Sep 18, 2006
A conversation with Joe Kraus, co-Founder and CEO of JotSpot
Recently, I talked with Joe Kraus, co-Founder and CEO of JotSpot. We discussed how the company started and where it’s going, the evolution of the wiki for more specialized applications, and JotSpot’s new enterprise tool, JotSpot Wiki Server.
| Joe K. |
Hi Stewart
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| Stewart M. |
Hi Joe
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| Joe K. |
hey
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| Stewart M. |
Thanks very much for doing this!
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Can you give me some background on JotSpot? How did the company get started and why did you decide to focus on the wiki?
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| Joe K. |
JotSpot started over 2 years ago
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I think there are two kinds of entrepreneurs
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top down
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and bottom up
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Top down are people who look at an existing, established business model and who look for holes
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so, for example, if you start a vertical search company
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you’re a top down entrepreneur
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search is well established as a business model
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you’re just looking for a niche
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that’s not me
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i’m no good at that
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i’m a bottom up entrepreneur
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i look for patterns that feel familiar
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so, in this case
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my business partner and Excite co-founder, Graham Spencer, and I were thinking about our next company
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and we decided to use a wiki to collaboate
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and in 20 minutes, I said “this is what we’re going to do”
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why?
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because never before, in the service of business, had I been so easily able to create a private shared space on the web
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but, the pattern felt like the internet in 1993
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in 1993, the internet was there, it was just trapped in the land of the nerds
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gopher, archie, veronica, wais
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| Stewart M. |
ah, i see where you’re going…
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untrap the wiki…
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| Joe K. |
and Netscape brought it out of the land of the nerds
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exactly
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so that was the first pattern that I felt I could see
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the second was that when I went around to companies in Silicon Valley and asked the CEO ‘do you have wikis here’, they’d look at me funny and say ‘what’s that?’
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and yet when I went to the bottom of the org, to the engineers and product managers and asked the same question, they’d say ‘yeah, we’ve got 3 or 4′ and we’d never give them up
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| Joe K. |
so, the other pattern was bottoms-up adoption
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and this part is key
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because no startup can create their own momentum
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they can’t spend enough money to create a category and try and get customers and the press to care about it
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in fact, I have a saying
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for entrepreneurs, it’s better to be a trendspotter than a trendsetter
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and in this case, it was clear that wikis were going to “move”
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the press was going to write about them, people were going to adopt them, even if JotSpot didn’t exist
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so, that was the pattern and it’s why we positioned in the wiki space
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even if, today, people question why we call it a wiki given all the things that you can do in JotSpot that you can’t imagine doing in any other wiki
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| Stewart M. |
fascinating – I think your saying is right on the ball
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| Joe K. |
we saw that we shouldn’t be caught up in what a wiki WAS
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but what a wiki COULD BE
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it’s the metaphor that’s powerful
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moving the web from a monologue to a dialogue
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it’s not limiting that metaphor to just web pages
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| Stewart M. |
well, at the core, it is the spirit of the wiki. I think you’ve taken it in a unique direction that’s evolving and refining the rote power of the wiki
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| Joe K. |
which is why, from the beginning, we wanted to apply the wiki metaphor to the creation not only of documents, but of applications
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and it’s how we ended up in this recent release at “page types” where we’re bringing the wiki metaphor, what you call the “spirit” of a wiki to the familiarity of interfaces and capabilities of things like MS Office
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consumer habits are hard to change. conversely, they’re easy to leverage
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that’s why page types are powerful.
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they introduce “wikiness” in an interface that feels somewhat familiar
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make sense?
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| Stewart M. |
thus the introduction of tools like JotSpot Spreadsheets, I assume
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and the applications catalogue?
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| Joe K. |
yes
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and we tested those things out independently
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| Joe K. |
and then folded them back into the wiki
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with “page types”
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| Stewart M. |
I think it makes total sense, and you’re right about habits
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can you give me a quick rundown of the current set of page types?
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| Joe K. |
web pages (standard wiki page)
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spreadsheet
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calendar
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| Joe K. |
photo page
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file cabinet
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| Stewart M. |
and a sense of what new types may be on the map?
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| Joe K. |
on the roadmap
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email list
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to do list
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| Stewart M. |
What have your customers told you they like best about JotSpot?
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| Joe K. |
they like many things
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it’s probably easiest to tell how we got to page types
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what customers liked about JotSpot was in some ways what they like about wikis
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they get to create a website that is organized in the way they work
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it’s a blank slate
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and they can write on it however they want
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(this, by the way, is one of wikis biggest difficulties as well)
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what they also liked, was this notion that JotSpot was more than a wiki
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| Joe K. |
it was a platform for installing and building collaborative applications
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that were built on the same platform, which integrated with the wiki and which could be modified in the same interface
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(because they were composed of wiki pages, just wiki pages with code instead of text on them)
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but, what they wanted was to thread these together
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they didn’t want the old style of outlook
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where you had siloes
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one for mail
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one for calendar
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one for todos
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one for notes
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etc
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what they wanted was the notion of a website that they could create, but where they could put down *interesting, useful functionality* beyond webpages in specific locations
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and that’s how we ended up merging in the notion of applications crossed with the wiki model
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which is really what page types is
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people also really like the ability to change the look and feel without having to know HTML/CSS
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| Stewart M. |
and with the simplicity of the wiki, not the complexity of Outlook
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| Joe K. |
exactly
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so, in short
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they *love* pagetypes
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they like that it’s a platform that can extend well beyond wikis
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| Stewart M. |
i see that all the time – people I work with are disappointed when the old tools don’t let them change the look and feel
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| Joe K. |
and at a basic level, they like to customize it in terms of look and feels
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| Stewart M. |
What would you say JotSpot offers the higher-ed market specifically?
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| Joe K. |
well, we have a lot of higher-ed customers
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in this case people really like two things
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1. they like the self-service part of JotSpot
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what I mean by this is that it’s a non-technical,30 second process, to get a jotspot account
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in addition, we have a pricing philosophy “expenseable, not approveable”
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the idea is the paid versions of JotSpot are cheap enough for you to put on your personal credit card and either pay for it yourself, or expense it back
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but the idea is that you don’t have to get *approval* ahead of time.
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| Joe K. |
so, if *you* want to do it, and you think that once it’s done, people will understand how good it is, you can do that
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2. they like the ability to run a comprehensive classroom site organized as they see fit
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use the calendar page type for class calendar and events
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use the spreadsheet page types for tracking items, teams, assignments, etc
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| Stewart M. |
i have a saying for this, which is: it’s easier to get a dollar from a million people than a million dollars from one person
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| Joe K. |
yes
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using the file cabinet, or the ability to attach a file to a wiki webpage to distribute materials or assignments
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students have the ability to do the same?
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so, it’s really a very flexible, multi-purpose, collaboration environment that works well for higher ed. both at the functionality level and in terms of the cost and simplicity of delivery
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| Stewart M. |
and because it’s so easy, straightforward, and quick, wikis are giving traditional course management software a run for its money
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| Joe K. |
without question
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| Stewart M. |
course managment software is easily 10X more expensive than enterprise level wiki software, and for not much more functionality
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which leads to my last question – can you briefly tell me about JotSpot Wiki Server?
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| Joe K. |
sure
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we’re in beta with it right now
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basically, it’s an on-premise version of JotSpot that we remotely support and maintain
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I like to think of it as TiVO
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| Joe K. |
from the management point of view
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| Stewart M. |
gotcha
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| Joe K. |
the details are that we wanted the installation to be as simple as possible
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where someone totally non-technical could do it, assuming they had a machine that could run it
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so, it runs on top of VMWare and it’s really a virtual or software appliance
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which means
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that in the download
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you get the VMWare player
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a LInux OS
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a webserver
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an app server
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and our server
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once it’s downloaded
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you double click an install-shield icon
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| Stewart M. |
great way to give people everything out of the box
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| Joe K. |
and then the rest just “magically” happens
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you do a bit of configuration via a web browser
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| Stewart M. |
very wiki-like!
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| Joe K. |
and then you’re done
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definitely
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| Joe K. |
it’s really aimed at those larger organizations who aren’t yet comfortable with a hosted service
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for potentially bureaucratic reasons
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| Stewart M. |
Joe, thanks very much for your time!
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| Joe K. |
thanks Stewart
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I appreciate it
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ttyl
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