Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

All Hail the "Maxist" Revolution!

You have to hand it to Slide Founder and CEO Max Levchin, who has just launched a new blog.

maxlevchin

The title of the blog? “You’ve Gotta Be Kidding Me: The Official Press Organ of the Maxist Revolution.”

Very funny, Max! (Here the Ukrainian-born Levchin is pictured in Moscow’s Red Square!)

By spooky coincidence, “you’ve gotta be kidding me” is the working title and guiding principle of a post I am preparing on the recent $500 million valuation for the San Francisco-based widget maker!

More on kooky widget economics soon, but Levchin is a welcome addition to the blogosphere, given his obvious intellect and engaging personality.

He joins other entrepreneurs, like Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen, who have proved themselves to be most excellent bloggers.

Levchin’s first post is about how to successfully launch a social-networking development platform, which he knows a thing or two about.

I am particularly intrigued by No. 9 and No. 10:

9. Make the No. 1 measurable goal of your PR team the amount of coverage that successful (or just interesting) developers get. People will jump through all kinds of hoops to be in the papers. Double so if the article lists them next to a [your] big brand.

10. Hold frequent developer events and invite leading developers to speak at those. Elevating developers (especially the smaller ones) to a pseudo-celebrity status can create a great deal of good will.

Hoop-jumping to get in papers and pseudo-celebrity status sounds a little Britney Spears for my tastes, but I like the spirit of it!

Of course, he did forget getting a crazy valuation as the best attention-seeking missile of all, and he already had a close-shaved haircut!

Here’s Max doing some Olympic hoop-jumping in one of my video interviews with him last fall, discussing the IPO market for widget companies like Slide:

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google