I think he genuinely interested in helping startups and giving his knowledge away, also in being well known, so that is part of the visionary bit you mention. He sometimes talks about himself in the third person as if he thinks everyone thinks of him as this visionary already.
I doubt he run Mahalo in long term, he will want to get it established and flip it in the next 5 years, if not sooner, and I've heard him mention on the show that he is envious of $100m buyouts for companies and he wants that for Mahalo.
I think he building connections for his next ventures and company. He is aware of a lot early stage companies, he can invest at very favorable rates and then give the company a much better chance of success by introducing it to key VCs that he knows - which could make some very good investments for himself.
actually, our goal is to get into the top 100 sites in the next year and the top 50 two years from now.
If we do that we'll have a really nice business, and to be honest I'm not interested in flipping this one. Like Evan Williams with Twitter, I'm long on this startup after having sold my last one quickly.
No regrets selling Weblogs, Inc. after only 18 months. In fact, it was an amazing deal that set me up to raise $20M to build something on the scale of About.com (top 20 site), eHow (top 30), Yahoo Answers (top 20) or perhaps even Wikipedia (top 10!).
I think we have a good chance to grow as large as About.com or eHow... getting to Wikipedia level, well, that's a little out of my control, but I'm going to try really hard.
In terms of being a VC I've thought about it, but for now I'm just going to do 2-4 small invetments (25-50k) a year. So far I've done two this year: www.challengepost.com and www.gdgt.com. Both of which are really great ideas with big potential. I love the entrepreneurs behind each of these... hopefully I can find a couple of these a year.
I doubt he run Mahalo in long term, he will want to get it established and flip it in the next 5 years, if not sooner, and I've heard him mention on the show that he is envious of $100m buyouts for companies and he wants that for Mahalo.
I think he building connections for his next ventures and company. He is aware of a lot early stage companies, he can invest at very favorable rates and then give the company a much better chance of success by introducing it to key VCs that he knows - which could make some very good investments for himself.