TechDirt was profiled in the San Francisco Cronicle today:
In the cutthroat business environment of Silicon Valley, industry information is perhaps the best tool for success. With the right kind of dirt, you’re golden; without inside scoops, you’re just about as clueless as the average Joe.
Enter Techdirt, a Belmont company designed to educate the masses. Via its Web site accessible by the public, the firm produces daily snippets of analysis on all of the industry’s latest news. Through password-protected private sites for corporate clients, the company also produces industry- specific analysis designed to help firms get ahead.
CEO Mike Masnick, a 30-year-old with an insatiable appetite for news, founded the company in 1997 and is still its most prolific analyst. He has also piloted the firm’s rise — last year, Techdirt tripled its staff to 12 and its revenues grew 400 percent from 2003, according to the company.
“It’s been quite a ride,” he says, noting that the company has been built solely on revenue, not on venture capital like most firms in the area. “If you had told me years ago that I’d build a company on this kind of news analysis, I wouldn’t have believed you for a second.”
Techdirt began as a business school project when Masnick was attending Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. To keep fellow graduate students up to speed on developments in technology, Masnick began a weekly e-mail newsletter with pithy snippets that analyzed all of the latest technology news. Gradually, as more people began clamoring for the newsletter, Techdirt evolved from a weekly e-mail into a Web site updated daily.
Masnick finished business school, then took his project west, to the Bay Area. After leaving a job at a (now defunct) high-tech startup in 2000, Masnick made Techdirt official, and incorporated the business. He then persuaded some like-minded folks from Intel, CNET and McGraw-Hill to help him run the show…
Finding the right mix of opinion and “reportage” is tricky. You don’t want to alienate people — but you gotta have fun providing value-added perspective or linkage. We’re jealous. TechDirt has its finger on the pulse of the industry and generally scoops everybody.
With the exception of Om Malik and Karl Bode, of course.
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