The Groogle of Gumroad.com

Gumroad, a site for selling knowledge content, is described by TechCrunch as "the buzzy one-man startup launched by Pinterest and Turntable app designer (and 19- year-old college dropout) Sahil Lavingia."

The word "buzzy" alone sets off alarms -- what does that mean?  Buzzy to whom?  Even if it represents a concrete value, such words only perpetuate the likelihood of contracting Groogle, because they are based on who you know, not what you know.

The idea of a "college dropout" being the latest in "cool" appears to be a symptom of Groogle.  TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis, when interviewing Mr. Lavingia says that "everyone should drop out of college."  In truth, she is too young and inexperienced to make such a judgment, and even Mr. Lavingia has the common sense to say he's actually on "leave of absence" from USC. 

"If everything turns to hell", says Lavingia, "I can always go back."  But Ms. Tsotsis -- and, it seems, a growing percent of the Groogle-verse (for example, Peter Thiel's "20 Under 20 Fellowship" program) -- prefer the idea of a "college drop-out," as it seems to raise the value of their young entrepreneur in the minds of the "buzzing" Valley-bees.  Especially if he hopes, as the "buzz" suggests, to create a $1 billion company. 

This would all be so much harmless teenage angst if Lavingia's start-up, Gumroad, hadn't received -- according to yesterday's TechCrunch announcement -- a commitment of $1.1 million in seed funding from investors Accel Partners, Chris Sacca, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Josh Kopelman, Seth Goldstein, Naval Ravikrant, Collaborative Fund and Danny Rimer.

Gumroad's investors appear to ignore decades of research -- and patents -- in the field of content pricing.  The big issue, says Tsotsis, is security.  No, it's not.  Security is a minor issue compared to what's required to allow content buying and selling -- and the ultimate requirement: dynamic pricing.

In fact, dynamic content pricing has already been resolved, and is actively working on the Internet amongst large communitities.  But getting the Groogle-verse to understand this fact, and deploy in a large scale, is difficult when there's so much buzz -- and bucks -- in Silicon Valley drowning out the real achievements in the field, including (yes) the achievements of people who haven't even dropped-out of college.