Scott Porad

Recently, I’ve had conversations with Marcelo and Jennifer at Seattle 2.0 about the Seattle Startup Index.  Often they receive complaints because they don’t include blogs or content sites in the index, and just about everyone they deny says “but you allow Cheezburger!”

I can understand why an outsider would think this because I often describe Cheezburger as a media company, and our product as “a collection of entertainment sites”.  Many consumers and people outside the company see Cheezburger as just a blog.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The business story is that of a media and content company, but it’s built upon innovative use of technology.  Our technology story has four pieces:

1. Dealing with scale and volume.
2. Creating a product where audience drives the content that broadcast to them.
3. Building a platform where we can launch new sites very inexpensively.
4. Building our product by using the most progressive product development practices.

All of this technology is in support of a business.  That’s right…the technology is just the means to an end.  Our mission is for that end to make everyone happy for five minutes per day.  And, we’ve developed some pretty innovative means to do that.

For example, one component of our technology strategy is to rely on commodity software as much as we can instead of “rolling our own” in-house.  Instead of spending time to build a display layer for our product we chose to use commodity software—Wordpress.  WordPress is commonly used as a blogging tool, but is easily adapted for use as a general purpose content management system.

We chose this route because we believed that our technology resources were best put toward more difficult and valuable problems.  In many quarters, this is considered a “best practice”.  I cringe to use such consulting-speak, but we’re often faulted for this choice.

On the other hand, if we had spent time building our own display layer instead of figuring out how to moderate high volumes of content we might have not ever reached this point.

How much content?  Every day, we receive 15-20k submissions that are each moderated and evaluated by our team and community, then the top content is published back onto our sites.  This is not a trivial task, and for it we need a system that can’t be bought off the shelf like WordPress.  This is software we wrote to meet the unique needs of our business.

But, really…does software to support  a business really a technology company make?

I’m not intimately familiar with every company on the startup index, but my personal opinion is that very few of them are actually technology companies.  Perhaps I’m old school on this, but my view is that a technology company is in the business of creating and selling hardware or software.

Most “technology startups” today don’t do that—they use technology to make existing business models (or social models) easier-better-faster-cheaper.  In other words, they use technology, like we do, as a means to an end.  I’d argue that if smoke signals were easier-better-faster-cheaper than the web to achieve the end, then that’s what would be used.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our software development practices.

Cheezburger is pioneering and embracing the most modern and progressive development practices.  The piece I enjoy highlighting is a continuous deployment system we’ve built that—with the exception of one human checkpoint—performs a completely automated commit-to-deploy cycle.  (We don’t trust our robots completely…yet.)

To achieve this we have written several pieces of proprietary software that I consider some of our core competitive advantage.  One of them has to do with how we manage our database schema and allowing us to do upgrades on the fly with out downtime.  I’m not going to get into the details of how it works, but a) I’m certain it would be a profitable business if we sold it independently, and b) it’s a beautiful piece of software that makes my geek-engineer heart go pitter-patter with glee.

This post is quite a bit longer than I planned, so I’ll stop beating you over the head with why we’re a technology company.  Oh, wait…we’ve also developed a social network at cheezburger.com, a public API, and we’re working on our own iPhone and iPad apps as well.  (And, as soon as I can hire a developer with the right experience, we’re going to build a Facebook app too!)

So, as you can see, the technology story never ends…