San Francisco — ADAM CURRY may be known to new media types as the "Podfather," but these days the former MTV VJ and disc jockey talks more like a spokesman for the chamber of commerce.
While striding through his hipster, post-industrial South of Market office space where some of his 40 employees are lost in a computer or ear-bud-induced haze, Curry, who's rarely at a loss for words, explained why he and his new company set up shop here and his pro-growth philosophy.
"I love doing business in America," said Curry, who was born in Virginia, grew up in Amsterdam, and today splits his time between London and the Bay Area. "I've lived in welfare states -- Netherlands is a welfare state, the U.K. is moving toward it. You can't fire anyone in a welfare state. But Americans are motivated. They want to work."
His entrepreneurial foray into podcasting -- the downloading of audio and video programs onto a digital device such as an iPod -- seeks to be among the first to generate big money off the up-and-coming medium that threatens to further erode terrestrial radio's power. Though there have been a few failures, Curry has a good track record in the business world. PodShow Inc., founded in January 2005, is only the latest in a series of company-building ventures for Curry that began in the dot-com boom of the 1990s, a time that made him wealthy enough to purchase and move his family into a European castle.
Curry's fame and bravado helped push podcasting into mainstream consciousness and earned him the Podfather nickname among those in the fledgling new media industry.
"Adam is the figurehead and the face of podcasting," said Tim Bourquin, founder and CEO of TNC New Media, an Orange County-based company. "He's definitely got a big following."
"Big" is the operative word for Curry, who is 6 feet, 6 inches tall and isn't afraid of thinking on a grand scale.
"If you're going to start a media revolution, which is what this is totally about, it's harder to do it in New York, because it's the capital of publishing. You can't do it Los Angeles either, because of Hollywood," he said during a recent tour of his PodShow offices. "It had to be here, where we're media scientists."
His doubters regard that kind of talk as overblown, somewhat like Curry himself, they say. They're bothered that while Curry promotes himself as a would-be revolutionary for the little guy, he's actually as profit mad as the corporate giants. He's just smaller, say his online critics who fire off scathing barbs unstoppable on the Web and in podcasts but not permissible in family newspapers.
