killed off. Milk is just getting started but Kevin has my respect as an entrepreneur, not as someone I want to ogle over and kiss his ass.
I went through a girly fanboy phase for 4 months when I first moved to SF but I got over that very fast. What’s insane is that there are guys who run huge companies that take big risks and rock it. There are guys who we don’t give an ounce of credit to. There are the guys who run Verizon and IBM and Apple and ARM and Motorola who have had missteps but no more than guys like Kevin Rose or Joe Stump or Mark Zuckerburg. The problem with the CEO of Motorola is that, when he screws up, shareholders get pissed. When Kevin screws up, a few fanboys tweet their anger 140 characters at a time about how Digg.com has been offline for 15 mintues.
“OMFG I CAN’T DIGG THIS NEWS STORY!”
What is upsetting is that a lot of people I respect are all for Joe’s joke / rant / hostile takeover of Yahoo!. It isn’t about Joe Stump. I’m sure he’s a talented guy. Heck, he employs a few of my friends like Mager, Chris and Jay. This is beyond Joe. That blog post could have been written by any one of a few hundred people in the bay area who are cool kids and gotten the same response. Some random sys-admin for FriendFeed could have written that post and received a similar response.
I am not jealous of the attention these guys get. I’m simply confused as to why anyone that doesn’t rent an apartment in San Francisco, didn’t go to stanford and didn’t work at Paypal / Apple / Facebook / Twitter, can’t qualify as a “cool kid”.
It’s frustrating that I have grown significantly as a person, entrepreneur and technologist in the past 12 months at my current company yet my street cred, klout, twitter interactions, emails and Facebook interactions with “friends” has dropped 80% simply because I left the startup world and moved to New Hampshire. I’m the same person I was when I left except now I work at a large company and don’t live in San Francisco. This means that I’m suddenly not cool, interesting or worth talking to.
That’s what bothers me.
I’m going to continue doing what I do and working on myself just as these guys in SF do each and every day. I sometimes just don’t get how paying insane rent in SF suddenly makes you qualified to run Yahoo!.
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