Valleywag: Self-demotion

How Oprah helped a startup CEO take Yahoo for $300 million

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:40:00 PDT

In its April 2008 issue, Entrepreneur caught the immodest-to-a-fault Gurbaksh Chahal in a self-promoting mood — not hard to do — when it asked him how he sold ad-targeting startup BlueLithium to Yahoo for $300 million. "G" — as Chalal calls himself — responded with a tale from the life of Oprah:

A couple years ago, Oprah went to Montecito, saw a house and fell in love with it. It wasn't for sale, so she ended up paying above market value for it—several times over the price—because it was something she really, really wanted. That's an analogy for selling a company. You want to be the house that everybody wants that's not for sale. I saw the market consolidating. I couldn't put a "for sale" sign out there, so I had to do it unconventionally. The way I did it was to make sure people realized I wasn't for sale. It made them realize that they needed me. They heard from different sources in different ways what BlueLithium was. That attracted them to my company rather than me going [to them]

The short version: Play hard to get. If only Chahal took his own advice when it came to pitching himself to the media.

Andrew Baron accelerates Twitter's descent into spam platform

Jackson West — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:00:00 PDT

Twitter has won kudos for being relatively resistant to spam. That may change. Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron, not pleased with the level of interaction his account has generated, has put it up for sale on eBay.

It would be silly to just delete this account I have here, especially if there is someone out there that had like interests and had something to say or wanted to get involved in some relevant conversations.

By "something to say," we assume Baron means "something to sell" — after all, why else would someone up the current bid of $1,525? In order to reach Baron's 1,635 followers with breakfast updates and cat photos?

No, it's to leverage Twitter's potential as a generator of links which increase websites' ranking in Google's search results. The good news for heavy Twitter users is that this sets the price of followers at around a dollar each. Maybe following every single account that adds you, spammer or otherwise, isn't such a bad idea after all. The only reason top Twitter user Jason Calacanis isn't selling his account? He's already using it for spam that promotes his business. (Photo by Dummycast.com's JA Donnelly)