“It’s not that Kentucky doesn’t want tech startups. They really, really do. They say so all the time. Constantly. I’m just not sure what they think Step 2 is. It’s like that single friend we all have who wants to meet someone (anyone), but never talks to people and rarely leaves the house.”—Drew Curtis
The “News” Distillery
Has Drew Curtis’s Fark.com suceeded because of Lexington, or in spite of it?
Lexington’s Drew Curtis posted an excellent piece on GigaOm last weekend, “Why Startups Outside Tech Cities Aren’t Totally Farked.”
Curtis is the founder and CEO of Fark.com, a news-aggregator and edited social networking news site, started in 1999. He described it to Poynter as “a news distillery. ‘Cause that’s a Kentucky thing, it works out well.” Fark’s daily gathering of absurd headlines has led to a book and a Jeopardy category. The site celebrated its tenth anniversary last year, and that’s at least partly because Curtis found ways to monetize the web back in the dark ages when conventional media was grasping at pay walls as “innovation.”
Later this month he’ll be speaking at Web 2.0 in New York on “Why the Online Ad Model is Currently Broken and How to Fix it.” Next month, he’ll be kicking off UK Tech Week with a talk in the UK Student Center Ballroom on October 18.
In his GigaOm piece, he writes candidly, “it’s a lot harder to run a startup in Kentucky than it would have been to do it elsewhere. It’s not impossible, mind you, but after having done this for 12 years and having compared my experience with friends at other tech startups, they had an easier time of it.”
Where’s the disconnect?
Lexington (and the state of Kentucky) constantly (constantly) broadcast their interest in attracting the high tech sector to the region. (Mayor Newberry’s platform includes Horses, Healthcare, and High Tech, in fact. Contrast Kentucky’s “theoretical” approach with the boots-on-the-ground Massachusetts initiatives for BioReady Communities, and you have an idea of how far behind Lexington lags. Somewhat controversially, the LFUCG website wasn’t even built by a Lexington firm; it was outsourced to a California company.)
Curtis says, “It’s not that Kentucky doesn’t want tech startups. They really, really do. They say so all the time. Constantly. I’m just not sure what they think Step 2 is. It’s like that single friend we all have who wants to meet someone (anyone), but never talks to people and rarely leaves the house.”
And it isn’t that Lexington is poor, or without resources. “There’s more money here than most people would think, especially in Central Kentucky. However, very little money is both accessible and focused on small startup tech companies. Every month, Kentucky hands out a dozen or so grants and loans to existing mid-size manufacturing operations to create hundreds of new $10-an-hour jobs, but nothing useful is available for smaller operations like Fark. We’re too small to qualify for tax incentives, too large from a revenue standpoint to qualify for startup grants, and the business loans available have somewhat onerous terms. I ran a few of the Kentucky grant and economic development programs by a Bay Area friend experienced in raising capital, and his opinion was they were only useful as options of last resort. He said that after he stopped laughing hysterically, by the way.”
Outside of frequent radio appearances, local media attention for Fark has been fairly scant, and Lexington isn’t a hotbed for tech media. Curtis writes, “There are other drawbacks to being outside of a large financial center as well. Media coverage is somewhat hard to come by. Tech blogs and legacy media exist mainly in the larger cities. I’d probably get more tech blog coverage if I could hang out with them after hours.”
When Billy Hylton interviewed Drew Curtis in 2002 for the 2002 “Who’s Drew?” coverstory, he began the article, “Lexington owes Drew Curtis an apology.” At the time, Hylton cited Shift magazine’s ranking of Curtis as number 10 on a top 25 web personality list, finding Curtis “more fetching than some of the digerati elite, like Napster’s Shawn Fanning, Matt Drudge, and even gadfly Michael Moore.” (Drew has outlasted Shift magazine.)
In 2001, Hylton reported “Fark.com received an astonishing thirty million page views, a number wildly out of reach to all but a handful of web sites.” For years, Fark.com was voted “best local blog” by Ace Readers in the Ace Best of Lexington readers’ polls, and for years, Drew Curtis would have to patiently explain, “Fark isn’t a blog.”
Today, Curtis reports the infrastructure here is sufficient, noting, “There’s enough Internet connectivity available to do pretty much whatever, including hosting a website locally that gets 60 million page views per month.”
Would he do another startup here? It sounds like it. “If I ever do another startup that takes on investors, I’ll argue all day long that the actual development arm be based in Kentucky. Or maybe I’ll just do it on my own again. Because at the end of the day, the major obstacle I had to overcome living in Kentucky was the learning curve. No one in the state had any idea how to grow, operate, and monetize a website the size of Fark. These days, there’s one guy who does know.”
Drew Curtis will speak at 7 pm, October 18 in the UK Student Center Ballroom, kicking off UK’s Tech Week, sponsored by the College of Communications and Information Studies and its ICT Co-Lab.
This article originally appeared as a Sunday editorial at http://www.aceweekly.blogspot.com.
