Tom Bevan At Claremont McKenna

Last night I had the pleasure of dining with Tom Bevan, founder of Real Clear Politics, who came in a day early to see Karl Rove speak before the Athenaeum. He sat down at our table, one table over from Karl Rove. There, Ben Casnocha and I grilled Bevan on RCP, how he makes money, and where he sees the future of media going. He described Real Clear Politics as not entirely "democratic" as a "lot of editorial decision-making" goes into the site. I had some time to digest what he was saying, and came back with a decent question for this evening.

Bevan had a few interesting remarks on tech start ups and what goes into starting up a company and maintaining dominance. Real Clear Politics started in 2000 and weathered the tech bubble burst. But just how?

"We turned Real Clear Politics into a lean, mean, machine," Bevan said. Bevan wakes up at 3:30 am every morning to go looking for good articles to include and to keep up to date before the rest of the country has risen. He went on to describe how unlike some of the other people during the tech bubble, he avoided venture capital money or hiring lots of additional people. Bevan insisted on specializing his Web site, which has since grown to over twenty employees and three sister sites, devoted to world politics, markets, and sports.

I asked Bevan how he continues to stay innovative, given the precarious nature of internet companies post-bubble. Media companies tend to dislike sending the competition to other sites by inserting hyperlinks.

"When we were starting up, the mainstream media was adverse to linking to anybody's stuff because they didn't want to drive traffic to their competitors. They didn't understand that there's a big pie that's big enough for everybody, but that was the game they were playing."

Bevon admits that the idea of Real Clear Politics is pretty simple, but now that he was the first to enter the market, he's pretty confident that he'll stay there. "We kept asking ourselves 'why aren't other people doing what we are doing?'"

He moved on and pointed to three key things that had made Real Clear Politics successful. They are:

• That your website ought to be the destination and stay that way
  
• That you want to partner with people rather than compete with them, like the Washington Post with whom Real Clear Politics is working with on mashing some RCP features onto the Washington Post's website.
• That there's a pie that's big enough for everybody.
  

Bevon remarked after his talk that as a founder of a start up you worry about everything all the time and look around for your competition, but he says that he fears the big media companies more than he fears the up and comers.

All in all, I thought the talk was very good from Bevan, if a tad bit too concerned with the minutiae of politics. Still, it was striking how many Claremont students replied and revealed that Real Clear Politics or Markets was a first stop (and for many, an all the time stop!) destination as they went about the internet.