Heh, I was first employee of Sulekha actually -- took a year off grad school after my qualifiers in 2000 and worked with them getting the whole thing going for about a year before going back to my PhD. Satya really wanted me to stay, but by 2001, it was clear that writing wasn't going to be meaningful revenue driver and they had pivoted to ticketing and classifieds, which worked as revenue streams, didn't rely on the writing to generate demand, and were not interesting for me. I also stopped writing there as writing steadily because 2nd, 3rd,... 10th priority, before ultimately being abandoned altogether. Which I don't blame them for.
In their defense, Satya and Sangeeta (who remain good friends, though I haven't been in touch for years) had a very tough challenge in the beginning. The initial angel round (from Param Parameswaran, Somasegar etc in 2000, right around the dotcom bust) was just barely enough to get us off the ground, and the server bills were getting bigger every month. The coffeehouse moderation was getting more demanding by the day. They did compensate a handful of us who had been helping out with some moderation and editing (I think they gave me $2000 before I joined them). In hindsight, there was really no way to make a writing platform pay in 2000. Now that we can see sort of how it can work with Substack (modulo their VC overhang), it's clear the e-zine model was too idealistic and the infrastructure wasn't ready. I recall the sheer relief when the ticketing business started to work and we got some actual revenue, but also the letdown feeling of the writing being on the wall for the... writing. Only the name "sulekha" remained. It's not surprising that today few know sulekha started as a writing and forums thing. It's only known for classifieds, ticketing and such. The 90s internet was something like an experiment in idealism that taught all of us a lot, but imo was a bit of a dead end if taken too seriously. I think we're in a similar phase with AI and training rights compensation now. I for one, am frankly fine feeding the LLM training scrapers for free. It's nice to be memorialized in the foundation model weights. I'll find other ways to make money :) On Fri, Jun 7, 2024 at 9:29 AM Udhay Shankar N via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 7, 2024 at 8:38 AM Venkatesh Rao via Silklist < > [email protected]> wrote: > > Ah yes, haven't heard those names in a long time. Ramesh later wrote a few >> pieces on Sulekha too. That whole scene was the equivalent of the Well for >> desis. >> > > I wrote (meaning, I let Sulekha use a couple of older pieces of mine) > there also briefly in that era. Stopped doing that when Satya, the founder, > said he intended to publish the contributions (including mine) in a > for-profit site, *without* compensating the writers (including me). > > Udhay > > -- > Silklist mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist >
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