tell me what you think of splitting 'a&e' into a separate forum

[El Diablo]

db,

I have been involved as a founder, investor, advisor, or board member of over 20 Internet startups over the past 10 years. The majority of those were venture-capital funded startups, a handful of them have become leading sites in their market segment. A number of those involve content creation and aggregation, some via message forums, others via traditional editorial, others via blog networks, etc. Other businesses I'm involved with that have similar network effect considerations have included social networking sites, auction sites, and online expert answer sites. I have sat in numerous boardrooms discussing this same challenge across all these businesses - how do you expand the business without diluting the value of the brand and risking the critical mass in areas where you have achieved a key level of success? The general rule is quite simple. The further you are experimenting with change in areas where you branch away from your core competency, the higher the chance of failure when making the change.

I will not discuss specific companies I've worked with in this forum, but am happy to do so privately.

You don't need to get this info from me, though. It is easy to identify a number of sites that have dealt with these exact issues and discuss the challenges of expanding beyond the site's core area of expertise with administrators at those sites.