https://mastersofscale.com/#/jimmy-wales/
Podcast Introduction ****
Masters of Scale is a business and finance podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. The show is created and owned by WaitWhat. In each episode, Hoffman introduces a theory on how successful businesses scale and tests their validity by interviewing founders about their path to scale.
Guest Introduction
Jimmy Wales is the co-founder of nonprofit online encyclopedia Wikipedia and for-profit web hosting company Wikia (Fandom). Previously, he founded a web portal called Bomis and a peer-reviewed encyclopedia, Nupedia
Early Dabbles
Jimmy was a futures and options trader in Chicago but was interested in the technology space. As a side-project, he was building a web browser when Netscape was launched and had attracted a $4.3 Billion valuation. The exciting riches of the internet economy made him jump to the world of entrepreneurship.
Jimmy started with a web directory called Bomis in 1996, which monetized via advertisements. NBC bought the Bomis inventory, but soon it came all crashing down during the Dotcom crash. It was terrible timing and not a failure of product-market or product-value fit.
The Idea of Wikipedia
Bomis gave birth to Nupedia - an online encyclopedia. He built a team of volunteers to contribute to articles. Jimmy devised a seven-stage review process to ensure academic level quality. But the output was meager as it took considerable time in getting articles reviewed from subject matter experts.
Wales realized he had an army of volunteers eager to contribute. The volunteers also bought into the idea of maintaining academic quality. A colleague suggested trying the “wiki-based system.” It was a concept developed by Ward Cunningham in 1984 and allowed for creating and organizing content that can be edited by anyone.
The Wiki Way
The biggest fear with a wiki-based system was the factual integrity of the articles. But Jimmy soon realized that the system worked quite well. Any wrong information or trolling would be corrected by volunteers around the clock sitting across geographies.