a young entrepreneur with millions in funding figures out it's time to replace herself with a professional ceo. plus, author eric reese on the lean start up and end gadget editor in chief tim stevens, staying loyal to aol. with reporters ryan lawlor this week on "press:here." good morning, everyone, i'm scott mcgrew. if you were to see the band

boston in concert, you'd be seeing a different set of musicians from the original band in the late 70s, which leads the question, are you really seeing boston at all? ♪ more than a feeling >> we bring this up as an analogy for what's been going on on the internet. it's more than a feeling, it's fact. various popular blogs have seen a sudden exodus of their best-known writers. this has been a particular problem for aol, which recently bought tech crunch, only to see tech crunch founder leave to start a different competing blog. aol's popular gadget website, called end gaeret, has seen the last three editors in chief leave to start competing websites. tim stevens is editor and chief at end gadget, the only editor

in chief in end gadget's history to not resign and start his own repeating blog. joined by farhad manjoo. is this idea it doesn't take much for a lot of the employees to run off and start their own competitor? >> i don't know if it's a concern, but it is possible. gadget has something of a secret sauce, secret formula, it's the voice of the site. the hardest thing to do is to train people to use that voice and learn that voice, once they've learned it, yeah, they can certainly take it else where. >> end gadget spawned out of a different site itself. >> peter rojas spawned off and started end gadget back in 2004. that's how we got started a long, long time ago and we've grown immensely since then. >> how do you protect end gadget? >> by being great.

i don't think we have a strong concern about this sort of thing. not something that worries us from day-to-day, we just stay focussed on keeping the readers happy and keeping our writers happy as well. ultimately, we spend all of our days writing about cool toys and technology and that should be fun, we do everything to make it fun. >> i think it's a good problem to have. more gadget blogs, the more people will be interested in gadgets. >> absolutely, our biggest competitor made both sites much, much better, so this kind of competition is not something that scares us at all. >> the question is, then, what is end gadget? is it the brand, is it a collection of writers, and if those writers leave, you know, and start something else, how do you carry that on? >> end gadget has always been a combination of very talented writers and the end gadget voice, and the voice has been

consistent since the beginning and something that's always continued from peter, to ryan, to josh, to myself. and we work hard to train anybody who joins the team to learn and that's the most important thing. having incredibly talented writers has been a very big part of end gadget and right now it's a combination of the people and the voice, and i think the voice is very important and makes us who we are. >> we have a interesting audience, entrepreneurs and also people not familiar with blogging and that sort of thing who think that's cute, he has a blog. give me the scope of this little cute blog that you have. >> we have about 35 editors in the u.s. and about another 15 around the world. the sun never sets on the end gadget empire because we have people in just about every town so we can cover news around the world. we have millions and millions of

viewers, so it's a very popular site. we're thrilled we're that popular, because it allows us to do the things we love to do, play with consumer technology, phones, tablets, give our impressions and help readers decide what they should be spending their money on. >> have things changed at aol and end gadget since "huffington post" came on and arianna took over the media side of the business? >> it's been liberating. we haven't had direct interactions with arianna or the huffington group. >> is that a good thing? >> absolutely. when i took over, i had meetings with arianna and laid out a plan what i wanted to do with end gadget and arianna said yeah, of course, you do. that's it. since then we've been sailing our own ship and manning our own team and things have been great. things are good. >> so there's no worry of end gadget becoming huff po tech?

>> "huffington post" has their own tech site, absolutely not. end gadget stands on its own. our voice is different than the way "huffington post" is. we haven't had a pressure to fit the way they do things, which is good, because i don't think it would work for us, frankly. their site is successful, ours is as well. no pressure to do anything like that. >> readers would smell it in a second. >> absolutely, our readers are incredibly smart. the most important thing is our ethics and voice and maintaining what we do and how we do it and keeping it clean. we make sure nobody at aol is telling us what to write. we don't do any advertising or anything like that. >> you can write what you say, what do you think about the future of aol? >> about the future of aol, it's

going to be a difficult transition, it's a huge shift for the business, but tim armstrong just gave in his meeting the other day, laying out how they are doing that and the pieces to make that happen and he's confident it could happen. i think it's going to continue to be a difficult transition. i think we still have rough times ahead of us. i think they are putting the right people in the right places to make it happen and i think it will happen and they'll be successful in the long run. >> what's it been like at end gadget in terms of your success? have you noticed traffic go up or down? >> traffic's been up, just had one of our strongest months ever and we'll have our biggest presence of ces this year with live interviews and that sort of thing. so yeah, traffic has been up. >> ces is like a war, right? >> like a boot camp. each year gets bigger and

harder, working 18, 19, 20-plus hours a day for greater than a week. everybody is fighting to get the exclusives, the news, get it online and cover it better than everybody else. we're ready, we're looking forward to it. >> you recently launched several ipad applications. at what point does what you're doing for ipad become more important than the site itself? >> well, it's an interesting fact that our iphone app gets as much traffic as our website. >> i would never have dreamed that. >> it's absolutely unbelievable to me the apps alone generate. apps are very important to what we do for that reason alone, so looking forward we're going to bring the app experience closer to the desktop experience. right now it's a different sort of experience, so what we want to do is bring them together and make them better, but we also launched a tablet magazine on the ipad as well and that's

rethinking the way we do things and how we present our content and make it easier for read for someoneth abrbrowser. >> you were the anti-magazine and this was very magazine-y. >> yes, it is. that came from my love for magazines and our readers don't have the time to be keeping up on the news that quickly. i wanted to give them a beautiful way to read our reviews, content, and enjoy that, quick back on the weekends, it comes out friday mornings. our ideal scenario, friday night, take out their tablet, download the latest version, get a cup of coffee. but, of course, what made the gadget great is getting news up first. >> tim steve stevens is current will remain editor in chief of ed gadget.

thank you for being with us. not all start-up entrepreneurs make the best ceos, how do you know when it's time to step aside and let somebody else run your company? when "press:here" continues. this is an rc robotic claw. my high school science teacher made me what i am today. our science teacher helped us build it. ♪ now i'm a geologist at chevron, and i get to help science teachers. it has four servo motors and a wireless microcontroller. over the last three years we've put nearly 100 million dollars into american education. that's thousands of kids learning to love science. ♪ isn't that cool? and that's pretty cool. ♪

that is a task rabbit, someone who will run aer rand for you. task rabbit has raised more than $17 million. its young founder decided it was time to bring in a professional ceo to run things, she's a former ibm employee herself. $17 million earlier this week, last week, in funding.

i know what my dad's going to ask, and that is what do you do with $17 million when the website's already up and running? >> yeah, we're really excited about this. >> i would be too. >> we are. >> it's $17 million, yes. >> we have some amazing partners involved, lightspeed ventures, and allen and co. and we're going to focus on more aggressive expansion, nationwide, internationally, product work, mobile platforms. there's a lot of work to do. we're going to work on focusing on hiring more people. >> to do what, though? you have a website and you have the consumer and the other consumer and you enable that connection, but that doesn't necessarily mean you need somebody else in the home office, does it? >> what we're really focussed on at task rabbit is providingn a amazing user experience every time someone posts the job. sure, we have the website and technology up and running, but

it's a marketplace model where there are two sides logistically connecting to make this work, so we focus a lot of energy on our logistics, customer service, and product. >> let me hug the third question, then let these guys have a question, that's the reason we began with. okay, you are a very bright coder, you know your way around code and have clearly made task rabbit in success, got $17 million, then replaced yourself as ceo, why? >> it's interesting. for me, when we kicked off the search to bring in some more executive help, we kicked off a search not looking for a ceo. i really wanted to look for a person that could join the team, be my partner, and help scale the business. at the time we had a ton of momentum, starting to launch new cities and i took a step back

what i wanted to focus on, and for me it's really product and engineering and technology, and as the business grew i knew i had to make a choice where i was going to be able to spend my time, so we kicked off the search, met amazing candidates, but when we met eric grossa, he was the right person. he's an experienced ceo, so we didn't hesitate to bring him in. i have no ego about the situation and was just looking for the right person to join the team. >> what i find interesting about your story, you've been doing this since 2008, as scott said, it's a type of situation people still don't really understand the concept, but seems the time's finally come, you have competition entering the market and other people doing the same thing, so why is now the time where, you know, this can actually be a business? >> it's a great question, because when i started this company in boston in 2008, twitter was just up and coming, facebook was pretty popular, and

none of these platforms had any traction yet. this is a completely different time three years later, and what we're starting to see is a ground swell of companies forming around this idea of sharing and collaborative consumption and getting people to share efficiently in a neighborhood together and that's what task rabbit is all about, empowering people to share free time, special skills, and services with others in their community, so i think this is a new idea, it takes time to develop these marketplace businesses, and i'm excited that, you know, in 2011 we saw a huge uptick in this ground swell and i think 2012 will be bigger for these collaborative consumption businesses. >> not only new technologies like location, phones, and stuff, but you have to get used to this as a new idea and social problem, so i use task rabbit, i got someone to come by and pick up some furniture for me, and i had to trust he would not run

away with the furniture, and i did it, you know, you have all the stuff on the site that helps you trust those people, but it was also a leap of faith and once you start to do it -- once you've done it. >> farhad did it, i'll try it. >> this is the early days of ebay were like too, very scary, then works, and grows from there. >> exactly. and that's exactly what we're seeing. the people that trust and use the site and get over the barrier to entry continually use the service and tell their friends, but that network effect does take time. >> you are one disaster away from a huge amount of publicity, then again, a lot of people are here about task rabbit, but one disaster away from bad press. >> it's true. what we believe we need to focus on is being prepared, so from the beginning when i started the company, one thing i did was

bring on a crisis management adviser out of new york and he's worked with us for three years, and the second thing i did was make our network of task rabbits actually a closed community where they go through an exclusive vetting process. we're focussed on a reputation system with ratings and reviews, but even with all that, you're right, it takes one thing to go wrong for it to turn into a major crisis, but you have to be prepared and stay on top of it. >> do you know how many start-ups do not have a crisis management plan? you are still arguing that leah should be the ceo of the company. you sit down with eric grossa, harvard? ran hotwire, expedia, et cetera. so how do you interview someone, tell us more about yourself,

we're not sure harvard is good enough for our company. do you know where i'm going with that? they call them gray hairs, how do you sit down and say i'm not so sure? >> every company is different, and with me at task rabbit, i was looking for not only experience in building a team, but also vision and passion for what we had built already and what we were continuing to build, and particularly with eric, when we sat down our first meeting, we really hit it off. i had the feeling, this is the guy. i went back to our executive recruiter, john love, amazing to work with, and i said i think this is the guy. we were at the end of the search, we had two other great candidates, and we just accelerated things with eric and started meeting twice a week, every day, spending time on the weekends together, and we spent as much time together as possible, and i think experience is important but also chemistry is really key, especially in an

early stage start-up like task rabbit is. it was important the entire team was excited about eric and felt he was a good cultural fit as well. it's been fantastic. >> how do you make sure you and the founders keep control and how do you make sure he doesn't do something different? it could be a steve jobs situation at apple. >> you could be fired. >> luckily for me, i've had tremendous support from our current board of directors, advisers, and mentors i've worked with over the past three years, so we kicked off the search together and were in it together, and they've been so, i think, respectful towards me and grateful for what we've built to date and i feel comfortable and confident working with those guys and bringing in light speed as well. i think mutual respect is also key and both eric and the board and everyone else has a lot of respect for what we've built so far.

>> leah busky, thank you for being with us. next on "press:here," leading a revolution on the way start-ups start up. author eric reese when we come back. claw. my high school science teacher made me what i am today. our science teacher helped us build it. ♪ now i'm a geologist at chevron, and i get to help science teachers. it has four servo motors and a wireless microcontroller. over the last three years we've put nearly 100 million dollars into american education. that's thousands of kids learning to love science. ♪ isn't that cool? and that's pretty cool. ♪

welcome back to "press:here," i'm scott mcgrew. you can buy all kinds of business books telling you how to run your company, but a surprising number of those books are written by people who have never run companies, an exception for today's guest, eric reese, he's been involved in two companies, joined by farhad manjoo. what was a lean startup? >> we saline because we want to be more customer-centric and increase the odds of success. >> well, and i ask this all the time, the central no-duh question, we try to make the product the consumer wants,

well, duh. >> easier said than done. >> but companies don't, that's the amazing thing. >> it's stunning. i was with a large company this week and we were talking about different initiatives they have in the market and several people in the workshop, they had been working on products for at least two years and no one had bothered to investigate during that time whether there was anybody who wanted it once it was going to be done. in a few minutes they were able to say a little bit of experimentation might go a long way. i'm sure you're right, but let's double check the assumptions in the brilliant business plan are remotely right. >> see, i find that really interesting, though, that you say that. the book is called "the lean startup," a guide for startups, but how can this be applied to huge companies? we look at companies like yahoo and aol and microsoft, that are, you know, trying to innovate themselves, and having trouble

getting that innovation right. >> that's exactly right. the case i try to make in the book is entrepreneurship is the management discipline that deals with situations with high uncertainty, and these large companies, the reason they are struggling is they are reentering an entrepreneurial phase they don't recognize, so they have to get back to the roots of entrepreneurship to figure out how do we figure out how to grow a new division, new business, new product line, but they are still using the same-old tools of general management from the 20th century, and we have to get them to start rethinking like entrepreneurial managers. >> what's involved with that, rethinking like entrepreneurial managers? >> the core is planning and forecasting. if it's above plan, should be demoted, but the problem is that planning and forecasting only work when you have a long and stable operating history in

which to make the forecast, so if you're in a situation of high uncertainty, those tools don't work. instead, take the business plan, our idea, our hypothesis and break it down into series of assumptions and test those as quickly as possible using something we call a minimum viable product. instead of the most exciting product we can launch, what's the smallest product we can launch in order to start working if this will work. >> measuring and tweaking, measuring and tweaking, which google does. they'll send a google page to only a few users, see the reaction and decide if that's worth doing. >> this is apple's model also. >> apple tends to do it behind closed doors and emerge the result as if it was full form. in cases like google and amazon, they are skilled when they are trying to optimize, try to figure out the right color of each button on our web page to click through the button.

at amazon, improving the checkout button, but for a startup, we want to do the tests in our biggest core assumptions in the business model. do people even basically want the thing we're building or not? let's run the test quickly and easily, then find out if we're on the right track and proceed to build more and more and more. >> with the number of startups out there, entrepreneurs building applications and businesses, it seems like it's so crowded right now that if you don't get it right the first time, you might not get another shot at iterating the product or making it better. how do you manage that? >> important point. we urge entrepreneurs not to launch in the press. you want to fail in private and take advantage of the fact no one's heard of you, you have a pathetically small number of customers, that's an asset, do the publicity push after you've

already figured out how to build a sustainable business. do the product launch as soon as possible, marketing launch when you're bragging how great you are as late as possible. >> i don't know who wrote the piece, might have been one of you guys, they launched in the press with a huge ta-da but didn't have a product ready and you only get one ta-da, then things move on. you wrote your book that you can teach, success can be engineered and taught, that a group of people can become successful entrepreneurs simply by being taught how to be entrepreneurs. >> i don't think it's only you can be taught. obviously, you have to have the drive, determination, passion, that makes entrepreneurs great, but if those are not enough to make you successful, it matters what process you use to test and refine your ideas. if you write the business plan, launch in the press and hope for the best, that's a surprisingly low success rate.

>> all right, eric reese is the author of "the lean startup" and theleanstartup.com as well. >> thank you. >> we'll be back in a minute. our science teacher helped us build it. ♪ now i'm a geologist at chevron, and i get to help science teachers. it has four servo motors and a wireless microcontroller. over the last three years we've put nearly 100 million dollars into american education. that's thousands of kids learning to love science. ♪ isn't that cool? and that's pretty cool. ♪

that's our show for this week, our thanks to tim stevens of end gadget, leah busque, eric ries, leanstartup.com and startuplessoneslearned.com. i'm scott mcgrew, thanks for making us part of your sunday morning.