Posts from the ‘narendra rocherolle’ Category

I had breakfast the other day in San Fran with Narendra Rocherolle, one of the creators of FBexchange, 30Boxes, and before that Webshots. And an all ’round good guy.

One of the things I admire about Narendra and his team is their inclination to build compelling consumer apps with a very small but efficient team. In this they share alot with Matt Mullenweg from Automattic/Wordpress. By way of contrast, I remember being pitched about 9 months ago by an East Coast startup that was building a Web 2.0/Social Networking “platform.” This startup had already raised $5-6MM, and was raising another $20M in their Series B. I asked why they needed/wanted all that capital. The answer was that they had 30 engineers and wanted to hire another 20. I knew then and there I wasn’t investing.

So, Narendra and I were talking about the power of building great products with small teams, and he suggested a new metric: unique visitors/employee and total pageviews/employee. What a great idea!

So I am now on a quest to see which companies out there have the highest unique visitors/employee and total pageviews/employee ratio.

I can speak for one company on this front — WordPress. According to Quantcast, the WordPress network has 100.3 M unique viewers in the last 30 days, and 416.8M total pageviews in the last 30 days. Having doubled their staff to a whopping grand total of 18, that gives WordPress 5.57 M/ unique viewers per employee, and 23.15 M pageviews/employee.

Wow, those numbers sound pretty impressive.

To complete my survey, I AM LOOKING FOR YOUR HELP!!!  If you have reliable data that you can share publicly for other companies, I’d love to pull together a chart that gives the blogosphere a sense of the range out there. And, I guess I should offer some sort of prize if anyone out there can beat the WordPress stats. Hmmm. How about funding by Polaris??