It gives me immense pleasure to introduce CEO of social personalized startpage startup Pageflakes, Dan Cohen. I had the rare pleasure of interviewing a successful CEO, down to earth, who was more than happy to share his experiences to our passionate readers, and face-to-face no less. Thank you Dan for reminding me why I love being a writer for Folksonomy.

All thoughts are most welcome and enjoy reading!

How did you guys get started?

Pageflakes was actually started virtually. It's actually a very interesting story.

Two German entrepreneurs in Germany who had been involved in prior startups, in sort of the first gen of the web, hooked up with a guy from Bangladesh and so all these guys hooked up via the web and started Pageflakes probably a little over a year ago.

The interesting thing they always had in their minds was once again taking this concept of a personalized page. I worked at MyYahoo right before this and that is probably one of the oldest personalized pages on the web, its about 10 years plus old. Then you got maybe applying Ajax to a personalized page and calling modules widgets, I mean that stuff has always been around.

But their idea was to make it social.

It was to take a personalized page and flip it around and allow people to sort of look at what you’re looking at. So the things you are interested in and things you find compelling and share that with other people and so that was really I think the unique idea that these guys pioneered.

I came on board January few months after they thought and relaunched the first version and been here about close to 7 months. Its gone by very quickly and having the ability to sort of really push the envelope of what personalized pages can do is just a thrill for me cause I been working on it for so long so its just great.

With the personalized startpage space being as competitive as it is, how did you come to the decision that quitting Yahoo and joining Pageflakes as CEO was a wise career move?

Well, I been a startup CEO. This is my third time. One was in enterprise, it was called USConnect Enterprise software for small medium businesses. This was back in the day. After that, I did a startup called Personity and this was mobile telecommunications infrastructure, to do “push-to-talk," presence, and instant messaging for mobile carriers.
Did a stint at Google running personalized products including iGoogle. Then, went to Yahoo to run MyYahoo.

So the opportunity came along and as far as a career move goes I love startups, and I just love being in a startup. I am a startup guy and everybody who knows me knows I am a startup guy.

I really enjoyed my experiences at Google and Yahoo and had the opportunity to work with some great people and on some great things. This is what I really wanted to do - be a CEO of a top-tier backed Silicon Valley startup pushing the envelope for something that I think is gonna be really really really big and that is exactly what I’m doing so I think it’s a great fit.

I mean I know personalized pages inside out and am the only person that I know who has worked on both iGoogle and MyYahoo in the world. I am a startup CEO, we got great VC backers, and a great management team. What more could you ask for? Anybody would be stupid not to do this.

For the sake of our readers who don’t know about Pageflakes, can you share with us, some of the new features being offered that differentiate you from your competitors?

Absolutely! You know I think we alluded to this before, but when I was sort of looking at Pageflakes to come out of MyYahoo and part of that Google, and take a look and see what was special about Pageflakes, I sort of had to ask myself the same question. I was looking at startups in this space and looking at what people were doing and I felt that Pageflakes had a great potential to be a very mainstream product.

I mean personalized pages, although they are very popular, the real hardcore users of those pages are still what you would consider to be the early adopter types. The vision that I had and Pageflakes sort of lined up as real differentiators – how do you make this a really entertaining mass market product as opposed to another RSS reader or news aggregator which is what most of these products have historically been?

For example MyYahoo is the #1 RSS reader in the world. People don’t think of it as the #1 Personalized homepage in the world right, they think of it as this RSS reader so that was one main differentiator - Our focus is on trying to do this for everybody and that’s evidence in the fact that we don’t even call them widgets, we don’t talk about RSS, we talk about flakes. Flakes, that go on your page. A page of flakes. And flakes of course are like snowflakes. That’s where we got the name “Blizzard” by the way for the snowstorm. They are really lightweight applications that go on a page. So people just need to know there’s a flake for dogs, cats, or whatever they are really interested in. And they’ll be able to find it.

The thing is this social aspect. Although they’ve been many attempts and discussions around doing this stuff, we are going to be the first company that is a major player in this market to have a social personalized page. Having a profile behind your personalized page that has your name, your interests, and that type of thing. The ability to find other people that have similar interests.

I’ve already done this with our demo users. I’ve actually already met some people that have similar interests to me. I like road cycling, rock bands, alternative music, and indie music. I’ve lived in Pittsburg for a while so I’m a huge Pittsburg Stealers fan. I mean there’s not many people with that exact same combination, but I found a couple of people on Pageflakes that way and now I’ve formed a network with these people. This differentiates us from a lot of the other social networks out there.

A social network kinda requires that you belong and publish yourself on day one. You need a profile and you need to be kinda out there. With a personalized page, what you’re doing is you’re starting off as an individual consuming your own content. You don’t have to join the social network to be part of it, but if you do, you’re gonna connect with people on a very different level.

You know, I think that most social networks, to break it down are about meeting people for social, perhaps romantic pursuits, or finding a job right. I mean everybody says a lot of social networks is about finding a job and there’s certain social networks out there that you don’t visit once you’re done finding a job.

Pageflakes is more what I think is gonna resonate with people that want to connect along whats in their head, what their interested in, or what they know about and connect with people in that way. It may not be about finding a job, it may not be about romantic relationships, but it certainly will be about the fact that you share common interests with people and I think its gonna be really exciting. So those things in general, the mass market and the intersection of personalized pages with social media are two huge differentiators for Pageflakes.

So you mentioned about finding a job, for the benefit of our readers, is Pageflakes hiring?

Oh yes, we are very much hiring and thank you for asking. Yes. If you love Pageflakes and you kinda wanna push the envelope of what you can do with AJAX, personalized pages, and social media, we’re the place for you. Feel free to email me directly and I’ll ensure your resume gets to the right place.

Going on the assumption that the vast majority of users today still do not use personalized homepage services yet, what is Pageflakes plan in the next 3-5 years to persuade more users to adopt its service?

That’s a great question. Think that most of these Web 2.0 companies rely on organic growth, viral growth, and those kinds of things. We’re no exception. We have that aspect as well.

I think that a lot of companies that start off being social networks to begin with, obviously, have an advantage in that respect. And by definition, you need to invite another 10 or 20 more people to make it useful. Personalized pages tend to grow a little bit more slowly. Think that once we launch this grand experiment of launching the social network intertwined with personalized pages that will change the dynamics of that quite a bit.

The second thing is this “pagecasting” thing. We talked about the social aspects of pages and we called it “pagecasting.” So when you take a page and show it to the world, you’re making a “pagecast.” And a lot of people are taking “pagecasts” and publishing it. Like I published one on a band called “Weem” so you can go to my pagecast and you’ll see my Weem page. And there are actual people that like the band, Weem, that come to my page. Now that is a webpage so you don’t have to be a Pageflakes user, just like you’re roaming the web like any other site. So what we’re finding is that for each of those "pagecasts" whether it be ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, hundreds, or even thousands we see people visiting each other's site. Its sort of like a network of user generated websites in that way sort of like a next generation Yahoo or something like that which has different properties and services. In our case, the "pagecast."

So that is causing a lot of people to visit Pageflakes and whether they use a personalized page or not, I mean they are technically a user of our product. We think that we got a lot of interesting ways to attract users. In addition to that, in the coming months, you’ll hear us talking about some pretty exciting partnerships that we think will have a huge impact on that as well.

Congratulations on your growth, I read somewhere your users have created 100,000+ Pagecasts already?

We have approximately 120,000 users that have gone to publishing a "pagecast." The things they are doing is just amazing. One of my favorite ones is “adoption of Ethiopian children” page that we have and its kinda great to be working on a product that you kinda have an impact on people’s lives. If somebody adopts a child as a result of this page, you know that’s something that may not have happened before. That’s pretty rewarding for me and everybody in the company.

Sometimes things are for fun like intellectual exercises, comedy jokes, or whatever. But there’s also serious stuff like this and its all over the map. One thing I’ll point out to you about the “pagecast” thing you remind me of is one of the new features that we have is called the random “pagecast.” If you go to the "pagecast" and click what looks like a little “ipod shuffle” icon it will literally spin the directory and just land on a “pagecast” that somebody made. And so if you really want to spend a couple minutes or a few hours to get inside people’s heads to find out what they’re doing, try the random “pagecast” feature, its just awesome!

On the note of user adoption, in terms of long-term strategic goals, do you plan to focus on converting users or is Pageflakes targeting new adopters?

That is a great question. Both. I mean certainly in the U.S. there is more of a saturation of personalized page users than anywhere else in the world. And so I think that in the U.S. there is more of a converting existing page users and we’re doing a pretty good job of it. A lot of our users are coming from other products and that’s great. And obviously, I used to work at some of these other products and in some cases, I’d like to think they were coming with me. In Europe and elsewhere in the world, people are coming to us that have never used a personalized page before so the short answer, Sian is its both.

How many people consist of the Pageflakes team worldwide today?

Our offices are in the U.S., London, Germany, and Malaysia. I think we have a few people scattered in other places but that’s the main concentration. We don’t like to talk specifically about employee counts, but its under 50, like a typical startup.

In this highly competitive market, what is Pageflakes strategy to hire and retain talent?

That’s a great question too. I mean in a lot of cases the people that are coming to work for us are users of the product themselves and they love it. Like Benjamin over here, he publishes a blog and a “pagecast” called “All the marmalade” which is a cooking blog and “pagecast” and he approached us. He’s a product manager and really wanted to work for Pageflakes. So we talked to him and he’s obviously very passionate about what we do and that’s a big part of it.

One of the interesting angles that we have is that we are based on .NET so we are based on Microsoft technology as opposed to the LAMP stack, and things like that which makes us unique. There aren’t many companies that are pushing the envelope of this scale with .NET technology so if you are a .NET or Microsoft guy this is going to be an incredible place to work because we are doing some great things. By the way, the last company that was massively successful with .NET technology of that scale was MySpace. So we think we have a very interesting proposition for certain types of people that want to work on this kinda technology and its just a lot of fun to work on a product like this.

You were the founder and CEO of two technology companies, can you please share your experiences of how the skill one should possess as “startup CEO” has evolved over the years?

Yeah sure. I think that’s a great question. I started my first company when I was 21. I was undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon so I been around long enough to work on some of those ancient Internet technologies before the World Wide Web. I basically started a consulting company out of that and over the next 9 years, I converted from being a pure tech geek to being able to understand how to be a business person. I like to say, I kinda went to the business school of Hard Knox. I made a lot of mistakes. I mean, if you’re 21/22 years old and an engineer you don’t know a lot about lot of things. You may think that you do but you don’t.

So to answer your question, making mistakes in a continual learning process, some good mentors, and having some people that I was fortunate to hire and work with on my teams, all had a huge impact on me and what I’ve done.

You know we’re all still learning, but when you get to your third startup, you got some great experiences and some great things. I relied a lot on our board of directors, investors, ad visors, and the management team here.

It’s kinda funny because when I was the young kid, people used to say, “I needed adult supervision,” but now I am the adult supervision. I never thought I’d see that day but here I am.

For the benefit of our learning hungry readers, could you please share what you would think is the greatest obstacle Pageflakes has encountered up to today?

Well, lets see, that’s a good question. I think there’s so much opportunity for us. There’s so much interesting things that we could be doing that I think the challenge is always going to be that we focus on things and not get distracted by a lot of great opportunities that might not be in our sweet spot.

Two, just scaling fast enough to handle the opportunity. That’s everything from hosting, to employees, to management, all the way up and down the scale. One analogy is trying to build the race car when its on the track and that’s what we’re doing and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

What do you do for leisure and relaxation?

I try to get some sleep which is far in between these days. I have a young daughter, she’s 22 months old so literally any amount of leisure time I get which is pretty limited, I try to spend it with the family and go on bike rides. I am a road cyclist. I don’t ride as much as I used to but I like to get my bike out and ride when I can. The SF bay area is one of most tremendous places to ride a road bike.

I shouldn't say I play drums because I haven’t played in a long time but I do play drums and like to jam occasionally. It’s been a long time but I do like to see live music. Of course, everything else in my life is about gadgets and technology, but that’s the work side.

Message to leave with:

Of course there’s the shameless plug. Try the new version of Pageflakes launching July 19 2007! And thanks for being an open-minded group of folks that are really interested in entrepreneurship and how companies get started. And of course you and your insightful questions. It’s fantastic to talk to people that really get it and really have some insight into it and thanks for the support. Rock on!