  CHUMLYThe Chumly website (chum.ly) is starting its third and final group of pre-launch membership before the site is made live to the public, though still invitation-only, in early February 2010. If you'd like an invitation to the current test go to Chumly and request an invite.
John Gotts has been working with his father creating Web start-ups since 1993, finding success in 2004 selling anti-spyware software online. John has identified ideas ahead of the market that have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. John's been involved in credit-card rewards software, anti-spam, anti-spyware, attempting to legitimize the BitTorrent space with the MPAA, Web search, Wiki.com, hydrogen generation, advanced search and explored an energy company with retired U.S. Senator Larry Craig, who is now an advisor to his new venture in Palo Alto. John's work on hydrogen generation to supplement diesel engines for greater HP and engine torque while dramatically lowering emissions continues today with help from his partners in Idaho. John was invited to LaunchSiliconValley.org on June 9th to showcase his latest foray into the Web search market and subsequently moved to Palo Alto to work on the subsequent Chumly project.
The company now has more than fifty people contributing to www.chum.ly and the site's success. John and his father started the company in June and the company seems to be picking up speed like a snowball rolling down the hill. Chumly is a blog site that makes it easier to post blogs across a user's network of social sites and to receive updates from these sites back on chum.ly. In addition there are many things that you can do on Chumly that you cannot do on Twitter and so it acts as an enhancer to Twitter. John Gotts serves as the company's Chairman & CEO and was instrumental in the company's strategic direction.
Although John has seen tremendous success he takes equal pride in the projects he's involved himself in that didn't come to fruition. Gotts is quoted as saying, "As Edison failed 10,000 times before getting the light bulb to work, so must an inventor/entrepreneur have the tenacity and drive to respect failure as a learning experience and not as a direct and immediate reason to give up. Venture capital firms expect to get a big win on perhaps two or three of ten investments. My successful ventures fund the experimentation of the less-successful ventures and I always come away smarter and wiser, which is valuable unto itself and lends itself to future endeavors." With that attitude John has self-funded his own start-ups for the better part of two decades and continues to innovate today as a self-made, self-educated inventor and business person. John Gotts has a profound love for business and has since riding his skateboard to E.F. Hutton at ten years old, where he learned to read and understand the Wall St. Journal from one of the stock brokers in the office. At this age he would also spend time at the public library pouring over annual reports and later discuss interesting businesses with his father. While living in Sun Valley, Idaho in 1994 to 1997 John Gotts wrote a stock trading newsletter called TrendTrading.com, which focused on trading core blue-chip stocks, which John would buy or short based on historical charts and trends. John is also an avid high-speed snowboarder and enjoys playing the guitar and singing karaoke. You can find more about John at his LinkedIn page and: |
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