Guy Kawasaki is the co-founder of Truemors. Guy is also a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures. Visit Guy's blog here.

How do you respond to people who say "Truemors is only news because Guy Kawasaki is launching it"?

They have a firm grasp of the obvious.

If it fails, it will only be news because it's my company. If it succeeds, t will only be news because it succeeds. Such is life.

How often is the criticism Truemors receives helpful? Do you ignore the criticism?

It was hard to ignore because of the high volume. :-) The issues were along the lines of

1. stupid idea
2. too much spam/crap
3. slow
4. Guy's censoring.

My responses, respectively, are

1. It's only stupid if it fails, and it hasn't failed yet. Even if it does fail, it was only $12,000.
2. If you provide a tool like this, some people feel compelled to test the edges. On the first day, we deleted about 50% of the posts. Some people posted crap, complained that there was crap, and then complained that I censored crap. This is like someone murdering his parents and then asking for a lenient sentence because he's an orphan.
3. It was slow. We changed ISPs. Unfortunately, this quintupled our breakeven point--from $30/month to $150/month. Life's tough for a startup. :-)
4. I'm censoring and proud of it. If a posting isn't a "true rumor," it will be deleted. The purpose of Truemors isn't to provide a place for rants, raves, spam, ads, or censor bait.

A quick test is this, If you read something on Truemors, would you tell your friend/spouse/colleague, "Did you hear that....?" Thus, we will delete "Guy sucks." We will also delete "Guy is great."

Democratization isn't the same as anarchy. 50% of the bloggers complain that there's too much crap. The other 50% complain that I censor. What's a guy to do? :-)

People have asked whether or not you would even consider funding a service identical to Truemors had you not started it. What's your answer to this question?

There have been many ideas that I would not have funded that became great successes, and there have been many ideas that I did fund that failed. The only reason I wouldn't have funded something like Truemors is if the entrepreneur only needed $12,000. The due diligence would cost more than that--luckily, I didn't have to check my own references.

If a startup is initially met with a significant amount of negative feedback, how can entrepreneurs decide whether their company is 'premature' or 'stillborn'?

This is a great question. I learned first hand about the negativity that greets a new idea, and I have even greater respect for anyone who starts a company. If entrepreneurs listened to everything in the blogosphere, no one would start anything.

Whether a company is premature or stillborn isn't the important question. "Do you believe enough to get pregnant?" is the important question.

How many people are working behind the scenes on Truemors? How are you combating spam?

In full-time equivalents, roughly two people are working on Truemors. Have you looked at Truemors lately? It's pretty clean because we delete junk. We'll try to throw some technology at the problem too.

However, we will not "require" registration to post. That is antithetical to the concept of democratizing information. With hindsight, we created too open and too trusting a system, but this is better than too closed and controlled a system. Live and learn.