[00:00.000 --> 00:09.380]  A website called FuckedCompany.com, and people suddenly got great pleasure out of reading about the downfall of mankind.
[00:10.660 --> 00:19.640]  75,000 people receive this email newsletter, and thanks for waiting to hear this guy speak, and I appreciate his patience and your patience.
[00:20.140 --> 00:22.260]  Pud of FuckedCompany.com.
[00:30.050 --> 00:30.690]  Hi.
[00:32.310 --> 00:34.750]  I live four blocks from here, so this was cool.
[00:36.750 --> 00:51.710]  It says in the thing that I'm going to talk about experiences setting up and maintaining a popular website for corporate rumors, how does he handle confidentiality of rumor mongers, avoid lawsuits, provide custom software to drive his site, and make money from it.
[00:52.330 --> 00:53.450]  So I shall do so.
[00:55.190 --> 00:57.290]  I'm going to... I'll give like a...
[00:59.270 --> 01:11.390]  Well, let me give you like the super quick overview of what FuckedCompany.com is, and then I'll go more into detail of some of the other things I do and the various ways that I am able to squeeze money out of it.
[01:11.630 --> 01:18.490]  And also I'll talk like a little bit about my history and where I come from and where I think it's going.
[01:21.270 --> 01:23.790]  A quick overview of FuckedCompany.com.
[01:24.810 --> 01:26.870]  It's a... it's a...
[01:27.410 --> 01:29.910]  It's... I think it's ranked number 900 right now on Alexa.
[01:30.510 --> 01:31.110]  It's a...
[01:32.150 --> 01:33.550]  It started out as a game.
[01:33.830 --> 01:36.850]  It was a website where you could bet on which Internet companies were going to go out of business.
[01:37.910 --> 01:38.270]  And...
[01:38.910 --> 01:40.190]  It sort of started out as a joke.
[01:40.330 --> 01:45.370]  And I made it just one weekend, like I'm sure everyone in here just makes a website in a weekend.
[01:46.610 --> 01:48.770]  It generates about $70,000 a month now.
[01:50.790 --> 01:52.250]  And... and so that's what I'll talk about.
[01:52.990 --> 01:53.650]  How so?
[01:54.490 --> 01:56.670]  And... and... well let me give you... let me start a little with my history.
[01:58.690 --> 01:59.090]  Uh...
[01:59.090 --> 02:04.210]  I'll do a quick gloss over my history because I know nobody really cares, but some people might ask me later.
[02:04.290 --> 02:04.930]  So I'll just answer it now.
[02:06.530 --> 02:06.930]  Um...
[02:06.930 --> 02:08.230]  Real quick, uh...
[02:08.230 --> 02:10.450]  When I... I grew up right outside of Washington, D.C.
[02:10.490 --> 02:10.870]  in Maryland.
[02:11.170 --> 02:16.890]  And my first introduction to this whole sort of world was, uh... from BBSing, probably like a lot of people here.
[02:17.370 --> 02:20.690]  Um... and I got really into pirate BBSes and stuff like that.
[02:20.930 --> 02:25.410]  Never much of a hacker or freak or more of just really into, like, pirating.
[02:25.410 --> 02:28.270]  You know, to the point where you're, like, downloading games that you'll never play.
[02:28.430 --> 02:30.730]  And, like, utilities that you don't even know what they do.
[02:30.910 --> 02:33.170]  But, like, you know they're real expensive, so you download them anyway.
[02:34.370 --> 02:38.410]  Um... and then I... and then I... I wrote a, uh...
[02:38.410 --> 02:42.450]  And then I... I started a bulletin board, um... called The Bearded Clam.
[02:43.790 --> 02:48.130]  And, uh... that was in... I guess that was in 88 or 89.
[02:48.230 --> 02:49.770]  I'm... I'm 26 years old now.
[02:50.370 --> 02:51.990]  Just, you know, for reference.
[02:51.990 --> 02:55.390]  I... I... so I guess it was, like, 88 or 89 when I started my bulletin board.
[02:56.150 --> 02:57.290]  Um... and it got pretty big.
[02:57.490 --> 03:00.330]  It was in 301, area code, if anybody knew it.
[03:01.190 --> 03:03.390]  And, uh... it... it got really popular and really big.
[03:03.530 --> 03:08.050]  And when I say... it... it was probably one of the biggest board... pirate boards in the... in the area.
[03:08.230 --> 03:13.310]  But, of course, speaking to scale, you know, big bulletin board was, like, 300 users.
[03:13.550 --> 03:17.310]  You know, and that was huge, because your phone line was busy all the time and... and everything.
[03:18.490 --> 03:19.810]  Where... interesting side note.
[03:20.210 --> 03:21.670]  I totally knew that it was illegal.
[03:22.150 --> 03:25.110]  Much like, you know, Napster knew that it was illegal.
[03:25.250 --> 03:28.330]  The thing is, when you have 300 people, there's really no way to justify it.
[03:28.370 --> 03:33.890]  But when you have 6 million people, you can totally try to, like, you know, afford lawyers and stuff to say that what you're doing is okay.
[03:34.170 --> 03:35.630]  Which, in the end, they lost anyway.
[03:35.630 --> 03:37.870]  So, um...
[03:37.870 --> 03:39.630]  So, quickly, uh...
[03:40.110 --> 03:41.690]  First, uh... Internet...
[03:41.690 --> 03:42.670]  I mean, for... well...
[03:42.670 --> 03:45.330]  I had been doing IRC and, you know, email and stuff for a while.
[03:45.450 --> 03:47.170]  But first web experience was when I went to college.
[03:47.170 --> 03:47.790]  I was a freshman.
[03:48.070 --> 03:49.790]  In 1994.
[03:53.130 --> 03:53.730]  Thank you.
[03:54.570 --> 03:55.370]  In 1994.
[03:56.670 --> 03:57.470]  And, uh...
[03:57.470 --> 03:58.570]  This, uh...
[03:58.570 --> 04:02.690]  This girl who I was, like, sort of dating, like, at the time, was like, uh...
[04:02.690 --> 04:04.430]  Have you ever heard of Mosaic?
[04:04.730 --> 04:05.570]  Like, it's this really cool thing.
[04:05.610 --> 04:06.430]  And I had never heard of it.
[04:06.510 --> 04:09.570]  Which is why I have the utmost respect for, like, the four girls that are here.
[04:09.810 --> 04:10.730]  Because that's cool.
[04:10.830 --> 04:14.070]  Because a girl is the one who initially showed me, uh...
[04:14.070 --> 04:14.730]  This whole big thing.
[04:15.990 --> 04:16.390]  Um...
[04:16.390 --> 04:19.190]  Anyway, my first reaction when seeing it...
[04:20.070 --> 04:20.470]  Was...
[04:20.470 --> 04:20.970]  And this...
[04:20.970 --> 04:22.690]  This is what sort of drove me up to...
[04:22.690 --> 04:23.390]  To now.
[04:23.610 --> 04:25.390]  Was, wow, it's just like...
[04:26.390 --> 04:26.790]  BBSing.
[04:27.310 --> 04:30.130]  Except when you are running a BBS...
[04:30.670 --> 04:31.470]  Pretty much.
[04:31.470 --> 04:33.150]  Except for probably most of the people in this room.
[04:33.470 --> 04:33.830]  You were...
[04:33.830 --> 04:35.190]  You were pretty much, uh...
[04:35.190 --> 04:36.290]  Bound by area codes.
[04:36.470 --> 04:36.590]  You know?
[04:36.670 --> 04:37.050]  Unless...
[04:37.050 --> 04:39.950]  And everyone's doing 950s and freaking and all that stuff.
[04:40.570 --> 04:40.970]  Which...
[04:40.970 --> 04:41.850]  You know, like...
[04:41.850 --> 04:43.210]  The more, like, leet, like...
[04:43.210 --> 04:44.290]  Cool your board was.
[04:44.370 --> 04:45.790]  Like, the more long distance users you had.
[04:45.890 --> 04:46.430]  But in general.
[04:46.650 --> 04:48.230]  If you're running, uh...
[04:48.230 --> 04:48.570]  Like a...
[04:48.570 --> 04:49.110]  Like a...
[04:49.110 --> 04:49.970]  You know...
[04:49.970 --> 04:52.170]  Like a site that specializes in, you know...
[04:52.170 --> 04:53.450]  This kind of game.
[04:53.750 --> 04:54.970]  And you're in the 301 area code.
[04:55.090 --> 04:56.710]  And there's another site that's specializing in the...
[04:56.710 --> 04:58.030]  Same exact thing.
[04:58.230 --> 04:59.310]  But they're, like, on...
[04:59.310 --> 05:00.610]  You know, the west coast.
[05:01.190 --> 05:02.410]  And a different area code.
[05:02.690 --> 05:03.870]  You are not competing with each other.
[05:04.350 --> 05:04.750]  Because...
[05:04.750 --> 05:06.850]  Most people will just stick to...
[05:06.850 --> 05:08.570]  Calls that are either local or...
[05:08.570 --> 05:09.270]  Or near them.
[05:10.050 --> 05:10.450]  Or...
[05:10.450 --> 05:12.270]  You know, there's a lot of other options with that.
[05:13.830 --> 05:14.230]  Um...
[05:14.230 --> 05:14.730]  So anyway.
[05:15.550 --> 05:15.950]  Like...
[05:15.950 --> 05:17.090]  But when I saw, uh...
[05:17.090 --> 05:17.290]  Mosaic.
[05:17.490 --> 05:18.430]  I said, it's just like BBSing.
[05:18.530 --> 05:19.690]  Except now, instead of...
[05:20.450 --> 05:20.850]  One...
[05:20.850 --> 05:21.810]  You know...
[05:22.570 --> 05:22.970]  Uh...
[05:22.970 --> 05:24.750]  Online bookstore in every...
[05:24.750 --> 05:25.590]  Area code.
[05:25.630 --> 05:26.550]  You just need one.
[05:26.810 --> 05:27.090]  You know?
[05:27.090 --> 05:28.110]  Because it doesn't matter where you are.
[05:28.270 --> 05:28.470]  Because...
[05:28.470 --> 05:29.650]  You know, everything is all graphical.
[05:29.870 --> 05:30.270]  And the same thing.
[05:30.370 --> 05:31.570]  Which is where BBS was...
[05:31.970 --> 05:32.990]  BBS was going with...
[05:32.990 --> 05:34.930]  RIP scripts and graphics and all that stuff.
[05:35.810 --> 05:36.210]  Um...
[05:36.210 --> 05:38.270]  But of course, the exact opposite thing happened.
[05:38.970 --> 05:39.370]  And...
[05:39.370 --> 05:40.190]  You know, there were...
[05:40.190 --> 05:41.230]  30 online bookstores.
[05:41.790 --> 05:42.010]  And...
[05:42.010 --> 05:43.730]  10 online pet stores.
[05:43.950 --> 05:45.350]  And there was Flues and Beans.
[05:45.550 --> 05:46.450]  And, you know...
[05:46.450 --> 05:48.210]  All these companies that sort of did the same thing.
[05:49.290 --> 05:49.690]  Um...
[05:49.690 --> 05:51.050]  And I'll come back to them in a moment.
[05:51.410 --> 05:53.370]  Just to finish up the history thing real quick.
[05:53.950 --> 05:54.210]  Uh...
[05:54.210 --> 05:54.830]  After college.
[05:55.450 --> 05:55.850]  Worked...
[05:55.850 --> 05:56.510]  Um...
[05:56.510 --> 05:56.990]  As a...
[05:56.990 --> 05:58.950]  As a senior consultant for Booz Allen.
[05:59.110 --> 05:59.450]  Which is...
[05:59.450 --> 06:01.370]  Was funny because I had never done it before.
[06:01.650 --> 06:01.850]  But...
[06:01.850 --> 06:04.310]  Like, if you could do Internet stuff, you were like a senior consultant.
[06:05.070 --> 06:05.470]  Um...
[06:05.470 --> 06:06.390]  Because it was 97.
[06:06.830 --> 06:07.830]  And, you know, they wanted to...
[06:07.830 --> 06:08.790]  They basically needed that.
[06:09.410 --> 06:09.790]  Um...
[06:09.790 --> 06:10.670]  Did that for about a year.
[06:10.810 --> 06:12.270]  Then moved to New York.
[06:12.450 --> 06:13.190]  Where I live now.
[06:13.830 --> 06:14.090]  Um...
[06:14.090 --> 06:14.950]  Actually, I'm a drummer.
[06:15.110 --> 06:15.750]  I moved here to...
[06:15.750 --> 06:16.470]  To play music.
[06:17.110 --> 06:17.430]  Uh...
[06:17.430 --> 06:17.730]  And...
[06:17.730 --> 06:18.350]  And got caught up.
[06:18.450 --> 06:20.050]  Of course, you know, being a programmer.
[06:21.590 --> 06:21.950]  Um...
[06:21.950 --> 06:24.650]  There's better money in programming generally than being a drummer.
[06:25.290 --> 06:26.510]  So, I, uh...
[06:26.510 --> 06:28.670]  Worked for a web shop called Think New Ideas.
[06:28.910 --> 06:29.870]  The owner of which...
[06:30.730 --> 06:33.290]  And the reason I worked there is because my boss was Adam Curry.
[06:33.390 --> 06:35.710]  The guy from MTV with the hair and stuff.
[06:36.510 --> 06:36.870]  Um...
[06:36.870 --> 06:37.510]  Which was kinda cool.
[06:38.230 --> 06:38.470]  Uh...
[06:38.470 --> 06:38.790]  Anyway.
[06:39.330 --> 06:40.910]  So, that is where...
[06:40.910 --> 06:43.170]  A lot of times people ask me, you know, Where did you get so cynical?
[06:43.310 --> 06:44.650]  Or how did you decide to do all this stuff?
[06:44.650 --> 06:45.770]  Or whatever with FuckedCompany.
[06:45.950 --> 06:46.810]  And the other things I'll...
[06:46.810 --> 06:47.110]  I'll get into.
[06:47.590 --> 06:50.530]  And a lot of it was when I was at Think New Ideas.
[06:50.530 --> 06:51.130]  This web shop.
[06:51.270 --> 06:52.450]  It's just like every other web shop.
[06:52.670 --> 06:53.710]  You're Razorfish.
[06:53.970 --> 06:54.830]  You're agency.com.
[06:54.890 --> 06:55.290]  All the other ones.
[06:55.370 --> 06:59.330]  And I'm just, like, you know, guy sitting in cubicle programming.
[07:00.330 --> 07:00.730]  Um...
[07:00.730 --> 07:03.850]  And I remember one of my first jobs there.
[07:04.230 --> 07:05.710]  I was a programmer, but I was all...
[07:05.710 --> 07:06.830]  They also called me a technical producer.
[07:07.890 --> 07:08.210]  Because...
[07:08.890 --> 07:09.210]  Um...
[07:09.210 --> 07:10.850]  What that meant was...
[07:10.850 --> 07:13.310]  In addition to programming, I had to, uh...
[07:13.310 --> 07:13.550]  I...
[07:13.550 --> 07:15.990]  I was sort of in charge of, like, pricing things out.
[07:16.110 --> 07:16.510]  Like, technically.
[07:16.710 --> 07:18.530]  Like, how much is it gonna cost to do X and Y?
[07:18.950 --> 07:20.230]  How much should we charge the client?
[07:20.370 --> 07:21.470]  You know, how many hours is it gonna take?
[07:21.870 --> 07:22.270]  So...
[07:22.810 --> 07:25.350]  My first week on the job at Think New Ideas.
[07:25.370 --> 07:30.290]  I sit down and the first job they give me is they say, Okay, um...
[07:30.290 --> 07:32.630]  Avon.com was one of the first clients we had.
[07:33.170 --> 07:34.210]  Like, the Avon lady.
[07:34.210 --> 07:34.790]  That Avon.
[07:34.970 --> 07:35.690]  And, uh...
[07:35.690 --> 07:42.770]  And they go, okay, Avon wants a form on their website that you fill out the form and click a button and it sends an email.
[07:43.630 --> 07:47.470]  Which, like, any programmer can write in, like, three lines of code.
[07:47.670 --> 07:48.810]  In, like, five seconds.
[07:49.510 --> 07:54.050]  And you probably wouldn't even write it because you've probably already written it a million times and you just copy it from something else you've written.
[07:55.490 --> 07:55.810]  Um...
[07:55.810 --> 07:58.810]  Well at the time my...my billing rate was, you know, whatever the rate...
[07:59.610 --> 08:05.890]  Not...I didn't make much money at all but my...the billing rate was like $1.50 an hour or something which is pretty standard for like a young, like, programmer.
[08:05.930 --> 08:09.410]  How much...not how much I was billing but how much they were billing the client for my time.
[08:10.070 --> 08:12.950]  Um...in the minimum...I said even though that will take about five minutes, you know.
[08:13.050 --> 08:14.290]  My billing time was $1.50.
[08:14.390 --> 08:15.810]  So I just tell the client it's gonna cost $1.50.
[08:15.810 --> 08:18.090]  Because it'll take me a few minutes and then I'll cover it.
[08:18.430 --> 08:22.370]  And so I'm telling this to the account services person who has to talk to the client.
[08:23.150 --> 08:26.050]  And she says, well, I mean, just this conversation with me right here.
[08:26.130 --> 08:26.710]  Now I'm in it.
[08:26.850 --> 08:28.030]  You know, now we've got a bill for my time.
[08:29.490 --> 08:31.990]  And, well, you know, I've got to tell this guy and that's his time.
[08:32.130 --> 08:34.550]  And it went through that whole thing and it ended up being $2,000.
[08:35.850 --> 08:38.970]  And no, no, that's... don't laugh yet because...
[08:39.390 --> 08:45.250]  Then we gave it to the account supervisor who was the one in charge of calling the client and telling them.
[08:45.850 --> 08:47.250]  And so we said, okay, it's $2,000.
[08:47.530 --> 08:49.630]  And he goes, we don't do anything for $2,000.
[08:50.070 --> 08:51.170]  Make that $20,000.
[08:51.790 --> 08:52.990]  So they charge $20,000.
[08:53.290 --> 08:54.490]  The client was like, all right, go for it.
[08:54.870 --> 08:56.530]  And I was like, okay, $20,000.
[08:56.730 --> 08:58.570]  Like, you know, CP space.
[08:58.790 --> 09:00.730]  Like I just copied it from like another one I had written.
[09:01.070 --> 09:01.390]  Hit enter.
[09:01.510 --> 09:02.310]  And I was like, there it is.
[09:02.430 --> 09:02.910]  It's done.
[09:03.170 --> 09:03.590]  $20,000.
[09:05.330 --> 09:07.430]  So I saw that over and over and over again.
[09:07.470 --> 09:10.910]  At the time I was making, you know, like 40 grand a year or something like that.
[09:10.970 --> 09:12.030]  And I'm seeing like...
[09:12.030 --> 09:14.830]  Literally, I did the website for avon.com.
[09:14.930 --> 09:15.970]  I did it with a...
[09:15.970 --> 09:18.550]  It was me and like three other guys basically.
[09:19.070 --> 09:20.090]  It was four people.
[09:20.270 --> 09:22.810]  We finished it in three months and they charged a million dollars for it.
[09:23.290 --> 09:25.690]  I'm like, I didn't see where this...
[09:25.690 --> 09:28.490]  Like how is it a million dollars yet my paycheck is like...
[09:28.490 --> 09:31.410]  I can't like afford Raymond noodles, you know, in New York.
[09:32.350 --> 09:33.930]  Raymond noodles are like $20 here.
[09:36.850 --> 09:39.450]  So anyway, that's sort of where I started.
[09:39.450 --> 09:42.450]  So one of the first things I said...
[09:43.030 --> 09:47.490]  So I was there for about 11 months and I just saw this happening over and over and over again.
[09:47.650 --> 09:49.190]  As did everybody I worked with.
[09:50.950 --> 09:52.530]  And I just said, f*ck this.
[09:52.570 --> 09:54.550]  I'm going to start my own consulting company.
[09:55.610 --> 09:56.330]  I'll get...
[09:56.330 --> 09:58.410]  You know, I'll start by doing stuff on my own.
[09:58.510 --> 10:02.490]  And then I can get the same like three people who I built Avon this million dollar website with.
[10:02.610 --> 10:03.430]  Which the client loved.
[10:03.530 --> 10:04.170]  They loved our work.
[10:04.230 --> 10:05.690]  It was just obscenely overpriced.
[10:06.690 --> 10:08.390]  And get the same like three people.
[10:10.350 --> 10:11.590]  And build the same websites.
[10:11.790 --> 10:12.430]  We'll make more money.
[10:12.610 --> 10:14.030]  We can charge a client like a fifth.
[10:14.170 --> 10:15.850]  And they're saving tons of money and everybody's happy.
[10:16.250 --> 10:17.110]  So that's what I did.
[10:17.310 --> 10:18.610]  Started out as a freelance programmer.
[10:20.930 --> 10:23.850]  Got, you know, job after job to the point where I had more jobs than I could handle.
[10:23.990 --> 10:25.170]  And then I hired somebody and hired somebody else.
[10:25.230 --> 10:26.230]  And eventually I had five people.
[10:26.850 --> 10:28.450]  And that went on for about a year.
[10:28.550 --> 10:29.250]  A little more than a year.
[10:29.770 --> 10:31.050]  It was called PK Interactive.
[10:31.050 --> 10:33.490]  And part of...
[10:33.490 --> 10:34.330]  How old were you then?
[10:34.590 --> 10:35.990]  I was 24.
[10:37.730 --> 10:39.610]  The question was how old and they said 24.
[10:41.290 --> 10:41.810]  The...
[10:42.470 --> 10:58.210]  One of the things about running that business though is we used to get so many people coming to us being like, okay, you know, we have two million dollars of venture capital and we want to, you know, sell little notepads.
[10:59.390 --> 11:00.210]  That's what we're going to do.
[11:00.350 --> 11:01.290]  We have two million dollars to do it.
[11:01.370 --> 11:06.030]  And so we would sit here in PK Interactive and we'd say, we can do that.
[11:06.770 --> 11:11.650]  We can do it way, way, you know, more than you could even expect us to do.
[11:11.750 --> 11:14.650]  Well, you'll be so freaking happy with your notepad website.
[11:15.010 --> 11:19.710]  But you're going to go out of business because nobody's ever going to buy one and it's stupid and there's already a hundred companies doing it.
[11:20.350 --> 11:32.850]  And they'd be like, well, you know, you don't understand because we've got best of breed synergies with B2B paradigms using e-tools and leverage and synergy and like all this, you know, eyeballs and like all this stuff.
[11:32.950 --> 11:34.790]  And I'm just like, okay, you know, I guess I don't understand.
[11:35.050 --> 11:35.430]  That's cool.
[11:35.590 --> 11:38.250]  Like, yeah, I seriously, you know, I was like, I guess I don't understand.
[11:39.050 --> 11:41.690]  You know, fast forward three years and we all know what happened with that.
[11:42.950 --> 11:59.610]  And I'm not taking any credit for being like the guy who's like the, you know, Flues.com was the company that the idea with Flues was that you were going to take your own money out of your pocket and convert it to Flues dollars that you could only use on like certain sites on the Internet.
[12:00.150 --> 12:08.710]  Nobody could ever figure out why anyone would ever actually do this besides credit card thieves who were like stealing credit cards turning into Flues and then like being able to spend it real quick.
[12:09.990 --> 12:11.710]  But they got $40 million in funding.
[12:11.950 --> 12:18.690]  And a lot of people in my position, I would imagine like tons of like probably a lot of you were just like, what is going on here?
[12:18.810 --> 12:27.810]  You know, but I'm not like all you're hearing from are the investors and the analysts and the journalists and the the, you know, all the people whose job it is is to increase the value of these companies.
[12:28.010 --> 12:33.850]  And so, so a lot of, you know, programmers and a lot of real like operations people like me are sitting here going like, I guess I just don't understand.
[12:33.850 --> 12:35.410]  But hey, you know, I'm pretty good at writing programs.
[12:35.410 --> 12:36.270]  So and they're paying me well.
[12:36.390 --> 12:37.030]  So I'll just keep doing it.
[12:38.730 --> 12:41.730]  So anyway, while I'm doing PK Interactive, I get the idea.
[12:42.170 --> 12:44.990]  Just seeing the ridiculous come to incredible heights.
[12:45.130 --> 12:49.770]  This is around, around May 1999, which is like the peak of insanity.
[12:50.870 --> 12:58.910]  And I said, you know, this is all in a lot of people were, you know, murmurs were coming up that this whole thing was going to crash and burn and die and be disastrous.
[12:58.910 --> 13:00.850]  And so I thought that that's funny.
[13:00.990 --> 13:13.550]  Let's make a website where, where people can, originally it was like, you know, like I said earlier, it's like a celebrity Deadpool where you can bet on, you know, instead of betting on when celebrities are going to die, you bet on when websites are going to go out of business.
[13:14.150 --> 13:17.070]  So I launched, I built the site in a weekend, like really dumb site.
[13:17.710 --> 13:24.910]  Don't tell them, but at the very beginning of the site, I used to actually just copy and paste all the news from like news.com and from like Yahoo and stuff like that.
[13:26.550 --> 13:28.130]  And I launched the site and then I went on vacation.
[13:28.230 --> 13:30.370]  I had like a planned vacation with some friends for a week.
[13:30.370 --> 13:36.530]  And I went on vacation and while I was on vacation, I had never been interviewed by like a reporter ever in my life to this point.
[13:36.670 --> 13:44.770]  And I'm on vacation and I get a, I was in Brazil and I, and I told my employees, I was like, don't, you know, give anybody my number or where I am unless it's like super important.
[13:45.130 --> 13:51.730]  And then I got a call and it's from salon.com, which is a online, uh, magazine that ended up actually trashing my book.
[13:51.850 --> 13:56.990]  So, but still they were, they're, they're partially, they were the first real press I got anyway.
[13:57.030 --> 13:57.910]  So I'm like, well, what's going on?
[13:57.970 --> 13:58.850]  You know, why are you calling me?
[13:58.850 --> 14:00.690]  And they said, well, we want to talk about this website you made.
[14:00.770 --> 14:03.310]  And I was like, the website that I made that I sent to six people.
[14:03.470 --> 14:03.670]  Okay.
[14:03.810 --> 14:04.130]  Side note.
[14:04.490 --> 14:10.590]  One of the things I want to talk about here is not just about me, but I want to talk about like things that maybe you could use in your own projects and stuff like that.
[14:11.210 --> 14:13.170]  Um, so I tell everybody in the world, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[14:13.330 --> 14:17.690]  I made this website and I only set in, and I'm just sort of free forming here.
[14:18.110 --> 14:22.710]  I built this website and I only sent it out to six people and it got like crazy popular and I don't know why.
[14:22.830 --> 14:24.830]  And it's really crazy, but that's actually a big lie.
[14:24.930 --> 14:25.810]  And I'll tell you what I did.
[14:26.230 --> 14:31.850]  But as soon as I launched the site, I was sort of using what I call like the two live crew model.
[14:32.090 --> 14:36.830]  And the two live crew is... nobody ever heard of two live crew until they started getting arrested and started getting in trouble.
[14:37.070 --> 14:40.450]  And we're like banned in Florida for obscenity and all that stuff.
[14:42.030 --> 14:51.990]  And as a musician, I was like, man, all I want to do is get in a band, be really offensive, and then anonymously send tapes of ourselves to the PMRC and get them really riled up.
[14:52.050 --> 14:54.510]  And then we'll be superstars.
[14:54.510 --> 14:59.850]  And so the first thing I did when I built FuckedCompany was I thought, who would be really offended by this?
[15:00.150 --> 15:08.270]  And there was a big listserv that if you're in New York, and elsewhere probably, a lot of people know of it, called the WAC List.
[15:08.950 --> 15:10.450]  It's the W... anybody know the WAC List?
[15:10.670 --> 15:11.070]  Yeah.
[15:11.410 --> 15:14.310]  It's the www.ac.org.
[15:14.530 --> 15:16.970]  It's the World Wide Web Artist Consortium.
[15:17.130 --> 15:22.710]  And if you ever start a new site and you want to like really spam it somewhere good, put it right there.
[15:22.710 --> 15:26.510]  Because it wasn't spam, what it was, was I just got some random Hotmail address.
[15:28.650 --> 15:36.330]  It's funny, I spoke at Microsoft like two months ago, and I was like talking about how I'm like making all these fake Hotmail addresses.
[15:36.630 --> 15:37.210]  I'm like, oh wait.
[15:39.730 --> 15:52.550]  So I made some fake Hotmail address and just, you know, like Bob Johnson or something, and sent an email to the WAC List, which is this, it's a listserv of like basically designers and other web people.
[15:53.750 --> 15:58.110]  And I think there's like six or seven thousand people on the list or something like that, and they read it religiously.
[15:58.110 --> 16:03.270]  So anyway, I send an email, I'm like, man, this is the most offensive thing I've ever seen.
[16:03.430 --> 16:04.070]  This thing sucks.
[16:04.090 --> 16:09.470]  And I put a link to my website, and then I had like a flood of email that's like, no dude, that site's awesome.
[16:09.730 --> 16:11.490]  Like, and the site just got huge after that.
[16:12.630 --> 16:17.010]  So the key is to find who would be, not who would like, most people when they advertise, they go for who's going to like it.
[16:17.010 --> 16:20.430]  But I go with, who's really going to hate it, and then it seems to take care of itself.
[16:22.770 --> 16:26.130]  Anyway, so it got really big, blah, blah, blah.
[16:31.630 --> 16:34.150]  Okay, let's move to sort of like present time.
[16:34.410 --> 16:48.450]  The site, I get about anywhere between 200 and 500 tips sent in to me every day from people who work for different companies that are pissed off for one reason or another, and tell me what's going on in their company.
[16:50.330 --> 16:51.810]  I'm getting all these tips.
[16:53.310 --> 16:55.810]  And meanwhile, this whole time, this is just like a little side thing for me.
[16:55.890 --> 16:56.370]  It's a little fun thing.
[16:56.470 --> 16:58.370]  But it's like, it's turning into like a lot of work.
[16:58.610 --> 17:02.030]  And it's also turning into something really cool, because it's becoming like the...
[17:02.610 --> 17:05.310]  Up until that point, there was no real...
[17:05.310 --> 17:11.210]  You couldn't put your finger on like a real voice for like operations people like me, like programmers and copywriters and designers.
[17:11.210 --> 17:15.530]  All you heard from in the magazines were all the investors and journalists and analysts and all those people.
[17:16.050 --> 17:20.290]  And so people would come to my site who weren't any of those people and be like, here's what's really going on.
[17:20.950 --> 17:23.310]  So I had a couple of ideas, and I...
[17:23.310 --> 17:34.510]  To not be one of those like f*cked CEOs or presidents I always make fun of, instead of just shutting my company down and laying off all my employees, I actually gave them the business and three-month bonuses each.
[17:34.870 --> 17:36.790]  So they all own the business now and they still run it.
[17:36.870 --> 17:37.990]  It's called Peak Applications.
[17:38.350 --> 17:40.350]  Sometimes they hire me as a consultant, so hire them.
[17:42.150 --> 17:43.310]  And so they were happy.
[17:44.390 --> 17:49.870]  And then basically, to quote this gentleman right here earlier, said, you know, you had a really good idea.
[17:49.990 --> 17:53.090]  You charge people to go through your trash, which is exactly what I do.
[17:54.190 --> 17:55.450]  Basically, here's how it works.
[17:55.630 --> 17:57.490]  And then I'll...
[17:57.490 --> 18:00.090]  Also, this relates to any website on Earth.
[18:01.370 --> 18:06.010]  I'll tell you how mine works and then how you can make me make it work for yours, if you have one or if you're starting one.
[18:08.210 --> 18:11.850]  I get these, like, 200 to 500 tips coming in to me every day.
[18:12.030 --> 18:16.530]  I only read, like, 40 of them and I only post, like, 10 of them to this.
[18:16.590 --> 18:19.670]  I sort of rewrite them and write my own little spin on it and then I post it to the site.
[18:19.930 --> 18:25.790]  So anyway, if I post 10 to the site and I get 500, that means there are 490 people who are like, what the f*ck, dude?
[18:25.810 --> 18:27.490]  I keep sending you stuff and you're not posting it.
[18:27.750 --> 18:29.510]  And I'm like, to be honest, like, I'm just one guy.
[18:29.650 --> 18:34.130]  Like, I don't have enough time to read it or it wasn't that funny or wasn't that good or wasn't that interesting or whatever.
[18:34.630 --> 18:37.830]  So on one side, I have all these pissed off people who are posting me stuff and sending me stuff.
[18:37.930 --> 18:40.670]  And they're like, dude, I'm going to stop sending you things if you don't post them.
[18:41.030 --> 18:59.010]  And on the other end, what I have are journalists, all the time journalists, and then sometimes investors and executives, but mostly journalists emailing me and saying, you know, I heard Razorfish is, you know, shutting down their, like, London office,
[18:59.350 --> 19:02.150]  but I don't see anything about it anywhere and I don't see anything about it on your site.
[19:02.150 --> 19:03.570]  Have you heard of anything like that?
[19:03.790 --> 19:11.350]  And I'll just, what I do is I manually search through the database and I'm like, oh, in fact, yeah, looks like 20 people told me that and here's the details and here's what's going on.
[19:13.030 --> 19:15.130]  So I was like, well, these people are bugging me for all this information.
[19:15.270 --> 19:16.530]  These people are sending me all this information.
[19:16.770 --> 19:20.130]  Why don't I just connect the two and sort of, you know, take a toll in the middle?
[19:20.810 --> 19:31.550]  So what I did was I launched the first pay service on FuckedCompany, which was, and still is, for $75 a month, and I'll tell you why I priced it, that number.
[19:32.250 --> 19:38.590]  For $75 a month, you can come into the site and you can read all of the stuff that I don't post, that I don't get around to posting.
[19:38.770 --> 19:40.810]  And you can search through it and you can do whatever you want with it.
[19:41.810 --> 19:44.290]  And that became a hit, tons of subscribers.
[19:45.170 --> 20:00.210]  The reason I picked $75 a month was, first, I wanted to show that to the people who are sending me stuff, I'm not trying to take advantage of, I'm not trying to, this isn't for like people who are like laid off and I'm trying to like get $75 out of them so they can like look up,
[20:00.350 --> 20:03.450]  you know, companies because up to that point, that was seen as the audience of the site.
[20:03.550 --> 20:07.670]  No, I mean, I wanted to make it expensive enough that it was clearly for businesses.
[20:08.030 --> 20:10.130]  It was like, this is not, you know, for regular people, it's for businesses.
[20:10.130 --> 20:13.670]  And if it's for businesses, then generally $75 a month is nothing.
[20:13.950 --> 20:20.010]  I also made it $75 a month because that was the exact price of my cable bill when I launched the service.
[20:20.370 --> 20:23.550]  And I was like, if I get one subscriber, I've got free cable.
[20:29.370 --> 20:32.430]  And at the peak, there were about 1,200 subscribers.
[20:34.690 --> 20:39.790]  And now there's less of those subscribers, but there's more of other subscribers and other services and I'll get to that.
[20:40.650 --> 20:46.210]  Oh, and by the way, when I started that service, the site was still maybe a little like underground or whatever.
[20:46.470 --> 20:49.930]  And then all in one month, it was the end of 2000.
[20:49.930 --> 20:56.770]  It was the Yahoo site of the year, the Rolling Stones site of the year, and it was number six in Time Magazine's best of 2000.
[20:57.250 --> 20:59.310]  That Napster kid was like the first five.
[21:00.050 --> 21:01.610]  So, f*ck him.
[21:04.230 --> 21:07.110]  Oh, how can that relate to other businesses?
[21:07.410 --> 21:13.710]  So, probably, I don't know if some people here know, just as an example, Silicon Alley Daily.
[21:14.690 --> 21:16.650]  Or Silicon Alley Reporter is the magazine.
[21:16.770 --> 21:17.290]  It's the magazine.
[21:17.450 --> 21:22.450]  It's like the big, you know, red herring, fast company, business 2.0, upside, etc.
[21:22.910 --> 21:26.430]  It's the version of that for just New York.
[21:26.590 --> 21:27.730]  And it's called Silicon Alley Reporter.
[21:27.930 --> 21:29.250]  And they have a newsletter called Silicon Alley Daily.
[21:29.450 --> 21:37.770]  Anyway, like a lot of those magazines and a lot of online magazines, running an online magazine is just about the most expensive thing you can do.
[21:39.230 --> 21:44.670]  Because you are not taking advantage of computer technology, which is the whole point, I think, of running a website.
[21:45.010 --> 21:46.330]  I mean, it's very manual.
[21:46.710 --> 21:49.670]  Any high school kid in America can make a website, you know?
[21:49.790 --> 21:53.990]  And if you have 20 people writing articles, that high school kid can post them up.
[21:53.990 --> 21:56.390]  And the website is like 1% of the whole business.
[21:56.610 --> 21:58.990]  And so, anyway, a lot of them lose money, and this one was losing money.
[21:59.190 --> 22:06.430]  And the CEO of Silicon Alley Reporter made all these changes to his company.
[22:06.430 --> 22:07.610]  Now they do something completely different.
[22:07.770 --> 22:11.130]  And he came up to me at some thing where I saw him.
[22:11.130 --> 22:15.530]  And he was like, I came up with this after I saw you speak at some other one of his things.
[22:15.770 --> 22:16.770]  And I said, what happened?
[22:16.830 --> 22:19.410]  He said, well, you know how you were talking about...
[22:22.190 --> 22:26.230]  Basically, the overarching goal here, which I failed to mention, was find something in your database.
[22:26.410 --> 22:29.550]  Find something that you have that you don't think is really valuable.
[22:29.910 --> 22:33.810]  But there are so many f*cking people in this world that it's valuable to somebody.
[22:35.230 --> 22:41.130]  There's a site that a guy who takes naked pictures of girls wearing FuckedCompany t-shirts out in L.A.
[22:41.170 --> 22:41.770]  And he sends them to me.
[22:41.850 --> 22:43.630]  And he runs a website called littlegrayguy.com.
[22:43.770 --> 22:47.670]  And it's a website of 5,000 pictures of naked women holding his cat.
[22:47.890 --> 22:51.810]  And for some reason, like millions of people go to this website.
[22:51.970 --> 22:53.990]  Like there's something out there for everyone.
[22:54.310 --> 22:57.830]  And whatever you can think of, there's going to be a lot of people who are interested in it.
[22:57.830 --> 22:59.530]  No matter how stupid you think it is.
[23:01.510 --> 23:14.850]  So, okay, one of the things of running a magazine, as you can imagine, if you've ever been in the journalism world, which I have not been, but it seems pretty obvious that if you're a journalist, you get a million press releases every day.
[23:14.930 --> 23:18.110]  Everybody's sending you press releases because everybody wants you to write about them.
[23:19.670 --> 23:23.910]  So, this is a magazine called Silicon Alley Reporter.
[23:24.190 --> 23:26.870]  And it's all tech, Internet stuff in New York.
[23:26.990 --> 23:33.950]  And so, he's getting a ton of press releases from companies, from tech companies in New York.
[23:34.050 --> 23:35.590]  Saying, here's what we're doing.
[23:35.850 --> 23:38.210]  Here's our new product.
[23:38.410 --> 23:40.290]  Here's how much venture capital we just got.
[23:40.390 --> 23:40.890]  Here's this, here's that.
[23:40.990 --> 23:43.690]  And they're getting like thousands and thousands of press releases.
[23:43.930 --> 23:45.890]  Like every other magazine out there.
[23:46.590 --> 23:49.590]  So, anyway, he's telling me that, he's like, so we're getting all these press releases, right?
[23:50.050 --> 23:51.790]  Every magazine in the world gets a million press releases.
[23:51.970 --> 23:55.330]  And you read, you keep the ones you want to keep, and you throw away like 99% of them.
[23:55.570 --> 23:58.350]  He said, but I listened to what you said, and we have all these press releases.
[23:59.090 --> 24:03.530]  Press releases are, obviously, the whole point of a press release is you want the whole world to see it.
[24:03.570 --> 24:05.510]  So, they're not secret, just the opposite.
[24:05.670 --> 24:07.410]  The people who issue them really want everyone to see it.
[24:08.130 --> 24:13.270]  But most people, you and I, don't get thousands of press releases mailed to us every day because we don't run magazines.
[24:13.670 --> 24:14.330]  But he does.
[24:14.330 --> 24:17.250]  So he goes, what I did was I started to keep all my press releases.
[24:17.890 --> 24:32.570]  And I hired somebody for like, you know, some like 12-year-old for like $5 an hour to like sit there and type in all of the contact information that's on every press release and like a two-sentence synopsis of like what it says.
[24:33.150 --> 24:36.610]  Most of them were like, this is... a lot of them were venture capital.
[24:36.690 --> 24:42.270]  Like, you know, they got X dollars in venture capital or they hired this guy or they fired that guy or whatever.
[24:42.970 --> 24:51.970]  So now they have the biggest database of executive contact information and venture capitalist contact information and all this information.
[24:52.450 --> 24:55.390]  And it's a database of stuff that's all just been given to them for free.
[24:55.510 --> 24:56.450]  And they sell it now.
[24:56.510 --> 24:58.350]  I think he sells it for $1,000 a year.
[24:58.490 --> 25:09.510]  You get to like go through his database and be like, well, what venture capitalists have given over a million dollars in VC to an online broadcasting company in the past six months?
[25:09.510 --> 25:17.810]  And he'll show you, according to all the press releases, he'll be like, well, there are... we're 57 and here they are and here's their contact information if you want to call them because they want people to call them.
[25:18.390 --> 25:22.410]  So anyway, that was an example of just taking stuff that you have that you think is garbage and charging for it.
[25:23.570 --> 25:26.050]  And that literally was garbage because they would normally throw it away.
[25:26.830 --> 25:34.230]  Another quick example of something I'm doing now, a new site that I'm going to launch in the next week or two, it's called internalmemos.com.
[25:34.230 --> 25:45.970]  I have about 750 so far internal memos that have been emailed or sent or faxed to me from people from like basically moles, like people in their companies who aren't happy.
[25:46.110 --> 25:55.970]  And so they're like, well, you know, everything from so-and-so is getting laid off or whatever to like they changed the lunch menu in the cafeteria.
[25:55.970 --> 25:57.550]  Like, I get it all.
[25:57.770 --> 26:03.010]  And so I have this big stack here and I'm like, you know, I should just scan these all and charge people to read them.
[26:04.910 --> 26:10.790]  Yes, there are legal implications with that, which I'm currently going over with my lawyer, but I think we're going to find out a way to do it.
[26:11.990 --> 26:12.610]  Why not?
[26:16.070 --> 26:19.210]  Okay, then what I did to expand...
[26:19.210 --> 26:29.930]  So first, I've told you how to really bring a lot of traffic to your site, which is find the people who would be most likely to be offended by it and make sure they know about it.
[26:30.550 --> 26:33.850]  And then once you have people coming to your site, what can you charge for?
[26:34.010 --> 26:42.450]  Whatever you have that nobody else has or other people have but nobody's selling, you know, that is what you can charge for.
[26:42.570 --> 26:48.830]  And then once you do that, now you have a big audience coming to your website of people who are willing to put their credit card number in for stuff.
[26:49.210 --> 26:51.250]  Now, well, actually, let me rewind.
[26:51.410 --> 27:00.550]  There are like 4 million people who come to the website every month and 3,999,000 of them don't pay for anything, which is fine.
[27:00.710 --> 27:01.070]  That's good.
[27:02.790 --> 27:07.490]  But those, you know, 1,000 or so people who do, they're cool.
[27:07.690 --> 27:16.530]  And what you do is you start other services and you have essentially like a launching pad for anything you want to do.
[27:16.930 --> 27:23.470]  So what I did real quick was I started looking, and here's another idea for you, if you have a site or if you're starting one, to make money.
[27:24.910 --> 27:38.670]  And you're a programmer or you've had a programmer write something for you, any little program that you need that you think, you know, like, anybody in here who has any type of website has, you know, if it's not just static HTML, you know, there's some program behind it that you wrote to do something.
[27:39.370 --> 27:47.550]  The fact that you found that program useful because you wrote it or you had somebody write it means there are probably 10 million other people who would think that was useful.
[27:49.310 --> 27:53.670]  Of those 10 million people, A, you want them all to know that, oh, here's the point.
[27:53.850 --> 28:06.830]  There are so many people who are probably interested in that that what I generally do is I take every line of code that I write on my website, I write it with the idea that it can be used by not just me but by anybody, and it's a pretty standard thing.
[28:08.190 --> 28:17.570]  You know, as far as the database, any time I ever make, like, a user's database, you know, where you have user name, and name, and password, and address, and whatever, I always just add a column called Site ID.
[28:17.790 --> 28:24.310]  I'm like, because one day, you know, I'm Site ID 1, but one day there's going to be Site ID 2 using this and Site ID 3, and there are going to be a thousand sites using this.
[28:25.010 --> 28:30.030]  So the first example of that was for online advertising.
[28:30.610 --> 28:38.730]  As everyone knows, the online advertising market totally tanked, and I was using L90 at the time.
[28:38.890 --> 28:42.270]  They're kind of like DoubleClick, you know, one of those big ad sales people, and they weren't able to sell anything.
[28:42.830 --> 28:54.770]  But people would email me all the time, and they'd be like, well, I just want to buy, like, $50 worth of ads from you and see if it works, you know, and if it doesn't work, then I don't want to, you know, I won't buy more, but if it really works, then I'll come back and buy,
[28:54.770 --> 28:56.070]  like, $10,000 worth of ads.
[28:56.110 --> 28:57.550]  And I always used to have the same response.
[28:57.770 --> 29:03.930]  I'd say, well, why don't you, you know, buy the $10,000 worth of ads now, and then if you want more, I'll give you the second half for, like, $50.
[29:04.630 --> 29:05.750]  But nobody was into that.
[29:05.930 --> 29:06.250]  So...
[29:08.430 --> 29:10.010]  So then I said, I know what I'll do.
[29:11.110 --> 29:13.170]  Screw L90 and DoubleClick, and I'll...
[29:13.170 --> 29:21.550]  There are a billion ad server, freeware ad server programs you can find out there that just cycle through banner ads.
[29:21.550 --> 29:25.050]  And I said, I'll just take one of those and modify it ever so slightly so that people can...
[29:25.050 --> 29:26.150]  And I already had all...
[29:26.150 --> 29:30.330]  I already set up all the CyberCash and all my billing stuff and all that for the subscription service.
[29:30.450 --> 29:36.090]  And I said, what I'll do is I'll take one of those ad serving programs and I'll make it so that people can buy ads with their credit card.
[29:36.790 --> 29:42.170]  Which seems, like, pretty obvious since you can pretty much buy anything on the Internet with a credit card, but it does not happen with advertisements.
[29:42.590 --> 29:44.090]  Now you can do it with Google.
[29:44.270 --> 29:51.250]  You can buy, like, keywords with your credit card and you can, like, hire ads and, like, Blogger has one now that you can...
[29:51.250 --> 29:54.230]  But at the time, nobody was doing it and you couldn't buy ads with a credit card.
[29:55.470 --> 29:59.530]  And it seemed, like, pretty obvious to me and people I'd mentioned to were like, yeah, that seems alright.
[29:59.730 --> 30:07.870]  So, long story short, you go now to my website and you look up where the banner ad is and there's a little link next to it that says, your ad here.
[30:08.050 --> 30:14.270]  And if you click that, it brings you to a page that says, alright, how many impressions do you want?
[30:14.270 --> 30:22.150]  Upload your banner, here's how much it's gonna cost, put in your credit card number, and then it sends me an email automatically and, you know, I can approve or reject the ad.
[30:25.010 --> 30:27.690]  So, automatically, I started making money from advertising again.
[30:27.850 --> 30:30.390]  Because people were, you know, 100 bucks here, 100 bucks there, people tried it out.
[30:30.590 --> 30:32.890]  It worked for some people, it didn't work for some people.
[30:32.990 --> 30:34.930]  So some people came back and bought more, some people did not.
[30:35.730 --> 30:37.810]  Doesn't matter, ads are pretty much free for me to run.
[30:38.630 --> 30:43.490]  Started, you know, not making millions from ads, but, you know, making a couple hundred bucks a day from ads.
[30:43.490 --> 30:44.790]  Which is, like, pretty good for doing nothing.
[30:47.570 --> 30:51.390]  So, what I did was, I took my own advice and I opened it up for the whole world.
[30:51.390 --> 30:55.130]  And I made a site, which exists right now, called httpads.
[30:55.310 --> 30:57.190]  It's httpads.com.
[30:57.990 --> 31:00.770]  And what you can, right now there are about 2,000 websites using it.
[31:01.210 --> 31:02.390]  And you can go sign up.
[31:03.050 --> 31:06.690]  And it takes exactly, like, two minutes to sign up.
[31:06.810 --> 31:09.750]  And I just give you a big chunk of HTML code and I say, stick this on your site.
[31:09.850 --> 31:11.010]  You stick it on your site, done.
[31:11.010 --> 31:14.330]  People come in by ads.
[31:15.010 --> 31:16.470]  I bill the credit cards.
[31:16.650 --> 31:18.890]  At the end of the month, I send you a check for 80%.
[31:18.890 --> 31:23.170]  And I keep 20%, as opposed to 50%, which is what DoubleClick and all those guys take.
[31:23.490 --> 31:25.070]  So everybody's happy and it works out.
[31:25.230 --> 31:26.290]  And that's rocking.
[31:27.930 --> 31:29.010]  Another example of...
[31:31.730 --> 31:34.810]  That, of course, I started, I built it for myself and then I opened it up.
[31:34.810 --> 31:38.950]  Another example of that is a site called AmazonScan.com.
[31:39.170 --> 31:43.270]  It's now called JungleScan.com because I got a bunch of nasty letters from Amazon.
[31:43.530 --> 31:49.750]  But the idea with it was I wrote a book published by Simon & Schuster in April a few months ago.
[31:49.850 --> 31:50.950]  And I'll talk a little about that too.
[31:51.490 --> 31:53.670]  But this is fun being able to talk like the first time.
[31:53.770 --> 31:54.950]  I'm like not pitching my book.
[31:57.570 --> 32:02.890]  Anyway, so Amazon.com has sales rankings for all of their items.
[32:03.810 --> 32:05.990]  How's it doing in comparison to every other item on Amazon?
[32:06.250 --> 32:10.070]  So what I did was I... and I always like to check it and they update it every hour.
[32:10.630 --> 32:13.570]  But I don't want to go to Amazon every hour and look at where my book is.
[32:13.970 --> 32:15.210]  So I wrote a program that would do that.
[32:15.710 --> 32:17.210]  It's like, you know, super easy.
[32:17.330 --> 32:17.930]  A little screen scrape.
[32:18.030 --> 32:19.810]  Just goes every hour and just grabs the ranking.
[32:19.850 --> 32:20.490]  No big deal.
[32:21.370 --> 32:22.090]  Of my book.
[32:22.230 --> 32:23.790]  And then I can, you know, chart it and look at the numbers.
[32:23.790 --> 32:26.770]  And, you know, I can look at it once a week and see exactly how my book did.
[32:26.930 --> 32:27.810]  You know, I can see like...
[32:28.150 --> 32:31.250]  I can see after this talk, maybe if like five of you go out and buy it.
[32:31.330 --> 32:35.510]  Which will be like, you know, 500% more people than would probably normally buy today.
[32:35.790 --> 32:37.050]  I'll see like a huge spike.
[32:40.470 --> 32:42.570]  And so I said, well, you know, I find this interesting.
[32:42.890 --> 32:48.550]  And like I said before, if I find it interesting, there are 10, 20 million other people out there who probably will find it interesting too.
[32:48.990 --> 32:51.330]  So I opened it up to the whole world and I called it Amazon scan.
[32:51.330 --> 32:55.890]  And I said, put in your book or CD or anything that's sold by Amazon.
[32:55.890 --> 32:58.750]  And I'll go out automatically and track it.
[32:58.810 --> 33:00.030]  And you can chart it and graph it.
[33:00.210 --> 33:01.710]  And then I can do fun things with the numbers.
[33:01.710 --> 33:05.130]  Like show you today's highest gainers and today's biggest losers.
[33:05.410 --> 33:10.690]  And, you know, all kinds of the highest ranked items ever and the lowest ranked items ever.
[33:11.590 --> 33:13.890]  And so I did that.
[33:14.370 --> 33:20.750]  And every link on the site goes through Amazon's affiliate program.
[33:20.750 --> 33:22.170]  Which anybody can sign up for.
[33:22.870 --> 33:26.990]  And I started that about five months ago.
[33:27.190 --> 33:31.090]  And it's already generated $100,000 for Amazon.com.
[33:31.210 --> 33:32.050]  Not for me.
[33:32.610 --> 33:35.910]  I get five to 15% of that through the affiliate program.
[33:36.150 --> 33:37.310]  But it's another one of those...
[33:37.310 --> 33:42.910]  It's another example of just using something that is like so dumb and stupid and easy that you just do for yourself.
[33:43.310 --> 33:46.850]  And you just have to remember, you know, how many people are out there on this...
[33:46.850 --> 33:50.730]  on this interweb thing that we've heard of so much.
[33:54.150 --> 33:56.950]  So that's pretty much that.
[33:57.270 --> 34:00.190]  Like I'll give like five seconds of like where I see it going in the future.
[34:00.650 --> 34:03.230]  Because that's like the most frequently asked question I get.
[34:03.510 --> 34:08.810]  The most frequently asked question is generally like, well, the .com thing happened like 1999.
[34:09.390 --> 34:11.090]  Like what do you think is the future of your site?
[34:11.570 --> 34:15.450]  My answer, which has been the answer for the past two weeks...
[34:15.450 --> 34:20.690]  I mean, I'm sorry, the past two and a half years, is I think it's got another good week or two left.
[34:21.150 --> 34:23.270]  But I've been saying that for two and a half years.
[34:23.470 --> 34:26.030]  So I'm not, you know, going to guess anymore.
[34:28.050 --> 34:29.290]  Subscriptions have gone down a little.
[34:29.650 --> 34:32.270]  But traffic has shot way up.
[34:32.970 --> 34:34.430]  Traffic is now higher than it's ever been.
[34:34.570 --> 34:39.290]  Especially after all the Enron, WorldCom, Xerox, etc.
[34:39.850 --> 34:40.710]  accounting scandals.
[34:40.810 --> 34:44.710]  That has really sort of swung things back into the direction of my website.
[34:46.430 --> 34:48.770]  Anyway, so that's... how am I doing on time?
[34:48.770 --> 34:50.090]  Am I about...
[34:50.630 --> 34:51.430]  Oh, I'm really early.
[34:52.330 --> 34:53.810]  And I have a lot more things I can talk about.
[34:53.890 --> 34:56.190]  But if anybody's interested, I'll take some...
[34:56.190 --> 34:57.150]  I'll like to take questions.
[34:57.690 --> 34:57.830]  Yeah.
[34:58.710 --> 34:59.290]  There we go.
[34:59.470 --> 34:59.990]  Where's the mic?
[35:00.710 --> 35:01.430]  I can't even see.
[35:02.230 --> 35:02.870]  Oh, whatever.
[35:02.970 --> 35:03.290]  Just talk.
[35:04.950 --> 35:05.310]  Okay.
[35:05.310 --> 35:05.510]  Oh, hey.
[35:07.770 --> 35:08.130]  Questions?
[35:11.830 --> 35:12.410]  Hello, sir.
[35:13.050 --> 35:13.330]  Oh.
[35:13.630 --> 35:14.510]  You're not asking a question.
[35:14.710 --> 35:15.430]  You're just the mic man.
[35:16.510 --> 35:17.610]  Does anybody have a question?
[35:17.750 --> 35:18.550]  You can just shout it out.
[35:18.690 --> 35:20.170]  I don't know if you've got to go all the way up to the mic.
[35:20.370 --> 35:22.010]  Oh, you've got to talk to the mic because we're recording it.
[35:22.170 --> 35:22.750]  But you know what?
[35:22.750 --> 35:25.410]  If you do shout it out, I'll say it and then the camera will hear it.
[35:25.510 --> 35:27.230]  Because I know it's a big pain in the ass to get up.
[35:27.290 --> 35:27.990]  I probably wouldn't.
[35:27.990 --> 35:33.870]  About two years ago, I gave you an internal memo from a company, which I won't name now, but it was a big one.
[35:33.990 --> 35:36.410]  And you put it on your page and it was cool.
[35:37.690 --> 35:38.050]  What?
[35:38.470 --> 35:39.150]  I'll tell you later.
[35:39.330 --> 35:40.290]  Thank you, by the way.
[35:40.510 --> 35:40.670]  Yeah.
[35:41.610 --> 35:45.470]  It was a big deal and the president got really mad, but he has no idea who did it.
[35:45.550 --> 35:49.650]  I got the memo because I left the company four months before and I was still on the mailing list.
[35:49.750 --> 35:50.090]  I don't know.
[35:51.970 --> 35:54.730]  And it's a really big company that you all know.
[35:54.970 --> 35:56.510]  So, it's scary as hell.
[35:56.510 --> 36:07.790]  Anyhow, so you protect my anonymity at some level, I assume, but if they got really mad and they did evil, legal things, how would you protect the fact that I did stuff?
[36:07.890 --> 36:11.550]  And I used a Hotmail account and blah, blah, blah to give it to you, but still...
[36:11.550 --> 36:13.190]  Right, I didn't post any of that stuff, right.
[36:13.270 --> 36:13.610]  Right, yeah.
[36:14.150 --> 36:14.730]  You protect me, but still...
[36:14.730 --> 36:15.910]  I'll take out your name and everything.
[36:18.230 --> 36:20.610]  The question is, how do you protect anonymity?
[36:21.190 --> 36:26.010]  Well, first of all, let me give you an example, because it's a real example that actually happened.
[36:26.890 --> 36:31.370]  There's a company called printcafe.com, I think.
[36:32.590 --> 36:36.850]  And they're like an online print whatever, it doesn't matter what they are.
[36:38.550 --> 36:45.190]  And I had never heard of this company besides that I, you know, they screwed like a hundred of their employees and so I wrote something about it on my site.
[36:45.430 --> 36:49.290]  Anyway, I get one or two cease and desist letters every week.
[36:50.010 --> 36:51.210]  So it's no big deal to me.
[36:51.270 --> 36:53.570]  I get them and I deal with each one on an individual basis.
[36:54.090 --> 37:01.850]  The only rule I have on my site for myself and how I edit it is the site is for the employees.
[37:02.150 --> 37:02.570]  You know?
[37:02.750 --> 37:05.110]  And so I look at it as an employee of the company.
[37:05.250 --> 37:13.450]  If the memo was saying, yeah, like, so and so is, you know, this girl who's a designer is like sleeping her way to the top or whatever, she's an employee.
[37:13.450 --> 37:15.770]  So I'm not going to post something like that and I'll get rid of something like that.
[37:15.890 --> 37:20.270]  But, you know, if it's something about a CEO who like lied and ripped off all his employees, I'll post that.
[37:20.410 --> 37:35.190]  Anyway, so what I was saying was this company, Print Cafe, sends me a cease and desist letter and they, and in the letter it said, people are posting internal information in your message boards.
[37:35.650 --> 37:39.010]  People are posting, like, I mean, then I went through and I looked.
[37:39.190 --> 37:41.970]  People were posting like how much money they had in their bank account.
[37:41.970 --> 37:44.590]  People were posting like the CEO's cell phone number.
[37:44.950 --> 37:46.730]  Like, people were posting all this stuff.
[37:47.070 --> 37:56.790]  But the interesting part was this was the first company that instead of threatening me and saying take that stuff down, they said, leave it up but tell us who's posting it.
[37:57.470 --> 37:59.270]  And I said, no, I'm not telling you who's posting it.
[37:59.270 --> 38:01.630]  The whole point of my site is it's, it's an anonymous forum.
[38:01.630 --> 38:02.990]  That's the service that I provide.
[38:04.590 --> 38:06.630]  So then they threatened to sue me.
[38:07.030 --> 38:10.050]  And, and I said, you know, I, I'm not giving you that information.
[38:10.050 --> 38:10.710]  Sorry, sorry, sorry.
[38:12.370 --> 38:15.630]  Then they went to a judge and they got a subpoena and they issued me a subpoena.
[38:16.330 --> 38:24.110]  A subpoena is when they ask, a lawyer asks you questions and you have to answer them truthfully because you're under oath.
[38:24.250 --> 38:26.050]  And if you don't answer them truthfully, you go to jail.
[38:26.970 --> 38:31.210]  So they subpoenaed me and I'm on the phone, conference call, it's me and my lawyer.
[38:31.790 --> 38:35.810]  And then their lawyer and they're like tech, they're tech guy, you know.
[38:36.710 --> 38:41.870]  And so finally they're like, okay, we're, we're, uh, oh no, that's sorry.
[38:41.990 --> 38:42.390]  That was a deposit.
[38:42.530 --> 38:44.390]  I give you the definition for deposition, not a subpoena.
[38:45.210 --> 38:45.550]  Deposition.
[38:45.550 --> 38:46.610]  I was being deposed.
[38:46.770 --> 38:49.470]  And the point of the deposition was that they were going to subpoena records for me.
[38:49.610 --> 38:50.830]  Subpoena is when I have to give them records.
[38:51.090 --> 38:52.250]  I am clearly not a lawyer.
[38:53.430 --> 39:00.350]  Anyway, so I'm being deposed and I'm answering all the questions and finally they're like, okay, well you have to give us the IP addresses of who posted this message.
[39:00.910 --> 39:02.250]  I said, not going to do it.
[39:02.370 --> 39:03.010]  And they said, why?
[39:03.190 --> 39:04.090]  I said, cause I don't store them.
[39:04.250 --> 39:05.350]  I don't store traffic logs.
[39:05.450 --> 39:06.450]  I don't store IP addresses.
[39:06.630 --> 39:08.070]  I don't store any of that stuff.
[39:08.650 --> 39:09.610]  I don't set cookies.
[39:11.310 --> 39:12.230]  I don't do anything.
[39:14.430 --> 39:15.790]  Which sometimes makes it difficult.
[39:15.970 --> 39:22.170]  You know, you can't do any, uh, there, there are a lot of things you can't do on a, on a, you know, it's hard to maintain state and do different things.
[39:22.250 --> 39:24.510]  When you're, when you're not, you know, doing any of this stuff.
[39:24.650 --> 39:30.130]  But the whole point was I, I knew one day I would be in this position and I wanted to just tell the lawyers like, no, I'm not going to do it.
[39:30.570 --> 39:33.370]  Um, so we went back and forth and they were like, well give us the IP address.
[39:33.470 --> 39:33.750]  I said no.
[39:33.850 --> 39:35.590]  And then, and then they said, okay, here's what we're going to do.
[39:36.130 --> 39:41.050]  They said, okay, these people who are posting all this stuff to your site, they keep coming back day after day and they're doing, they're doing, doing.
[39:41.410 --> 39:47.650]  Why don't you just turn on IP logging just for like a day and don't tell anybody and we'll, we'll trap them and then you give us the IP addresses.
[39:47.790 --> 40:04.890]  And I was like, I don't think the judge who gave you that situation And this subpoena, and who approved of this, or who gave you this subpoena, had the intention of basically destroying my entire business for some, like, f*cked, like, dot com that's like gonna go out of business in a week anyway.
[40:05.450 --> 40:07.550]  And so that's what I said to them, actually.
[40:07.650 --> 40:08.790]  My lawyer wasn't happy with that.
[40:10.130 --> 40:11.850]  They went away, and they never came back.
[40:11.970 --> 40:12.990]  So that was that.
[40:15.330 --> 40:16.130]  Thank you.
[40:19.370 --> 40:19.950]  Yes, sir.
[40:20.370 --> 40:22.020]  Just two short questions.
[40:22.190 --> 40:26.950]  One, I was wondering if there was any way that you kind of determine the authenticity of anything you get?
[40:27.460 --> 40:30.580]  And also, and maybe I've missed this, do you have a fund or something set up?
[40:30.640 --> 40:34.930]  Because it seems like people would love to just follow you as you start shorting companies or something based on what you get.
[40:35.540 --> 40:38.910]  I know there's probably insider rules in that, but that's all.
[40:39.120 --> 40:39.980]  Okay, two questions.
[40:40.100 --> 40:42.930]  The first was how do you authenticate information that you get?
[40:43.100 --> 40:46.830]  And then, like, you know, can I invest with you?
[40:51.100 --> 40:53.330]  The first question, how do I authenticate it?
[40:53.430 --> 40:54.500]  I basically don't.
[40:55.230 --> 40:57.450]  What any... Well, here's the deal.
[40:57.790 --> 41:05.980]  Well, you know, like, for all, like, your CS majors in the house, you know how, like, the first thing you learn in, like, CS 101 is, like, there's data and then there's information?
[41:05.980 --> 41:08.620]  And data is just, like, you all are data, like, sitting here.
[41:08.750 --> 41:11.560]  But information is, like, you're wearing a blue shirt and you're wearing a black shirt.
[41:11.690 --> 41:14.450]  You know, like, that, you know, turning information into data.
[41:14.580 --> 41:18.080]  So I kind of look at my site like information, you know?
[41:20.180 --> 41:22.160]  And translation is I'm not a journalist.
[41:22.160 --> 41:25.810]  I have absolutely no journalistic integrity because I don't have to.
[41:26.790 --> 41:27.580]  It's just me.
[41:27.580 --> 41:28.540]  I can do whatever I want.
[41:29.660 --> 41:36.540]  If you are a reporter for any type of major magazine or newspaper, you generally have the two sources rule.
[41:36.750 --> 41:46.000]  And what that means is when something, when you hear a rumor, when you hear so-and-so is going out of business, you need two sources to say that, yes, that is true, two real insiders.
[41:47.270 --> 41:53.000]  I basically have a bunch of pixels on a screen telling me that this is happening with no real person behind it.
[41:54.520 --> 41:57.790]  So what I do, everything that turns into news starts out as rumor.
[41:57.910 --> 41:59.080]  So what I am is I'm the rumor.
[41:59.560 --> 42:01.330]  On the other hand, how do I authenticate it?
[42:01.390 --> 42:03.660]  So far, I've written about 4,000 pieces on my site.
[42:04.040 --> 42:09.600]  And the most wrong I've been, to my knowledge, is I'll say somebody's laying off 100 people when it's really 60 people.
[42:09.830 --> 42:15.000]  And then, of course, the cool part about a website is I can go change it to 60 and be like, it never said 100.
[42:15.190 --> 42:16.080]  Like, I don't know what you're talking about.
[42:19.020 --> 42:21.210]  So anyway, that's the deal with authenticity.
[42:21.520 --> 42:23.790]  So the end result is it doesn't really matter too much.
[42:24.660 --> 42:28.230]  But you can usually, oh, but the really thing is you can tell, you know.
[42:28.580 --> 42:41.640]  And what I'll do is I, the back end, the extra net sort of thing that I wrote to maintain it, what I'll do is I get 500, let's say I get 500 tips today right now and I want to go home and I want to read through them.
[42:41.660 --> 42:49.790]  I don't just randomly go through, what I do is I have a program that goes through each tip that I get and looks, it counts up the keywords.
[42:50.120 --> 43:00.690]  So for example, if I got 500 tips today and, and 50 of them said H2K2 in it, I would go home and that'd be at the top of my list.
[43:00.790 --> 43:06.770]  And it'd be like, I don't know what happened there, but something happened there because 50 people just sent you an email that has that word in it, so check it out.
[43:07.450 --> 43:20.890]  So the authenticity thing is if I see, you know, 20, 30 people sending me the same sort of thing, you know, I could tell sort of different people that I'm generally, I just go with gut instinct and I, and I publish it and it's pretty much always right on.
[43:21.960 --> 43:22.850]  Any other questions?
[43:24.500 --> 43:27.020]  Anybody just want to, want to shout one out and then I'll say it into the mic?
[43:28.560 --> 43:29.450]  How was Brazil?
[43:30.040 --> 43:30.910]  How was Brazil?
[43:31.560 --> 43:32.430]  It was, it was okay.
[43:32.580 --> 43:38.690]  Actually, it sucked because like the whole time, which I went to Brazil like the day after I launched the site and I was like, I want to go home and like work on my website.
[43:39.330 --> 43:40.310]  You know how it is.
[43:40.410 --> 43:42.270]  It's like, it's like serious addiction, you know?
[43:43.000 --> 43:44.710]  Like right now, I'm like, what's her?
[43:46.100 --> 43:46.420]  Okay.
[43:48.140 --> 43:49.320]  Do I post the cease and desist?
[43:49.480 --> 43:53.230]  Oh, do I post the cease and desist letters?
[43:54.120 --> 43:54.400]  Yeah.
[43:54.620 --> 43:54.840]  Oh, yeah.
[43:55.380 --> 43:56.060]  Not all of them.
[43:56.140 --> 43:56.880]  I post a lot of them.
[43:56.980 --> 44:02.230]  If it's something that I'll comply with, then I don't want to seem like a big pussy and like let everyone know that I complied with it.
[44:02.300 --> 44:03.420]  So I just sort of keep it on the DL.
[44:05.020 --> 44:12.360]  Like I got a cease and desist from, from Viacom because somebody was writing, no, no, it was from MTV.
[44:12.620 --> 44:18.120]  That's, it was from MTV because somebody was writing something about MTV in the message boards and they were like, please get rid of this.
[44:18.250 --> 44:19.620]  And normally I'd be like, ah, f*ck you.
[44:19.710 --> 44:20.140]  You're the man.
[44:20.270 --> 44:22.790]  But I was like, well, MTV is owned by Viacom.
[44:23.270 --> 44:24.560]  Viacom owns Simon and Schuster.
[44:25.250 --> 44:28.820]  I am in the middle of negotiating a book contract with Simon and Schuster.
[44:29.270 --> 44:30.300]  Don't want to do that.
[44:30.400 --> 44:31.080]  Don't want to go there.
[44:31.080 --> 44:31.980]  Deleted the messages.
[44:32.230 --> 44:33.320]  Threw away the cease and desist.
[44:33.440 --> 44:33.980]  Never happened.
[44:34.750 --> 44:41.900]  But I, I, but that there's, I would never, you know, like I was saying earlier, there'd never be any type of like privacy concerns or anything that I would, I would put out on.
[44:42.800 --> 44:43.270]  Yes, sir.
[44:43.500 --> 44:47.250]  I was wondering with your, the functionality that you have, say with the Amazon thing.
[44:47.440 --> 44:47.620]  Yeah.
[44:47.940 --> 44:51.730]  Is that protected at all in case Amazon says that, oh, I think that's a great idea.
[44:51.840 --> 44:53.520]  And they start offering the service on their site.
[44:53.880 --> 45:01.730]  And if it is protected, do you do anything if you find out that say, I thought it was a great idea and I wrote my own program to do it for myself without paying you?
[45:02.980 --> 45:03.000]  Right.
[45:03.160 --> 45:06.320]  The question is, what's the deal with Amazon scan in that regard?
[45:06.540 --> 45:09.620]  And, and, and the answer is... Amazon for instance, but any, any similar.
[45:09.790 --> 45:09.790]  Right.
[45:09.840 --> 45:14.160]  Well that, that site in particular, when I first wrote Amazon scan, it started to get really popular.
[45:14.340 --> 45:20.860]  I was like, you know, Amazon is probably going to say that this is a, a good idea and they probably will steal the idea and they probably will do it.
[45:21.420 --> 45:24.640]  And there's nothing I can do about it because they can do it better because they don't have to do screen scrapes.
[45:24.750 --> 45:26.210]  They got the data in a database right there.
[45:27.620 --> 45:28.620]  So that's what's probably going to happen.
[45:28.710 --> 45:30.190]  On the other hand, Amazon really loves it.
[45:30.270 --> 45:31.640]  I've, they've called me a bunch of times.
[45:31.750 --> 45:32.940]  They've been like, we think it's really cool.
[45:34.250 --> 45:37.290]  Alexa, which does traffic rankings, which is owned by Amazon.
[45:37.290 --> 45:43.580]  I'm now doing a, in addition to ranking the, to tracking the ranking of books, I'm tracking the ranking of websites on Alexa.
[45:44.040 --> 45:52.690]  And the Alexa people, I'm talking with them, they're actually adding functionality into their Alexa toolbar, which is this little thing that, that they can spy on you.
[45:53.000 --> 45:59.940]  And they're, they're, but really, you know, the, the, I like, I mean, the, the reason I, I, what I get out of it is they, they also maintain a traffic rankings.
[46:00.080 --> 46:03.640]  And they're adding functionality into that for me, for Amazon scans.
[46:03.900 --> 46:05.660]  So they, they seem pretty gung ho about it now.
[46:06.820 --> 46:11.100]  Maybe they'll buy it, but they probably won't because it's like written in PHP, which sucks.
[46:11.320 --> 46:14.840]  And if it got as much traffic as Amazon gets, it would probably die.
[46:17.710 --> 46:20.880]  Has your ISP ever complained about anything that you host on your website?
[46:20.880 --> 46:21.540]  Have what?
[46:21.710 --> 46:24.340]  Your ISP ever complained about anything you host on your website?
[46:24.360 --> 46:25.300]  Oh, has my ISP ever complained?
[46:25.520 --> 46:27.040]  My, well, my ISP went bankrupt.
[46:29.100 --> 46:29.460]  Exodus.
[46:31.540 --> 46:44.420]  My, they're like, my, my servers, they, they were in, they were in New Jersey, which is, you know, which was cool because like, and technically I'm not allowed in the knock, but you know, if I, if I really need to go like swap out a hard drive, like they'll sort of let me in.
[46:44.690 --> 46:47.660]  So one day I call and I'm like, yeah, I gotta come down because my computer's all f*cked up.
[46:47.900 --> 46:53.860]  The, the, the website, by the way, if anybody cares, my sites, I have five servers, five dedicated servers down there.
[46:54.770 --> 46:58.730]  Three Linux, one Windows 2000 and one Windows NT.
[47:00.960 --> 47:04.660]  Oh, and the website is, is Cold Fusion, PHP, Perl, Java.
[47:06.320 --> 47:10.640]  The, the, I use MySQL for some of the stuff, SQL server for some of the stuff, flat files for some of the stuff.
[47:10.790 --> 47:11.420]  It's a big mess.
[47:13.000 --> 47:15.770]  I don't, which I don't recommend, but that's what happens when you don't plan.
[47:16.520 --> 47:17.840]  Wait, what the hell was the question?
[47:19.240 --> 47:19.940]  I don't even remember.
[47:20.860 --> 47:22.320]  Oh, has my ISP ever complained?
[47:22.580 --> 47:23.600]  Uh, yeah, one time.
[47:23.790 --> 47:33.290]  They were like, uh, they were like, you know, some people are writing some stuff in the message boards and again, not to be, not to like let the world know like that I'm like a big, like, like pussy loser.
[47:33.560 --> 47:35.400]  I, uh, deleted it and didn't tell anybody.
[47:35.640 --> 47:36.710]  Uh, so only once.
[47:36.840 --> 47:45.250]  Oh, also a lot of times people, if they want to complain to me, what they do is they, they think they're really going to get me by, uh, by complaining to the ISP and the ISP has the best response.
[47:45.380 --> 47:55.800]  Cause like, for example, let's say somebody were, you know, slandering you on my site, which I don't, you know, I'll, I'll take care of it if I see it, but you know, I told you the rule, the site is for the employees.
[47:55.940 --> 47:56.440]  So, you know, whatever.
[47:56.690 --> 48:02.040]  But anyway, instead of coming to me, they come to my ISP and my ISP is like, I don't, we have nothing to do with that site.
[48:02.160 --> 48:03.880]  You know, we hosted, but that's that.
[48:04.040 --> 48:06.940]  And so, uh, my ISP has been really cool, even though they're bankrupt.
[48:07.790 --> 48:08.580]  And I'm a little scared.
[48:08.660 --> 48:10.300]  Oh, oh, the point of my server is being in New Jersey.
[48:10.980 --> 48:13.860]  I, they shipped like two of them out to California without telling me.
[48:15.210 --> 48:17.020]  And like, my site was down for a day.
[48:17.210 --> 48:20.230]  They overnight, or they same date it to, uh, across the country.
[48:20.400 --> 48:22.120]  Cause like this one's bankrupt and that one's not.
[48:22.230 --> 48:23.640]  And it's really kind of, really sucks.
[48:23.840 --> 48:24.880]  And I'm trying to figure out what to do now.
[48:25.270 --> 48:28.250]  If anybody wants to give me free hosting, come see me.
[48:28.920 --> 48:30.080]  Otherwise I'll probably stay with them.
[48:30.230 --> 48:32.190]  How much bandwidth do you use per month?
[48:32.190 --> 48:33.920]  Um, how much bandwidth do I use per month?
[48:34.420 --> 48:44.600]  Um, well, the way for, for big sites, you generally, they look, they do like per second, I don't know, per month, but, um, I'm at, uh, 20, uh, gigs a second.
[48:44.900 --> 48:46.230]  No, 20 megs a second.
[48:47.000 --> 48:47.290]  Yeah.
[48:47.790 --> 48:48.160]  Sorry.
[48:49.980 --> 48:51.040]  20 megs a second.
[48:52.790 --> 48:54.340]  Which is still a lot.
[48:54.770 --> 48:57.600]  So I'm trying to, uh, really scale down on graphics.
[48:57.840 --> 49:01.540]  And it's funny when, when you look at a site, like, you know, a lot of people don't think about it.
[49:01.800 --> 49:04.820]  Go to, go to, for example, go to yahoo.com, go to their homepage.
[49:05.160 --> 49:06.840]  And until recently, they only had two graphics.
[49:07.320 --> 49:13.160]  They had a Yahoo graphic on top, and they had a little, like, Visa logo for, like, something they were selling.
[49:13.600 --> 49:28.380]  Because when a site gets as much traffic as Yahoo, which is, I think, the number one, uh, site on the Internet right now, adding one little, like, 800 byte graphic to your homepage is, like, $2 million a year in bandwidth, you know.
[49:28.560 --> 49:35.100]  And, and, and you really start to realize, like, okay, I need to, like, chill out with the graphics and the movies and all the stuff.
[49:35.340 --> 49:37.250]  So, um, you know, strip it down a little bit.
[49:37.960 --> 49:50.560]  Um, so I was just wondering, since you've given us this, uh, all these great examples of, um, what we can do to make money with our company, are there people that have written you, that have done something that have made successful?
[49:51.440 --> 49:52.400]  And who are they?
[49:53.000 --> 49:55.100]  Or not who are they, but, like, some examples?
[49:55.640 --> 49:56.120]  Well, what have people done?
[49:56.210 --> 50:05.400]  Well, the one was I gave you the example of the, of the Silicon Valley, uh, reporter guy, who, who said he figured out how to make money by selling the information that he had in these press releases.
[50:05.920 --> 50:13.020]  And to answer your question, I will, I will remember that I forgot the second half of that other guy's question, which was, like, can I invest with you?
[50:13.060 --> 50:13.620]  That question.
[50:14.100 --> 50:23.660]  Um, I, I don't, uh, I've always, well, A, I never had enough money, really, to invest in the stock market until I started, uh, PK Interactive and, and f*ck company.
[50:23.820 --> 50:29.940]  And, and by that time, the stocks were going way down, but, uh, still didn't really know a whole lot about, you know, shorting or any of that stuff.
[50:30.060 --> 50:37.300]  A, B, my lawyer was like, you know, you really shouldn't, uh, start trading on these, like, internal documents and memos and stuff you're getting all the time.
[50:37.820 --> 50:39.290]  Um, I didn't want to get wrapped up in that.
[50:39.400 --> 50:44.300]  So, I'm, uh, I'm buying an apartment, but that's my, you know, I don't really go into the market too much.
[50:45.000 --> 50:48.080]  Um, and how that relates to your question.
[50:48.480 --> 50:52.230]  Uh, all the time, I, I just got finished with an eight-city book tour.
[50:52.360 --> 50:56.080]  And every, every city I went to, there would be, like, one guy on the audience who will come up to me.
[50:56.210 --> 50:57.690]  He doesn't even have a book in his hand.
[50:57.730 --> 50:59.160]  He's like, I'm not trying to, like, buy a book.
[50:59.500 --> 51:03.080]  I just want to tell you that I made, like, $10 million because of your website.
[51:03.750 --> 51:05.660]  I'm like, you should be buying, like, two books.
[51:08.360 --> 51:14.270]  Um, uh, and, and what they do is a lot of people are using it to find, uh, real estate, for example.
[51:14.640 --> 51:17.920]  You know, companies going out of business, they gotta, they gotta sell their place cheap and fast.
[51:19.100 --> 51:19.380]  Huh?
[51:20.210 --> 51:22.730]  Oh, I think I'm running out, oh, some guy on phone.
[51:23.320 --> 51:28.560]  Um, uh, real estate, you know, the company's going to business, you can find out, uh, what, what's available.
[51:28.820 --> 51:30.640]  Um, a lot of people using it to buy and sell assets.
[51:30.900 --> 51:31.900]  Company goes out of business.
[51:32.460 --> 51:34.120]  Uh, you know, big Internet company goes out of business.
[51:34.120 --> 51:36.480]  You know there's going to be like 200 air-on chairs up for sale.
[51:38.300 --> 51:40.320]  So people are buying that stuff real cheap and selling.
[51:40.420 --> 51:43.270]  And there's a lot of different ways to make money and a lot of people just use it to short stocks.
[51:44.580 --> 51:45.080]  Yes, sir.
[51:45.300 --> 51:53.820]  I have two related intellectual property questions related to your premium service where people pay per month to get the tips that are submitted to you that you don't publish.
[51:54.270 --> 51:58.840]  And the first question is, what gives you the right to resell those tips that are given to you?
[51:59.230 --> 52:04.000]  And the second thing is, what prevents your premium customers from turning around and giving those tips away?
[52:05.140 --> 52:18.580]  The question is, what gives me the right to sell the tips that are coming in to me and then what keeps people who buy the tips from turning around and selling them or giving them away or doing whatever they want with them?
[52:20.000 --> 52:27.160]  It's not what gives me the right, it's that when you submit on the form, you have to... it's not email, it's not something like that, it's through a form.
[52:27.160 --> 52:34.160]  And the form says in huge, big-ass bold letters, whatever you put in here, I will basically sell.
[52:34.320 --> 52:35.880]  Anyone will see it, anybody who wants to see it will see it.
[52:36.100 --> 52:41.400]  So don't put any personal information in here, don't put anything you don't want the entire world to know about in here.
[52:44.160 --> 52:51.380]  And the reason why people send me stuff, if they didn't want the world to know about it, they wouldn't tell anybody.
[52:52.020 --> 52:55.080]  They tell me because they're hoping I'll put it up on the site.
[52:55.140 --> 52:57.730]  And if I put it on the site, there's four million people a month who are going to read it.
[52:58.140 --> 53:02.880]  If I don't put it on the site and it just gets sold, at least there's like a thousand people who are going to see it.
[53:02.880 --> 53:05.900]  You know, as opposed to nobody, then it's a whole big waste of putting it in.
[53:06.000 --> 53:10.250]  So people like that it's... that at least, if it doesn't make it to the site, at least somebody's seeing it.
[53:10.250 --> 53:11.290]  The people who matter are seeing it.
[53:11.580 --> 53:15.160]  Maybe some journalist is going to see it and write a story about it and then a billion people will get to see it.
[53:15.770 --> 53:20.020]  And what keeps people from turning around and selling the information that I have?
[53:20.230 --> 53:20.540]  Nothing.
[53:20.690 --> 53:25.500]  In fact, it's, you know, sure there's like a terms and conditions where I say, you know, don't sell it and don't whatever.
[53:25.690 --> 53:27.160]  But, you know, people can do whatever they want.
[53:27.290 --> 53:31.560]  You know, what keeps you from going down on the street and selling bootleg Madonna CDs?
[53:31.560 --> 53:34.320]  Like kind of nothing, you know, you can.
[53:34.920 --> 53:36.250]  Is that sufficient?
[53:36.500 --> 53:36.710]  Yeah.
[53:36.960 --> 53:37.060]  Okay.
[53:38.560 --> 53:39.400]  Any other questions?
[53:43.740 --> 53:45.600]  Any of my employees post anything that...
[53:45.600 --> 53:47.140]  Well, right now I only have one employee.
[53:48.840 --> 53:51.500]  But, for a company, because they're all...
[53:51.500 --> 53:53.100]  The old consulting company gave it to them.
[53:53.560 --> 53:57.060]  No, one of the cool things about running my site is I control what's on it.
[53:58.020 --> 54:00.740]  So I'm like, you know, big surprise, there's nothing about me on it.
[54:00.740 --> 54:04.220]  No, actually, I am probably the most slandered person on the...
[54:04.220 --> 54:07.820]  If you really do the site and you like a search for my name or something, you'll read like...
[54:07.820 --> 54:13.020]  You can find pretty much anything about me, which I use when people complain to me.
[54:13.160 --> 54:14.180]  They're like, hey, there's like...
[54:14.180 --> 54:19.900]  Okay, my site, just to give you some numbers, there are over 10 million messages that have been posted to my site in the various message boards.
[54:20.580 --> 54:24.540]  Some guy will complain because like one of them like says something bad about him.
[54:24.540 --> 54:28.120]  And I'll be dude, like five million of them say something bad about me.
[54:29.180 --> 54:30.080]  Like it's okay.
[54:31.280 --> 54:31.840]  Yes, sir.
[54:32.020 --> 54:33.440]  How much time do you spend on this?
[54:33.540 --> 54:34.720]  I mean, it's just you.
[54:34.880 --> 54:35.940]  So what's your schedule?
[54:36.080 --> 54:37.420]  Like what do you do to work on this?
[54:37.960 --> 54:38.920]  What's my schedule?
[54:38.920 --> 54:40.300]  How much time do I spend on it?
[54:42.320 --> 54:44.600]  I'm generally like a nighttime guy.
[54:44.860 --> 54:48.720]  Like I'm going to hearken to guess that most of this audience probably is too.
[54:49.660 --> 54:51.080]  Don't really like waking up early.
[54:51.200 --> 54:51.740]  Call me crazy.
[54:51.920 --> 54:54.060]  But for some reason, I feel we have something in common there.
[54:56.240 --> 55:02.380]  I generally, you know, I like to get about six or seven hours.
[55:02.580 --> 55:05.520]  I mean, I get more, but you know, six or seven or eight hours of sleep a night.
[55:05.640 --> 55:07.600]  But I generally wake up at about 1 or 2 p.m.
[55:08.280 --> 55:10.940]  and stay up really, you know, until the sun comes up.
[55:13.140 --> 55:16.620]  People ask like how many hours a day or how many hours a week do you work?
[55:16.620 --> 55:24.860]  And I never really know how to answer that question because the answer is either zero or 24 seven because it's just what I do and it's, I like to do it.
[55:24.960 --> 55:33.660]  And it's, and it's like, you know, like for some people it's like watching TV, you know, it's like that's, and I know a lot of you can totally relate to this.
[55:33.760 --> 55:36.180]  Like you're like using Photoshop right now because like it's cool.
[55:36.480 --> 55:37.040]  It's fun.
[55:37.440 --> 55:38.060]  Like whatever.
[55:38.180 --> 55:38.800]  That's what you do.
[55:38.920 --> 55:39.340]  That's what you do.
[55:39.720 --> 55:42.980]  So I'm, so I don't really know, but, but actual like work on f*ck company.
[55:43.120 --> 55:45.760]  I mean, it takes, you know, a couple of hours to write the site.
[55:45.760 --> 55:47.120]  A lot of times I'm doing maintaining it.
[55:47.180 --> 55:50.940]  A lot of times I'm restarting the SQL server every like hour because it's crashing.
[55:51.460 --> 55:57.060]  Um, so it could go anywhere from like two hours a day to like all nighters, which I do all the time.
[55:58.040 --> 55:58.520]  Yes, sir.
[55:58.760 --> 55:59.940]  What's the name of your book?
[56:00.280 --> 56:00.960]  Oh yeah.
[56:00.960 --> 56:02.400]  Let me, let me talk for a second about my book.
[56:02.500 --> 56:03.020]  What's the name of the book?
[56:03.420 --> 56:07.040]  It's called F companies spectacular.com flameouts.
[56:07.040 --> 56:08.780]  It actually is F apostrophe D.
[56:09.200 --> 56:12.760]  People always say to me, oh, is that cause Simon and Schuster didn't want to like put the word f*cked?
[56:13.140 --> 56:15.200]  Like, no, actually they did want to put the word f*cked.
[56:15.540 --> 56:21.700]  Um, but I've, I've, uh, you know, I know that Walmart isn't going to sell like a CD with like a bikini on the cover.
[56:21.880 --> 56:23.940]  Like they're not going to sell a book that says f*cked on the front.
[56:23.940 --> 56:28.840]  So, uh, I sold out as hard as possible there and put the censored version.
[56:29.640 --> 56:34.220]  Um, but the inside of the book is, is, is not, is not censored at all.
[56:34.400 --> 56:36.760]  It's, it's a lot of, a lot of naughty.
[56:36.940 --> 56:39.300]  You must be 18 or older to open this book.
[56:39.420 --> 56:39.840]  Click here.
[56:40.820 --> 56:46.420]  Um, and, uh, it's called F company spectacular.com flameouts really quickly.
[56:46.420 --> 56:48.620]  What it is is it's sort of like a bathroom reading kind of thing.
[56:48.620 --> 56:55.560]  It's 150 short stories of the dumbest, most ridiculous.com business plans.
[56:55.800 --> 57:02.320]  I could find out there, um, that had millions, you know, how much money, how many millions went into them and how many people were affected and what they tried to do.
[57:02.440 --> 57:09.380]  I mean, there's everything from, well, there's, you know, all the ones that we've all heard of pets and web van and Cosmo and furniture.com.
[57:09.520 --> 57:14.740]  But what, what's more interesting are the ones that you haven't heard of that, that, uh, went through just as much money.
[57:15.720 --> 57:21.100]  Like there's heavenly door.com spent $20 million trying to sell cemetery plots online.
[57:22.240 --> 57:31.600]  Uh, uh, uh, oh, DigiSense spent $20 million making a device so that you could smell websites.
[57:33.560 --> 57:48.900]  It's a thing that would, you plug into your computer and, you know, they, they, they, uh, are trying to pass through like the, uh, like, like the W3, you know, standards, like a, uh, HTML tag for like, you know, smell, like scent equals strawberries.
[57:49.960 --> 57:55.360]  And then this thing like puffs out like little smells of, of, um, I, it's nuts.
[57:55.540 --> 57:57.020]  I know, but that, that didn't take off.
[57:57.140 --> 58:02.460]  That's funny cause that's one of those things that's like really, really cool, but there's like no commercial reason for it.
[58:03.600 --> 58:09.420]  So anyway, so it's got a lot of stuff like that in it and, uh, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty wacky, I think.
[58:10.780 --> 58:12.780]  Uh, any other questions?
[58:13.620 --> 58:14.220]  I'm done.
[58:14.460 --> 58:15.040]  I'm getting the X.
[58:15.220 --> 58:15.520]  Thank you.