Add to iTunesGilPenchina - CEO, Wikia
Introduction
On this episode of Read/Write Talk I sit down with Gil Penchina, the CEO of Wikia and a very active angel investor. We talk a little about his role at Wikia and how he got there. But I think some of the most interesting conversation comes from his advice for entrepreneurs and some of the things he’s learned looking at all the different deals he sees.
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Transcript
| Sean Ammirati:Gil, thanks for joining me today. I was wondering if you could start with just giving us a quick overview of how you got to Wikia?Gil Penchina: Oh! How did I get into Wikia? So funny enough I was actually an investor. A friend of mine called me up and he goes “Hey Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is working on this cool new thing and he’s raising money and what do you think? So you know, Jimmy Wales wants to do another user generated Wiki project. That sounds like a good one to me.” The Wikipedia is incredibly successful and he seems like a really great guy.” | |
| 1:03 | So, I ended up investing and along the way. A couple of months later, they called me and said, “By the way you seem to know a fair amount about community from your time at eBay. We’re thinking about trying to hire someone to run the thing. And who knew? Here I am.Sean Ammirati: Interesting. Okay, then you kind of touched on it but could you give a quick overview for people who aren’t familiar with Wikia, with what it is?
Gil Penchina: Sure. So what we are in essence is the largest Wiki project who tried to create commercial content on every topic. What our users are doing and what we’re trying to help with is we are enabling them to write organized information on every topic in every language. Today we have roughly a million pages of information on everything from caring with pets that have Diabetes to catching up on “Lost” the TV show to figuring out how to navigate the World of Warcraft. Every topic you can imagine in now 70 languages. |
| 02:09 | Sean Ammirati: So you touched on your customers on, we’ve had the CEO of WetPaint on before. Can you talk a little bit about how you relate to some of the other, how you’re different than some of the other eiki platforms out there?Gil Penchina: Uhmm, I’m not sure I know.
Sean Ammirati: Okay. Well maybe just talk a little bit then maybe about who the target, the targets users that you’re kind of co-opt and helped create this Wikia sites. Gil Penchina: Well I guess what we do is we try to make, you know, which information available on every topic. So our use is for people who care about a particular topic whether its travel or local information or how to program in Perl and people who are passionate about a topic and want to share and collaborate and build a useful guide and set of information with their peers. |
| 03:06 | Sean Ammirati: Okay and how would you decide if content, if you’re one of these people who cares about one of these topics like parole or whatever, how would you decide whether to put the content on Wikipedia or on Wikia?Gil Penchina: Well I think that’s a pretty easy one.
Sean Ammirati: Okay. Gil Penchina: For me anyway which is, you know, Wikipedia is the ultimate encyclopedia. It’s the one page reference to everything. So Wikipedia has a page on the World of Warcraft. We have 44,000 pages. Wikipedia has a page on, you know; Marvel the Comic Book Company and we have 25,000 pages on Marvel. So, Wikipedia is a great reference if you want to get a one page of information on anything. If you want to go deeper, people tend to come to us. Sean Ammirati: Okay, good. And you’re also in the search business now, correct? Gil Penchina: Yeah, that’s been a recent addition to the business. |
| 4:02 | Sean Ammirati: And you acquired Grab to that? What’s the kind of one-minute overview on or as many as is you need but on kind of what you’re trying to do in search?Gil Penchina: Let me ask you a question. When you started your website how much money did you spend the first month on technology and software?
Sean Ammirati: When we started Read/Write Talk? We actually had a grid that was part of Read/Write Web so not much. Gil Penchina: On launch? Sean Ammirati: Yeah, I mean, not even probably. I mean it was pretty straightforward but obviously, you know, I’ve been part of other web start-ups and yeah it’s relatively inexpensive to start a website. Gil Penchina: So I was investing, ten years ago, it was $2 to 5 million to start a website. And not it’s 2 to 5 hundred dollars except in search where you still spend millions in dollars just to get the basic infrastructure up and running in order to start thinking about some cool new idea for search. Our goal in a nutshell needs to get the cost of launching a search engine down to 500 dollars. |
| 5:08 | Sean Ammirati: How are you guys, I mean, are there other areas that you or other opportunities like that that you see?Gil Penchina: I don’t know. I mean we’re very customer driven, right? So we talk about and work out on a lot of projects and we wait until customers get excited. And when we hear a lot of interest, we trace it. So, you know, we’ve been opportunistic I guess in that way. It was a luxury that both Jimmy and I have been around a long time and able to raise quite a lot money that we consider pursuing multiple projects. But we don’t go out and say “Hey we have this really smart idea.” We go out and we say, “Hey there’s some problems.” And how passionate are people about helping us solve these problems.
Sean Ammirati: And you acquired Grab from the looks by other. Are their acquisitions that you think are kind of other areas you would like augment your sites with the acquisition? |
| 06:04 | Gil Penchina: Uhmm, I mean we’re still looking in search there. There’s an interesting technologies that we think makes sense and that we can then turn around like we did with Grab and make available to the open source community. So they are proprietary technologies that we could be open sourced in it in order for search to work. You know we partnered with some people as well who are open sourcing technology to make search easier and more transparent for people. So it may not have to acquisitions but we’re always willing to listen to a pitch.Sean Ammirati: Okay. And then, I guess the question is that you have the search arm and you have the Wiki arm. If someone asked you kind of what the overall mission of Wikia was, how would describe it?
Gil Penchina: Yeah that is, I would be lying if I said there were cut up synergies between the two. They’re really pretty different businesses. I think what we’re focused on really is this mission driven content of making information free and making services that are transparent and open. |
| 07:10 | And we think that search is not particularly transparent right now if you can’t see how people decide ways with what the results are and you can’t get access to stay on the levels of the software today for it. And similarly content, we think there are a lot of content businesses that are copyrighted and that they’re not transparent as to whether the writer has some economic interest to what they wrote or not. And in those projects that we’re trying to do is get good information that is unbiased and transparent to people.Sean Ammirati: That is actually quite a helpful and obviously then I’m just going to think about what are the areas there might be that lack of transparency. Let’s shift a little bit to talk about yourself. So you’ve had quite a successful career on and shaping the Internet starting that on eBay and also been a pretty active and looks like a successful Angel Investor. What are the things in your career that you’re most proud of? |
| 08:14 | Gil Penchina: Uhmm, being able to go home and see my kids everyday? You know, seriously I mean the value in all consuming place and trying to find some balance here has probably been as promising. That I’m able to try to spend time with my family and work on things that incredibly interesting whether at eBay or Wikia or investments that go on things Linkedin. Working on consumer services that lots of people like is something I’m very passionate about because you get a common feedback. Most of it negative usually. When people are telling you what’s wrong with your service. So over time I’ve come to learn that if people aren’t complaining about what I’m doing it means I’m not working on something very interesting. |
| 09:04 | Sean Ammirati: Interesting. What’s the, that could potentially be your answer. But what are the kind of big take aways that you’ve learned from watching all these web starts? Any other ones like that?Gil Penchina: Been a few, right. Come up with a big idea and knocked in 50 seconds from the hosting site, been trying to do something that’s original and find something that people are passionate about. You know, I mean when I was in eBay we used to drill clip the role to half a dozen websites that when I went down, people actually cared enough to call the media and screen. You’d see that noise in the New York Times? eBay went down. Hotmail went down. UTrade went down, right? But there are 5,000 other websites that go down everyday and nobody cares.
Sean Ammirati: Uhm-hmm. Gil Penchina: Right now Wikia is one of those “nobody cares” sites and I need to fix that. Sean Ammirati: What’s the best advice that you’ve ever received from somebody else? Gil Penchina: Wow! Oh, because I get a lot of advice. |
| 10:07 | Sean Ammirati: Which I think you said earlier is a good thing.Gil Penchina: Yes. No! It’s a tremendous thing. What was the best advice I’ve ever got? I’m not sure I have a good answer for that one.
Sean Ammirati: Okay. So let’s play it the other way then. So you’re, to just kind of wind the clock back to the start of your career, what advice would you offer to young aspiring entrepreneurs? Gil Penchina: Oh, that’s much easier. [Laughter] Gil Penchina: It helps a lot if you know where you want to go ten years out because you can spend ten years building these fields to get there. Sean Ammirati: Uhm-hmm. Gil Penchina: So, you know, things has the hand of the curb. If you know you want to be an entrepreneur, spend some time in a medium or big sized company to see what its like when you get there. You know, figure out what are the range or skills you need in understanding finance to marketing, and technology if you’re in our sector anyway. |
| 11:09 | Sean Ammirati: Uh hmm.Gil Penchina: Now, and go get functional experience in those areas. Or you know conversely do it the go games and like with our way of interest. Dive in and don’t give up. But you got to figure out what you need to know because whether in the bank trouble saying if it doesn’t like so good which we’re getting so much advice along the way and so much of it was helpful. And there’s just too many things to learn.
Sean Ammirati: And actually I think Doug talked on that if that’s to where you want to and know where you want to go 10 years from now. If you knew somebody who wanted to be where you were, what do you think are those skills that are the things that I need to know? Gil Penchina: You know, the funny one is everyone talks about the hard spills, right? On the basic understanding of technology and engineering and experience working with consumer products, marketing and some understanding of finance and sort of how world works and venture capital was, is always helpful. |
| 12:12 | But at the end of the day, what I really think about, what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur and I can honestly say I’ve never been one. So I’m faking it. It’s really about selling all the time. It’s about building a vision, selling the vision, convincing investor to some customers and avoid using “you and other bloggers” that it’s a cool vision that everybody wants to be a part of.Sean Ammirati: Uh hmm.
Gil Penchina: If you can really build up a compelling story that people believe in, you can’t lose. Sean Ammirati: So just kind of wrapping up now, there’s just a couple of minutes left here. Just a couple of more questions on Wikia, one of them is that what do you think, as you’re out talking to Bloggers and venture capitalists and customers, what do you think are the areas where maybe Wikia is most misunderstood? What would you like to correct that people tend to misinterpret out in the marketplace? |
| 13:14 | Gil Penchina: So many things.[Laughter]
Sean Ammirati: Well you’ve got an open platform here so – [Laughter] Gil Penchina: Yeah, it’s good. Well I always have to start with “We’re not called Wikipedia.” It takes people a while to figure that one out. I think the majority of our readership doesn’t realize that they can write. They just think that, you know, I have a team of editors who writes stuff for them. So I think, you know, explaining to people what our Wikia is and the notion of collaboration and sharing. And in answer to that certain interview frankly we spend most of our trying to explain to them that we’re mission driven first and traffic driven second. And it’s been a while they wrap their heads around that. But, you know, we’ve been able to find investors who are willing to invest in both. |
| 14:07 | Sean Ammirati: Yeah I mean and clearly in Amazon which, you know, in terms of investors, it’s interesting that they were able to buy into that go along with that. What do you think is your business model though? How do you think you will make money these sites?Gil Penchina: I think, certainly on the content side, it’s an advertising business. We get very significant traffic every month and if we, eventually we got around the high links and sales people. You know we would sell for a lot of advertising without too much trouble. Right now we use federated media to sell this for us. On the search side, we don’t know and frankly we’re not too worried about it because we think that if we enable this explosion to new ideas and innovation and mash-ups on search technology. If there’s a lot of people who are using it, we don’t, the money will come and it’ll come from any one of the number of certain usual suspects in the open source world from consulting the premium software to selling T-shirts and mugs. And we have the luxury to wait and find out. |
| 15:18 | But then why build a business model when you don’t have any customers? Get some customers and then figure out the business model.Sean Ammirati: Cool. Well, I’d really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. And thank you for listening to another episode of Read/Write Talk - The people behind the web. |
