True Rumors
Guy Kawasaki is the Silicon Valley celebrity since the 1980s. He worked as an evangelist for the Macintosh computer, later he tried running his own software companies that didn’t do very well. He found his niche in motivational speaking, never mind that he himself is not very successful in operating companies!
With Guy Kawasaki so closely associated with start-ups, there has been considerable curiosity in recent weeks about what his own start-up would be like, as whispers he was up to something began circulating on blogs such as TechCrunch.
Guy regularly tells his audiences that the only companies worth starting are those that can change the world. So, if you think that he started a company that “could change the world”, well… take a look at truemors.com and see it for yourself.
Is Truemors really a world-changing-company? Hardly. In this site, people can use email or the phone to call in “true rumors” they’ve just heard. The submissions are categorized like “Business,” “Science and Tech” and such — then users vote for the ones they like the most.
This site is the mixture of twitter and digg. If anyone else started a site like this, no one would have visited it. Guy Kawasaki used his celebrity status and blogs to spread the word. A site is developed just to spread the rumors?! Man… give me a break!
Guy Kawasaki says he has been working on Truemors for just three months. Because it uses free software, with programming done by a for-hire outfit in called Electric Pulp located in the high tech mecca of South Dakota, the costs are minimal. Guy says to date, he has spent $12,000 on Truemors.
Here is his punch line: “During the dot-com bubble, you needed $5 million to do stupid ideas. Now you can do stupid ideas for 12 grand.”
