Dan Cohen: Hi, Sean. I’m Dan Cohen. I’m the CEO of Pageflakes, the community personalized homepage.

Sean Ammirati: Dan, So, you’ve been in the personalized start page business for a long time. Do you want to just tell us where you were before Pageflakes and what you brought to the table coming there?

Dan Cohen: Sure. This is my third startup. I’ve been the CEO of, and somewhere in the middle there, I was at Google where I led personalized products which included iGoogle, their personalized page. Then, I went on to lead My Yahoo which, to date, is the largest personalized page out there. Then, I had this wonderful opportunity to come to Pageflakes. I work with some really talented entrepreneurs and sort of changed the game of what has been a fairly stagnant product category for the last 10 years.

Dan Cohen: Exactly. I want to run the number one largest personalized page on the web as I’m sure we’ll talk about. There’s just a lot of unique things about what we do that’s just different than what has been done before.

Sean Ammirati: Sure. I guess two times maybe.

Dan Cohen: Yes.

Sean Ammirati: Two different times.

Dan Cohen: Exactly.

Dan Cohen: If you look at the situation - working at Yahoo, leading My Yahoo - I’ve been an entrepreneur twice before here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I have a startup company that has some really talented young entrepreneurs from Germany and Europe as well as Bangladesh, and the opportunity to take what I’ve learned as both a startup CEO as well as working on personalized pages to take an 8-year firm, Benchmark Europe now Benchmark Capital investing, in it.

It was just like a dream job for me, and an opportunity to work in a startup where you can obviously innovate a lot more quickly and you could execute a lot more quickly and be a lot more disruptive than you can in a large company setting, which for a guy like me is ideal.

My personal passion, of course, was trying to make this kind of product be very mass market. I worked on the new version of My Yahoo which is still in beta. A lot of what I tried to do there and I’m also trying to do here is to reach a new audience for a personalized page and it’s working very well. We’ll talk about that shortly. So, this sort of mass market, easy-to-use, automatic personalization is a big part of what Pageflakes is doing.

We have 133,000 Pagecasts that people have basically put their pages together on various interests. They’re publishing it and sharing it with other people, which is something that you never did with a personalized page before. So, those things in general were just some unique compelling things, and I thought that would redefine the category, and it looks like they did.

But can you give us a sense what are some really popular ones? How far down the proverbial long tail did they go? Just talk a little bit about this new offering that is somewhat distinct to Pageflakes.

So, we suffer from that like everybody else, but yes the broad things, of course, are going to be things like sports or technology. If you go to pageflakes.com/dancohen, you’ll see what I call Blogalicious, which includes Read/WriteWeb and a bunch of others. It’s like a dashboard for all the Web 2.0/technology blogs that are out there. So that’s pretty popular. A lot of people look at that because I’ve already put it together.

Sean Ammirati: Great. These people that are doing the Pagecasting, what’s the incentive for them? Is it just to get that content out there? Are they making money on these? What do your Pagecasters look like if that’s how you would describe them?

Now, we’re learning a lot about them. They’re putting their pictures there. They’re telling us where they live and a lot of other things. I have to say that from just culturally, we’ve got…I look everyday at the people that are coming in. I see people from Saudi Arabia. I see a pastor’s wife from Canada. I see a graduate student in California. I see pretty much all walks of life. It’s just incredible.

So most of these people have deep interests or deep commitments or deep passions with something. They’ve spent the time to collect something that they use everyday to consume information about their favorite topic, e.g. adopting children. They feel that other people could benefit from that. That’s exactly what a lot of those people are looking for right now. It’s just the notion of disseminating, sharing and also finding other people that share their interests, which Pageflakes enables you to do.

Dan Cohen: It isn’t. A lot of that has to do with the fact that with a personalized page - and this is a challenge, I think, for a good personalized page - users don’t want to give up screen real estate on a personalized page for a display ad. That’s different. You go to CNN.com. You expect to see an ad for a pickup truck or something on the side. At Pageflakes, if I were to take a 1024 screen and put an ad on there, it will be like 30% of the screen real estate.

Sean Ammirati: Yes. Everybody seems to go back to that holy grail - the search monetization. At least, it’s part of the strategy.

Dan Cohen: You bet.

Dan Cohen: I think that on the surface, it looks like a very crowded space. I think 2005-2006, that area was what I would call sort of the era of the personalized page startup, or literally, there was like…when I was working at Yahoo, I’ve been identified with 20 personalized pages.

Sean Ammirati: Sure.

In terms of competition and differentiation, I worked in Google and I worked in Yahoo, and that’s my competition. I had no interest in punching another startup in the face. I’ve got bigger fish to fry. My Yahoo has 50 million users. That’s a very different kind of competitor. Two Davids don’t need duke it out. It’s David and Goliath, right?

So, that’s kind of how I see it. I think that, really, that’s the kinds of users. Yahoo and Google both have something that no startup has, which is a giant funnel of traffic from their core businesses. You go to Yahoo.com, there’s a button on there that says My Yahoo. 400 million people are going to see that. You go to Google.com and they have Personalized Page in the upper right-hand corner. There’s a link there. So, hundreds of millions of people see that. We don’t have that luxury. So, those are the main kinds of things that I think about rather than feature wars with other startups and things like that.

Dan Cohen: We don’t. I think a lot of the reason why that is because we think there has been some distortion in the marketplace about user counts, particularly in some of the startups in the space. When I worked at Yahoo, I sold ads to big companies. They would use independent auditing to determine user size, and it was not Alexa. It was not self-proclaimed counts. It was comScore and Nielsen, right?

You’re going to buy a giant ad or do a sponsorship with My Yahoo, you’re not going to take their word for their user count. So, I just prefer to play by those rules and comScore starts to see us bubbling up pretty soon, then you’ll have your answer.

Dan Cohen: Of course.

Sean Ammirati: I’m sure I’m not the only one who has asked you that question.

Dan Cohen: You bet.

Sean Ammirati: OK. I think it’s a great insight on Pageflakes specifically. One thing also that I’d like to capture in this. It’s just a little bit on your view on the Web in general. Because as Read/Write Talk hopefully grows some popularity, we not only just talk to you about your businesses, although we want to make sure we cover that, but also talk to thought leaders about what’s going on in the space in general.

So one of the things I’m curious about is, as you look out into the Web in general and you certainly have a great track record being at two of the biggest players in the space and a multiple serial entrepreneur - what are the other things beyond the personalized start pages and the social networking stuff that you’re really excited about right now?

Obviously, advertising dollars are shifting to the Web in droves. I think that advertisers are finding it tough to figure out what to do with those dollars. Is it just to buy keywords on Google or what else should they do? They need to figure out how to make that effective. They’re very used to ‘you have a certain number of eyeballs on a TV show’, and that’s sort of maturing.

Again I feel generic saying this stuff, but the user generated content - the ReadWriteWeb, to use your term for it - it’s a reality that has happened. You see statistics at this conference that 50% of what teenagers are consuming, I think, is like stuff that they have generated, that kind of thing. It’s very different than even 5 years ago. So, that’s huge.

So, those are sort of the macro things that go on there. I think that most of the startups in this space including Pageflakes are just trying to figure out how do you harness those big trends and turn it into: (a) a product that someone’s going to use, and (b) how are you going to make money out of it.

Dan Cohen: I don’t think there’s a magic formula. I think that most people that you talk to in entrepreneurship know that obviously things like tenacity and drive are very important. They have to be part of your makeup if you want to do something like this.

In retrospect, I think maybe spending a couple of years at a big company first may have short-circuited some of the things that took me several years to figure out and learn. I think you can also get very complacent there. I think the people that sort of come out of school and whether they have an MBA or Masters degree, undergraduate, go to work in a big company and stay there for a very long time. At some point, you’re going to lose your useful energy and drive.

I also do think that there’s some truth to the ‘what time of life are you in’ when you start to pursue entrepreneurial things. I think it’s very difficult now that I’m married and have a daughter. It’s much different than when I was 21 years old. For most people, it’s tough later in life to become an entrepreneur after working 15 years at Megacorp.

The last thing I’ll say there is there’s no substitute for making mistakes and learning. I’m still doing that; both of those things. Hopefully, I’m doing it a lot less on my third company.

Dan Cohen: Cool.

Sean Ammirati: I really appreciate your time.

Dan Cohen: Thanks, Sean. Great to talk with you.