UNI Entrepreneurship Symposium 2015
March 4, 2015
3 p.m.
University Room, Maucker Union
University of Northern Iowa
The University of Northern Iowa John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center is pleased to present the UNI Entrepreneurship Symposium on March 4 from 3-4 p.m. in the University Room of Maucker Union on the UNI campus. The event is open to the public and is free. No reservations required. Faculty: we can accommodate your class. Sponsors for the event are: UNI Entrepreneurs (student organization), UNI Reaching for Higher Ground, and the UNI John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center. The event is being presented as part of the Reaching for Higher Ground theme for 2014-2015: Media and Social Media.
This year's speaker is Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com, an internet news aggregator. He is also the author of It's Not News, It's FARK: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News (2007). He is a frequently guest on many news programs. For Fark.com as a company, he firmly admits he has not contingency plan in place in the event of a Zombie attack. Besides worrying about Zombies, he's had to fight trolls -- patent trolls to be exact. In his TED 2012 talk, he explains how he fought a lawsuit from a company that has a vague patent and claimed Fark.com was infringing on the patent.
As the founder, sole owner, and CEO of Fark.com, Drew Curtis is in a very unique position where digital media is concerned. For the past 15 years, he has watched as media evolved from an industry that eschewed and dismissed the digital realm to an industry very much aware that their future depends on it.
With over 2000 news items a day submitted by a pool of three million users, there's very little that happens in the world that doesn't pass across Drew's desk, all thanks to the advances in digital media. And yet, without traditional journalism, there would be nothing to report. Fark represents a new piece of the media consumption equation – curation.
Fark deeply permeates the pop culture zeitgeist - in 2009 Fark was honored for the second time with its own category on Jeopardy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO3wVQkFMco Fark’s influence continues to be felt 15 years after its founding – in 2014, Fark was mentioned by Yahoo Finance as the highest volume driver of Internet traffic per capita of any site on the Internet (and #9 overall on raw numbers). In pure English, Fark drives outbound traffic equivalent to a quarter of all Reddit traffic while being less than 1/10th the size community-wise.
Drew Curtis runs Fark.com in Kentucky and owns 100% of the company. Fark was self-funded and built entirely in-house. Drew has appeared on every major news outlet dozens of times each, and has done over 1,000 radio interviews to date. Fark.com is heavily watched by media outlets for story ideas, and as a result many of the eye-catching news stories of the week originate from there.
Previous speaking engagements include TED 2012 ("How I Beat a Patent Troll" - main conference at Long Beach), South By Southwest (2009, 2010, and 2011), multiple Poynter Institute symposiums, and Web 2.0 and assorted other social media conferences.
http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_curtis_how_i_beat_a_patent_troll
http://blog.ted.com/2015/02/19/drew-curtis-of-fark-on-running-for-govern...
Drew is also the author of It's Not News It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News, possibly the only book in existence reviewed by both Dave Barry and Stephen King.
Drew is a co-collaborator on a beer with Stone Brewing Company founder Greg Koch and their mutual friend Wil Wheaton. Stone Farking Wheaton W00tstout was released nationwide in July 2013 and sold completely out within two weeks. It was ranked in the Top 20 New Beers of 2013, and a new batch is planned for 2014.
In Dec of 2012, Drew graduated from the prestigious Berkley Columbia Executive MBA program, receiving a degree from both Haas School of Business and Columbia Business School. Much to the chagrin of his entrepreneur friends, Drew found the experience to be both useful and interesting.
In January 2015, Drew filed to run for Governor of Kentucky in 2015 as an Independent candidate. His theory is that social media and other technological changes have made it possible to do so successfully without party support.
In his spare time, Drew is an avid soccer player. He is also currently working on a secret project to end patent trolls. He also has profound ADD in case that wasn’t obvious.