King  Gary 

There’s some chatter going on with regards to Guy Kawasaki‘s latest web venture, Truemors, a “rumor reporting site. Users text, email or call in a rumor and other users vote on it. Popular rumors make it to the home page.” (from from TechCrunch) and how Guy mentions that it (only) costs him $12,000 for the entire website to go from an idea to reality.

There’s already been quite a bit of criticism about this, most recently from Mathew Ingram, who’s post is entitled “Kawasaki: How I wasted $12,107 on Truemors“. In my opinion, he’s pretty much gotten it spot on; I agree that Truemors is a pretty pointless endeavor, once you look past the fact that it’s founded by Guy. (The multiple TechCrunch posts increased the site’s exposure to me, more than anything else. Those gave it way more hype than it deserved.)

To most people, this sounds like a glowing success story of a web startup, but to be honest, there are certain levels of web startups. There’s the kind where you need to launch it with several partnerships with major corporations before you can even get off the ground (a la Joost) and then there’s the kind where all you really need is a credit card in order to get something up and going. In the case of Truemors, we’re in the latter category.

The way I see it, someone like Guy could spend $12,000 on a web startup such as this because he can afford it more than most other people who are still in their college dorms and want to birth a startup of their own soon (like me!). Also, he’s gotten more flak for making this post than other people would get obviously because of his popularity.

There are many more posts out there that are just like this, which make claims that seem amazing to the blog author but which are unspectacular to those who are more savvy, which is precisely why we need to continue spreading the word on the wonders of open source software!