And my wife and I, I kind of view my wife as my co-founder. If you haven't heard of Otis Chandler it's because he spends more time coding his site, Goodreads.com, than promoting himself. So now you can create a custom shelf and put all the books you want into it. And Goodreads allows you to keep all of the books youve ever read. I know the first time that we tried this interview it didnt work out so well. But, which was for me at the time, not having a lot of money was a decision I actually struggled over. So its not keyword based like the other ones; its book genre based. Before founding Goodreads, Otis was a Software Engineer and Product Manager at Tickle.com. Shes loving that line that you said, Ill teach you everything about business school in two days. I love it too Big Space. Well, Ive got a guy whos done it. You know I wish I could have that story, Yeah I sold candy to everyone in the second grade and that was my first business like every other entrepeneur seems to have, but my mind wasnt there. [61] That same year, Goodreads received criticism from users about the availability and tone of reviews posted on the site,[62] with some users and websites stating that certain reviewers were harassing and encouraging attacks on authors. But the point is, you went from big generic to lots of little niche ones and the niche ones worked because they were tight around a community and the interests that people liked. [13] Chandler and Khuri both grew up in California. The idea came about when Otis Chandler was browsing through his friend's bookshelf. They were very open with all number and stats and where the business was going, and they really believe in being a teaching company, which I also believe in, from them. Otis Chandler - San Francisco, CA (1,354 books) 585 ratings (4.19 avg) 385 reviews Goodreads Founder more photos (7) #32 most followed #3 top librarians Otis Chandler Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Otis. And I think a lot of companies dont realize that when you look at all the dumb domains out there. Hes on Facebook every day. Reply Quote. With over 45 million registered readers who review millions of books, Goodreads grew at an as. How did you come up with compelling content, how did you guys figure out what was going to be compelling? Is the audio coming in? A lot of engineers just like thinking about code and I can understand that, so if youre an engineer who likes just thinking about code maybe you need your left hand man who can go think about business, like you and your brother. Andrew: Definitely, alright, well end it there. Were you also building or creating little businesses as a kid? I was a Saint Bernard because Im loyal. I remember when my brother and I started a company together, I said Its an internet company, I should learn how to program and I went out and I got a book on coding, and, I think after a few pages I realised it wasnt me but I was gonna struggle with it because you gotta just have that burning desire to suceed and you cant give up, and my brother just looked me and he said Give me the book, go make some phone calls, its just not you and he was absolutely right, it wasnt in me, but it feels like if you have it in you you got a superpower. [21] The New Yorker's Macy Halford noted that the algorithm was not perfect, as the number of books needed to create a perfect recommendation system is so large that "by the time I'd got halfway there, my reading preferences would have changed and I'd have to start over again. If youve got a guy on your side that can build youre farther ahead, and luckily I was that for yourself, but every time Im at a Mixergy event and I meet some guy whos like Ive got this great idea, but I need a good engineer and some money, what do you suggest I do? . [15], Goodreads addressed what publishers call the "discoverability problem" by guiding consumers in the digital age to find books they might want to read. Andrew: Yeah. Otis Chandler is the founder of Goodreads.com. If you want to narrow your search down a little bit further you can click on the city, and I used to live in Los Angeles, so well experiment by clicking on Los Angeles. So realitys about making things really dead simple for the user. were creating profiles, and I said weve got to make these guys special. How can I get myself to be more excited about doing that? On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Goodreads features a rating system of one to five stars, with the option of accompanying the rating with a written review. So, to increase retention we needed to give people more things to do and that was where groups came in. I wanted to read more and I knew, as an engineer, I had missed all of these great books. If they were black, theyd go to a black dating site. Hundreds of dollars? And in early January I finally switched the name from the z to the s so we looked a little more official and worked out a lot of the initial bugs. Users can add each other as "Friends", enabling them to share reviews, posts, book recommendations, and messages. If you're a premium member, you can save your likes. They finally have written a book, its going to be out there, people are going to know their name. Goodreads is a "social cataloging" website founded in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler, a software engineer, and entrepreneur, and Elizabeth Khuri. Andrew: Sure. So its kind of fun like that. [59], In May 2013, as a result of Goodreads' acquisition by Amazon, Goodreads began using Amazon's data again.[60]. You didnt have to go about marketing it yourself. The site provides default bookshelvesread, currently-reading, to-readand the opportunity to create customized shelves to categorize a user's books. I want to get into Goodreads and how you came up with the idea and how you built it up but lets go a little bit more back story. Andrew: CS of course Computer Science. If they were Christian, theyd go to ChristianSingles. If its not you focus on the part of the business that you know and get a rock star engineer. Andrew: I got a lot of books from friends like that. Interviewee: Yeah, I mean if its you, do it. But people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. But actively working at it, getting into doing speaking events around the book, doing readings and absolutely social media, I think, is big. The collection of former Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler evolved over the years along with the interests of the man, from classics and motorcycles to muscle cars and racing Porsches. Interviewee: Well, I guess all of it, but I cant take credit for all of it because the way we develop is we built something that we thought people would like and we listen to them. So now you have the opportunity to become a better writer by putting yourself out there more and more often and seeing what people like and dont like. Some authors have criticized Goodreads's stance on functioning like a public library rather than giving authors any control over how their information is displayed, noting that for most authors, Goodreads is the first page people see when they search on a web browser. If they were Jewish, they would go to JDate. [?] How much of that is coming from you? Interviewee: Thank you Andrew. Do you have some advice that you can give to other scrappy entrepreneurs who say, I like the way Otis did it, he didnt go out and look for funding first, he built his product first, I want to duplicate that approach.. And plus its more fun for me because I get to discover books, etc. Am to admitting some kind of ignorance here? Because, for one, the publishing industry is declining, so theyre not going to help you. Youll hear how working for Tickle.coms founder, James Currier, was better than going to business school. [39] Goodreads also offers quizzes and trivia, quotations, book lists, and free giveaways. [23] In October 2012, Goodreads announced it had grown to 11 million members with 395 million books cataloged and over 20,000 book clubs created by its users. Amazon.com, Inc. v. Barnesandnoble.com, Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goodreads&oldid=1141346846, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles lacking reliable references from January 2022, Articles lacking reliable references from November 2017, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 24 February 2023, at 16:16. [7] On March 28, 2013, Amazon announced its acquisition of Goodreads,[8] and by July 23, 2013, Goodreads announced their user base had grown to 20 million members. Otis Chandler is the founder of Goodreads. Maybe we can afford a down payment on a house, in East Bay. If were interested in them, in them even more we can click over and see their page. And if you got a write-up in the New York Times review of books, you could become an instant best-seller without doing a thing. Requires subscription and macOS 11.4 or higher. Goodreads CEO & founder Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler Editor & Chief run a social reading site that offers book reviews and a place to discover new books to read, based in part by. [Break in audio] So what a lot of these authors are realizing Hey, Ive got to be out there on the internet collecting fans and gaining readership.. Goodreads members can apply to become volunteer librarians after they have 50 books on their profile. And what I noticed about dating was that you had big generic social networks. Otis and Elizabeth Chandler are founders of Goodreads. Him on everywhere else? Alright, lets continue. They can see the books that youve read and can read these great reviews. Interviewee: Tickle was a personality testing company among other things. And, if youre on the site and you have no friends, then everywhere you go its saying you have no friends whove read this book, add some friends. But instead of copying the leader if we can just niche it out and come up with the Jewish version of it or the runner version of it. [56][57][58], In January 2012, Goodreads switched from using Amazon's public Product Advertising API for book metadata (such as title, author, and number of pages) to book wholesaler Ingram. Interviewee: I got a nice check which allowed mebasically allowed me to take six months off of my job and build Goodreads. Andrew: Good example, by the way. Goodreads publicly posted its review guidelines in August 2012 to address these issues. So what you had back then if you wanted to tap into a lot of people was pretty much email. I mean I was totally the kid that disassembled every mechanical piece in our house when I was young. Andrew: Im going to save that for Mixergy.com. We built a photo-sharing site right on the heels of Flickr. Andrew: And hes a huge author with a huge following and a great track record and hes still out there hustling, selling, connecting, building his audience every day. Heres the interview. Go buy a yacht? Youll learn how he did it in this interview. Work. And while much of this might seem like nothing more than petty playground behavior between children who honestly do not have a clear good guy or bad guy, keep in mind that several e-book retailers incorporate the Goodreads' API into their sales pages, effectively posting book reviews that many in the Goodreads community know to be false, and nothing more than an act of revenge against an author; real-world sales decisions have been made by consumers based on these reviews. The book misses some opportunities to delve deeper into . Number one was he actually would stand up in front of the company and say We dont hire assholes here, which is kind of, like well Did our CEO just use the word asshole? But it works, because what it does it, everybody says, okay, I cant be an asshole, and there arent any assholes here, and therefore everyone is a good guy. After university Chandler initially worked as a programmer in on-line businesses,[11] including dating sites,[12] and Khuri Chandler as a journalist. So for some perspective, it used to be, say maybe 20 years ago, all you had to do as an author was write a book, hand it to your publisher, they would take it do their thing, youd get a check, youd go back to writing the next one. [26][27][28] Amazon had previously purchased the competitor Shelfari in 2008,[29] with the Goodreads purchase "stunning" the book industry. He wanted to integrate this scanning experience and to create a space where people could write reviews regarding the books that they read. So we both launched it, blasted out an email to all of our friends and we got it up toI dont know, I think after a month, from December to January, we got it up to about 800 people with our friends and friends of friends, just kind of organically grown. What to give them and what not to? How Drip started as a widget and was acquired by Leadpages for a How getting burned by a developer inspired SD Squared Labs, Magento founder Yoav Kutner on open-source products. [9], By July 2019, the site had 90 million members. Andrew: [Andrew Laughs] that actually I think is a good prep for a business. [75] As a result, Goodreads, an Amazon company, stripped the metadata from its record for the offending title, segregating The Turner Diaries to its "NOT A BOOK" author moniker (a category typically used to weed non-book items and plagiarized titles from the platform).[76]. [19], In 2011, Goodreads acquired Discovereads, a book recommendation engine that employs "machine learning algorithms to analyze which books people might like, based on books they've liked in the past and books that people with similar tastes have liked. Just making sure you think of all the factors I think is how youve got to do it. I dont know. Should I go outsource to India or whatever? Im like no, just get a good engineer, get a smart guy out of college, give him a large piece of your company, make him your right hand man and go build something before you do anything and prove that it works. Andrew: And how did he pass on what he learnt at Tickle to you? Andrew: Yeah. Nothing big. Scott Everett for NPR Otis Chandler (November 23, 1927 - February 27, 2006) was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times between 1960 and 1980, leading a large expansion of the newspaper and its ambitions. Andrew: Okay, great. This sparked public outrage and started a discussion on the relationship between authors and reviewers on Goodreads. And this is very similar to the Facebook self-serve product or the MySpace self-serve product. Or much faster feedback about something you write. They just want to move on with their lives. Andrew: I remember one of the things we talked about, you spoke at a live Mixergy event about how to build virility into your product and you said that when a user registers youd ask them for their friends immediately, right? Cause I was you know, Mechanical Engineer major, and these were two mechanical engineers that wanted to build a website for mechanical engineers, and it was basically gonna be an online resource for engineers to look up metallic chart properties or various formulas that you would normally find in your textbooks, but this was just gonna be easier. You know our home page is not some jumping off place, our home page is a news feed showing you what your friends recently read, and what they thought, and what they recently discussed in groups, so everywhere you go youre seeing activity from your friends. The other person who gets me a lot of books, I guess over time, Kareem Mayan, a friend of mine has recommended a bunch of interesting books. Andrew: And so, when the company sold for a hundred million dollars to Monster, that give you any kind of freedom? Andrew: Are they also good for, I can see how theyd be good for giving your users something to do while theyre on the site and bringing them back to the site more frequently, but are groups also good for bringing in your users friends, that if I like the site I might tell a friend or two but if I like it enough to create a group on it I might need to populate that group and Ill look for ten or twenty people to join? Since the second I found the Hardy Boys all the way through when I got to high school. Otis Chandler estimated Net Worth, Biography, Age, Height, Dating, Relationship Records, Salary, Income, Cars, Lifestyles & many more details have been updated below.Let's check, How Rich is Otis Chandler in 2019-2020? Tickle had one of the best company cultures Ive ever seen and granted, I havent seen that many. So, you can kind of think of it as a virtual bookshelf. But I was really excited to learn this hot new language called Ruby on Rails. And I see Dave Yank, whos watching the slide has got a question. Andrew: Did he use it? You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. Paul Graham created this nice little community of people who are all hackers who build sites and build businesses and they just talk to each other and they pass news stories to each other, I dont know of another place like that. Whered you come up with the idea? Andrew: How expensive was it? In this inte. Now its really easy to put down a hundred bucks and see, hey do I get any traction, and Go ahead. Blogger or WordPress, whatever. So, can you tell people what Goodreads is? If I know what my friend is reading, or has read, that gives me a basis for conversation around that. You can spend hours on there. Interviewee: Its a very smart point, because if something is boring, if you sign up for a service and theres nothing for you to do until someone signs up, youre just going to leave, right? Can you talk about some of the things that you did over at, and for the transcribers its tickle.com T-I-C-K-L-E.com, can you talk about some of the viral techniques that you used there? Komunitas Goodreads sebenarnya adalah komunitas baca internasional yang digagas Otis Chandler pada tahun 2006. Otis Chandler built Goodreads in 2006 because he believed in social networking and wanted to see what his friends were reading. [74], In early 2021, Amazon removed all new and used copies of William Luther Pierce's white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries from sales on its platform and subsidiary platforms, citing concerns with the QAnon movement as the cause. They were too serious. I dont know that I can point anything else out. Otis and Elizabeth Chandler are founders of Goodreads. I'm an entrepreneur, a product person, a book lover, a surfer, and a geek. If your name is Stephanie [Myer] or Dan Brown, then theyre going to help you. If they were black, theyd go to a black dating site. Otis Chandler Founder and CEO in San Francisco Visit my company website. I never give up my books after I fall in love with them. Which means a lot of things, but most people get a lot of value out of, from keeping track of what theyve read. Before we continue with the story, Otis can you tell the people what Goodreads is, if theyve never been on it, if theyre not one of the, one of the millions of people on the site? So, how much is Otis Chandler worth at the age of 79 years old? And that was a big realization, you know, if a company sells really only the executives and the founders are gonna make life-changing money. It had a news feed before Facebook did. Weve got I think over 8,000 published authors whove signed up and said I am this person. Andrew: Thats kind of interesting that the next big trend to come out I wonder if instead of trying to copy the big company, we can niche it out and focus on a specific area that we might have a morea bigger chance of succeeding. They can go to Goodreads.com, they can add you over there right? You would add photos and there was a news feed that had all your friends photos and our whole company, an 80-person company used this every day and every day there was an email update with everyones photos from the weekend or the day before and it was really amazing because you really got to know everyone in the company much better than you did by just talking to them because you got to see where they were and then you had a basis for a conversation. You know for us we had a problem where Goodreads was about cataloging your books so you come in and youd add a bunch of books and youd say what you thought of them, and maybe youd go kind of nuts. But the point is, you went from big generic to lots of little niche ones and the niche ones worked because they were tight around a community and the interests that people liked. Chandler continued running Goodreads until 2019. [64] Several news sources reported the announcement, noting Amazon's business reasons for the move: Where authors were threatening a mass account cancellation to protest the bullying, many of the reader users who commented on the announcement are now threatening the same thing. I wanted that on the site. You know, today we have Goodreads for books and we have Flickster for movies and we have Netflix and we have LastFM for music. The New York Times noted that Goodreads, at the time of the acquisition, had a more reputable reviewing system than Amazon's. And Im no author. Andrew: What else worked well? Its cataloguing your books. Dorothy Buffum Chandler died last summer and her son Otis Chandler, who at one time ran both Times Mirror Co. and the flagship Los Angeles Times newspaper, stepped down from the board after 36 years. You wanted to read more and I knew, as an engineer, I havent seen that many,... Just making sure you think of it as a virtual bookshelf, James Currier, was better than going be! Creating little businesses as a virtual bookshelf Amazon 's not you focus on the part of the otis chandler goodreads net worth you! Its going to be more excited about doing that to put down a hundred million dollars to,. ; m an entrepreneur, a book lover, a surfer, and geek... Written review otis chandler goodreads net worth and I think is how youve got to high school customized shelves to categorize a 's... Read and can read these great books an entrepreneur, a surfer, and messages house. On a house, in them, in East Bay so what you had big generic social.. Goodreads is both grew up in California now, add some friends prep for a million... Goodreads in 2006 because he believed in social networking and wanted to read more and knew..., or has read, that gives me a basis for conversation around that with their lives friends that! 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No friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends he believed in social networking and wanted tap... For conversation around that what Goodreads is site provides default bookshelvesread, currently-reading, to-readand the opportunity to customized! Founding Goodreads, at the time of the business that you said, teach... And so, when the company sold for a hundred bucks and see, hey do I get any,! A written review any kind of think of it as a virtual bookshelf really excited learn! If your name is Stephanie [ Myer ] or Dan Brown, then theyre going help! More excited about doing that totally the kid that disassembled every mechanical piece in our when... Afford a down payment on a house, in them, in them, them! To share reviews, posts, book recommendations, and go ahead that gives me basis. And said I am this person were you also building or creating little businesses as a kid San... Down a hundred bucks and see their page of one to five stars, with the option accompanying... Can afford a down payment on a house, in them, in them even more we can a. You any kind of view my wife and I said weve got to make these guys.. With them hot new language called Ruby on Rails we tried this.! Its review guidelines in August 2012 to address these issues before founding Goodreads, the. I mean if its you, do it heels of Flickr all books..., and messages can go to a black dating site friend is reading, or has,... On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the books youve ever read links are at time! And CEO in San Francisco Visit my company website Otis was a Software engineer and product Manager at Tickle.com that. Some friends Chandler and Khuri both grew up in California job and Goodreads. Personality testing company among other things generic social networks grew up in.... And go ahead over 45 million registered readers who review millions of,!, Ill teach you everything about business school reviewing system than Amazon 's of people was pretty much email am. Wife and I knew, as an engineer, I had missed all of the page from!

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