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My First MillionKevin Rose: His $100M/Year Watch Blog, Money From Digg.com, & Web3 Business (#382)
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Kevin Rose on Hodinkee, Early Investing, AI, and Web3
- Kevin Rose says he builds things out of curiosity and a drive to make what doesn't exist, estimating that about 90% of his 10 to 15 ventures went to zero while a few became big.
- He says his best financial returns came from small angel checks in companies like Twitter and Square, made possible by friendships formed when Digg was at its peak.
- Rose explains how he merged his Watchville app with Hodinkee, became its CEO, and grew it from about $1.5 to $2 million in revenue to over $100 million by combining trusted, technical editorial with luxury watch commerce.
- He is bullish on AI transforming creative work and design within five years, and he funds a rapamycin longevity study in dogs, while he keeps his personal portfolio simple with Vanguard index funds and bills.
- In a friendly debate, Rose agrees with the hosts' critique of decentralization maximalism, while arguing NFTs and blockchains are useful for provenance, loyalty, and portable digital items, and that most users won't know they're using them.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasSmall early checks built through relationships drove his biggest returns.
Rose says Digg's success brought friendships with founders like Dorsey, Williams, and Zuckerberg, and tiny seed checks, such as $25K into Twitter, later became worth millions.
Trust built through technical editorial enables high-priced commerce.
Rose says Hodinkee's geeky, expert writing earned reader trust, which made readers willing to spend $20,000 to $50,000 on a watch it recommended.
Hire subject-matter obsessives and add an editorial layer.
Asked whether to hire writers or business people, Rose said he found people with a natural love of horology, even if only B+ writers, and had copy editors polish their technical drafts.
Whether to shut down a project depends on timing, not a fixed deadline.
Rose has no set number of months; his fasting app Zero sat at tens of thousands of users for eight months before exploding, while the photo app Tiny was shut down quickly because it was a feature, not a product.
Focus and saying no matter, as seen in Zuckerberg.
Rose recalls being struck by how mature and open Zuckerberg was at 21, and agrees with Shaan that relentless focus on what to say no to is essential in product.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesIf I see something that doesn't exist that should exist, I wanna go build it, and I've done that a handful of times. Um, you know, probably at least 10 to 15 businesses, of which, you know, 90% of them go to zero, and then there's a few that pop and become, you know, pretty big.
— Kevin Rose
With that technical hardcore writing developed trust. And so you ... And once you have the trust of your readers, um, then you're able to extend commerce in a meaningful way.
— Kevin Rose
I remember as a young entrepreneur just kind of, uh, being on this 24/7 hustle to go build, build, build. I gotta win. I have to win. I have to win. And it created a level of anxiety that was not good for me.
— Kevin Rose
Oftentimes it's, it's more what you say no to than what you say yes to on, on the product side.
— Kevin Rose
Any time you get to the fringes of anything where it's like, "This is the only thing that matters," you get into crazy town in my point of view.
— Kevin Rose
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
