Electric Minds!

In 1996, I started Electric Minds with $2 million from Softbank. The idea was to create a high quality online magazine about technology and issues around technology, with assigned, edited articles. Each article had a forum thread attached -- we used one of the first web-based forums -- in which we would encourage high quality discourse about technology. Our intention was to solicit, edit, and pay writers for articles based on the best forum posts: what we now call "user generated content" and "social media." In 1996, Time Magazine named us one of the ten best websites of 1996 (unfortunately, the article is now behind a paywall). In 1997, we were out of business. Electric Minds failed because we were ten years too early with the user generated content and social media -- part of the PR pitch for the site was that we wanted to usher in the era of "the social web" (a term that Wikipedia attributes to me). It also failed because it relied on ad sales by a human (Google didn't exist until 1999, and their auto placement of ads was still later), because our venture capitalist, Softbank, pulled the rug out from under us after assuring us they would continue to support us, and because I was a shitty CEO. One of my most destructive weaknesses was my inability to really judge the character of the people I was hiring -- and reluctance to fire them when they proved inadequate. We saved a snapshot of the site's content, minus the forum conversations, which were lost when the content management system went away. One of the features that is still visible was our Virtual Community Center -- a compendium of links to the many virtual communities that existed in 1996-97.