• Current: President and founder of Conjecture Corporation which runs a growing network of consumer-facing websites that reach over 13 million unique visitors per month. Sites include: Snippets, wiseGEEK and CalorieGallery.
  

• Investor/Advisor: I currently devote a portion of my time investing in and advising web-based businesses. I am also an LP in a seed/early-stage venture capital fund.
  

• Serial entrepreneur: Previous businesses include: a custom CD/DVD-case business with major clients including Mitsubishi, Caterpillar and CNBC; a crêpe restaurant that I started from scratch in the San Francisco Bay Area; a screen-printing business that allowed me to pay my way through college.
  

• Education: BA Philosophy, UC Berkeley.
  

• Avid traveler: I took a six-month backpacking trek through India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Later, I went on a three month trip to India which included a month of isolated beach-side camping on one of the Andaman Islands.
  

• Other interests: I enjoy hiking, especially summiting peaks. I also enjoy cross-country skiing, design and classical piano.
  

• My name: My name is spelled “Denis Grosz” and is pronounced like “Dennis Gross” (as opposed to “Denise Grows”). The “sz” in my surname takes the Hungarian spelling because my paternal ancestors lived in the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Both of my parents are Slavic and since double-letters are rare or non-existent in Slavic languages, my given name only has a single “n.”

About This Site

I intend to address some issues related to internet entrepreneurship and will focus on those areas where I have a different approach than is often described elsewhere.

I have been reluctant to launch this site, because I have mixed feelings about the many other internet-business websites that abound. On one hand they contribute to the wealth of information about this new and ever-changing medium. On the other however, their content is often construed as advice and my fear is that entrepreneurs lacking experience or confidence would follow someone else’s suggestions.

There is significantly more noise than signal floating out there, and every business situation is different; each successful entrepreneur needs to develop the ability to consume info and then decide which direction to head. As far as advice goes, each entrepreneur needs to be nudged in different directions. For example, there is plenty of discussion about how overspending is the death knell of a startup. While I thoroughly agree with this, I tend to run my businesses so lean, that the advice that I actually needed early on was to spend more.

Internet gurus are beneficial but for different reasons than they may think. Their charismatic suggestions serve to broaden the pool of ideas-to-consider, but I haven’t found one that is close to reliable enough to be followed. In the same vein, I hope that the articles on this site will only be interpreted as things that have worked for me or as ideas-to-consider; they are certainly not intended as advice.