Wikia CEO on lunacy, air miles and being profitless
Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia Inc., showed up for a recent interview in a brown T-shirt that said "Wikia" in yellow letters on the front, and "Lunatic" on the back.
"We have a monopoly on lunacy," he said, when asked about the shirt.
While Google Inc. works hard to nurture its image as a whacky, non-corporate company, Wikia seems to manage it quite effortlessly. Started by Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales, the company is not making much money yet, and its executives seem barely interested in doing so. But they do like to work. The company began life building Web sites using its wiki collaboration software where users can discuss their passions, vent opinions and share experiences. So far there are 3,000 sites and around 80,000 Web pages, supported by the 38 people at Wikia.
Somehow that wasn't enough, so the company decided to build a search engine, too. And when they're done with it, they plan to put all the software, algorithms and a constantly-updated index of the Web on the Internet, for use by anyone. For free.
Penchina even showed this reporter an e-mail to a potential investor which started: "To be honest, you'd have to be crazy to invest in us ..." It's not exactly a pitch that most venture capitalists would go for. But sometimes it works, according to Penchina. "Wikia has had several buy-out offers," he said, but he's "not interested."
He sat down recently with IDG News Service to talk about his company and what makes him tick.
IDG News Service: What's the biggest site in your community today?
Gil Penchina: WowWiki [World of Warcraft]. It's where people give advice to each other on the game, how to build guilds, get through parts of the game, that kind of stuff. There are over 30,000 pages, all by contributing members.
IDGNS: Is it a non-profit?
Penchina: WowWiki is a for-profit site. You can barely tell by looking at it, but we sell a very modest amount of adds. We're not a non-profit, we're profit-less. We're not really worried about profit now. We're worried about building revenue. Our theory is we'll make a little money on a lot of topics, instead of a lot of money on a few topics.
IDGNS: How did you get involved with Wikia?
Penchina: We're about two and a half years old. I've been here about a year and a half. I was originally an investor, and I invested without having much information, which is scary. Welcome to Silicon Valley. So I had dinner with Jimmy a couple months after I did my investment, basically to find out what the heck I'd put my money into. He started to talk about what Wikipedia was trying to accomplish, its mission to make information free, and how it had become global and how people were sending him checks for $1,000 to donate, and I said seriously? People are sending checks for $1,000 to a Web site? That's pretty passionate, who are these people?
So it got me all amped up on how interesting it was
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