POPULARITY
Sun, 22 Mar 2020 00:00:00 Z2020-03-22T00:00:00ZTim Armstronghttps://akron.thechapel.life/resources/akron/sermons/how-not-to-worry/how-not-to-worry-p
Triathlon Tips Podcast by Live Your Own Fit with Jaimielle & Pete Jacobs, Ironman World Champion. Something for all levels of triathlete, from beginner to elite you'll get some tips for training for a triathlon, and competing in a triathlon. We cover mindset, swim bike run tips & technique, nutrition, and many more details and common sense advice. We hope you enjoy it. Swim tips Choosing a wetsuit - swim tips in training and the race - how to draft in the swim - avoid anxiety, panic attacks, shortness of breath - The three key elements of simming- technique - streamline - rhythm. Triathlon bike tips - nutrition on the bike - building strength - MAF (maximum aerobic function) heart rate on the bike - tips for staying calm and focused - reminders to drink and eat. Run tips in triathlon How to keep focus - technique tips for the run - cadence - posture - foot landing - Nutrition - run pacing - Mindset technique - how to visualise in training to build a strong mindset for race day. Being in the moment using gratitude to dispel fears, doubts, worries, anxieties and tension. Get more from your physical body by being clam, present, and relaxed in mind and body. www.liveyourownfit.com @liveyourownfit - @petejjacobs - @jaimielle We provide triathlon coaching programs, health coaching, guidance for life change and improvements in all areas of health and performance. One off consultations available for those not ready for a 6 or 12 week commitment.
[Tech House] In the first of two parts, Luis Karvlaska breaks down a house session from the course, playing tech house, drums and jungle sounds mixed recorded live at the last BPM FESTIVAL 2016 in Wah Wah Bar Playa del Carmen, a 125 bpm tech house party! Enjoy it!! iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/mx/podcast/luis-karvlaska-podcast/id1081195618?mt=2 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DjLuisKarvlaska/ Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/luiskarvlaska Twitter: https://twitter.com/luiskarvlaska Mixcloud: https://www.mixcloud.com/luiskarvlaska/ Podomatic: http://luiskarvlaska.podomatic.com/entry/2012-04-22T00_25_43-07_00 Track List: 01. Velex (Luis Karvlaska Essences Intro Mix) - Ben Grunnell, Collective Machine 02. Jack (Original Mix) - Dario D Attis, David Aurel 03. Make Me Want Me (Original Mix) - Ben Grunnell 04. We Love Music (Original Mix) - Emery Warman 05. Danza Danza (Original Mix) - Kaiserdisco 06. Rotate (Original Mix) - Mihai Popoviciu 07. Donatello (Luis Karvlaska Bootleg) - Ben Grunnell 08. Black Door (Original Mix) - Joeski 09. Mind Body & Soul (Luis Karvlaska Edit) [Acapella] 10. Barlovento (Original Mix) - Matthew Codek 11. Floortom (Original Mix) - Chiqito 12. Pretty Twist (Original Mix) - Metodi Hristov 13. Maiar (Original_Mix) - Ben Grunnell 14. I Like It (Original Mix) - Demarzo 15. Trip Trap (Jaceo Remix) - Hugo Luigi Rocca 16. In the Shadows (Joeski Remix) - Ante Perry, Tube & Berger 17. Reflex (Original Mix) - Stefano Noferini, Metodi Hristov 18. I Get Deep (Late Nite Tuff Guy Remix - Emanuel Satie Rework) - DJ Le Roi Feat. Roland Clark 19. Rock It (Stefano Noferini Re-Edit) - Luca M, JUST2, Vzorov 20. Watcha Gonna Do (Original Mix) - Harry Romero 21. Jack (Original Mix) - TN.T 22. Huracan (Pirupa Remix) - Simone Liberali 23. The Cat (Original Mix) - Cari Golden, Coyu 24. YO (Original mix) - Purple Disco Machine 25. Daledalehey (Luis Karvlaska Bootleg) - Rafa Barrios
[Circuit] Thanks everyone for your support! ...let's make 2016 even bigger! Luis Karvlaska is back again with a new powerful circuit session!, free download and enjoy it! iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/mx/podcast/luis-karvlaska-podcast/id1081195618?mt=2 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DjLuisKarvlaska/ Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/luiskarvlaska Twitter: https://twitter.com/luiskarvlaska Mixcloud: https://www.mixcloud.com/luiskarvlaska/ Podomatic: http://luiskarvlaska.podomatic.com/entry/2012-04-22T00_25_43-07_00 Tracklist: 01. Everybody's Free (Luis Karvlaska Intro Mix) [Acapella] 02. All You Need (Luis Karvlaska Bootleg) - Agua Sin Gas by Antoine Clamaran 03. Take U 2 Luv (Peter Brown & Lucas Reyes Remix) - eSQUIRE & OFFBeat Feat. Polina Griffith 04. Bitch (Leandro Morales Remix)- Bruno Knauer 05. Calor (Luis Erre Universal Mix) - DJ Lapetina Feat Paula Bencini & Alex Marie 06. Grooveland (Luis Karvlaska Circuit Bootleg) - Oscar L. 07. Goddess (Mauro Mozart Remix) - Ana Paula Feat. Carol Campos 08. Show Me Drums (Luis Karvlaska Bootleg) - Edson Pride 09. Underground Kontrast (Xavier Santos Mash) - Celeda Vs Muzzaik 10. No Drama (Luis Karvlaska Bootleg) - Beth Sacks 11. Everybody Need a Man (Dj Aaron Edit) - Offer Nissim Feat. Maya 12. Gimme The Midnight (Luis Karvlaska Bootleg) - Madonna 13. Leke Leke (Alessander Gelassi Remode Remix) - DJ Fist 14. Cairo Nights (Luis Karvlaska Edit 2016) - Mauro Mozart 15. I Wanna Sing2Me (Roger Grey Private) - Thomas Gold & Luis Erre Feat. Paula Bencini 16. Toca's Miracle ( Mad Frequency Bootleg ) - Fragma 17. La Puta (Leo Blanco Triberical Remix) - Julio Leal, Miguel Maldonado 18. Only You (Club Mix) - Jon Flores 19. So Alone (Nathan Cozzetto Remix) - Mark Bale & Lucas Reyes Feat Sarah Tyler 20. Today Is My Day (Original Mix) - Tikaro, J.Louis & Ferran Feat. Clarence
Audio File: Download MP3Transcript: Lucy Sanders: Hi. This is Lucy Sanders. The CEO and co‑founder of NCWIT. The National Center for Women and Information Technology. With me is Larry Nelson, W3W3. Hi Larry. Larry Nelson: Hi. I'm happy to be here, of course. This is a wonderful series. Everything will be posted on w3w3.com, and on our blog and our podcast directly in addition to the ncwit.org site. Lucy: Yeah. It's exciting today. We're interviewing somebody who has been a leader in the tech sector for a many successful efforts, including start ups that required by companies we've all heard off like eBay. While you've heard of them, Kate Matsudaira is the founder now of Popforms, which is a pretty cool company for all you go‑getters out there, self starters who are really eager to use some neat tools around empowering your own leadership around growing successful teams, engaging people, etc. We'll hear more about Popforms in just a moment. Kate is a very interesting and accomplished person, an author, a speaker. One of my favorite things she does is she sits on the board of ACMQ. Now, this is a test. I don't how many people know what ACM stands for. ACMQ is an editorial board for the association for computing machinery, which is a very old and very large professional society for us computing people. I one time had the honor of speaking to the ACMQ Board about voice over IP. Larry: All right. Lucy: It was a long time ago. Kate's very technical, CTO, lots and lots of technology skills like cloud computing and distributing systems and everything else. We're just really thrilled to have you here Kate, welcome. Kate Matsudaira: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be on the show. Lucy: We have a lot of different kinds of questions to ask you about entrepreneurship, but let's just start first with technology in general. You're a very technical person. How did you first get into technology? Maybe you could share just a bit with listeners about the things you see that are particularly interesting and are emerging, in terms of technology. Kate: Well, I first got into technology when I was a kid. I always loved math and science and figuring things out and I remember having a microscope as a child. There was a pond where we lived and I would go get pond water and put it under there and there was all these things crawling in it and I thought it was the craziest thing that you could see all these weird things swimming in the water. I always remember that was one of my earliest experiences with science. Then, just the passion for science and technology. I ended up studying computer science in college, largely because it was my favorite set of classes. I just felt like it came really natural to me. When I did my computer science, it never felt like work. It was like the stuff I would save for last because I like doing it so much. It's kind of a natural thing for me to study. In terms of cool technology trends, well I'm really into wearable computing. I was complaining the other day that my computer...I have a MacBook with a solid state drive, and I was running out of space. I'm like, "I got to get a newer computer because I need to store everything. I remember when my hard drives weren't even a gigabyte. It's just amazing to see how fast technology has grown and how it has empowered so many cool things. I love the wearable tech and just all the things that you're going to able to do when computer gets smaller and faster, and there's more memory and more power processing and things like that. The applications are just mind blogging, so it's really my thing. Oh, and 3D printing and laser cutting are other really cool technology application. I'm really into physical goods. How technology bridges that gap I think is fascinating. It's going to be really interesting to watch over the next few years. Lucy: Well, just sort of a follow up to that. We just got a 3D printer here at NCWIT. We're very excited for MakerBot, great company. We've interviewed MakerBot before Jenny Lauten. Somebody told me, I haven't verified it, that you can now go get 3D printed dress online. Larry: Whoa. Lucy: I believe it when I see it. That's classic, right? Larry: Yeah. [laughs] Lucy: I don't know what's that like. Anyway, we really love wearables also. Wearable computing is such a great way to teach kids about computing. Larry: Before we get into all the different thoughts and questions that we have that you're going to help our audience with, could you give us the latest in Pop Forms? Kate: Yes. What we do at Pop Forms, we like to say we help super stars shine at work. What we're essentially trying to do is bridge the gap that exists...Right now, if you're an executive or a really senior leader and you want to better at your job, there's all kinds of things you should do. You can spend thousands of dollars going to leadership training, seminars, conferences or hiring a coach. If you're just a high potential employee and you really want to advance in your career and you have a smaller budget, what exists for you today? We're really focused on online education around helping people be better leaders, be more productive and just kind of shine and do amazing on their job. Lucy: Give one example, perhaps, of a kind of things that people can do at your site. Can people come to your site and learn? Kate: We have a lot of different courses on topics around getting things done, around improving your communication skills, on being a better public speaker or pitching and to speak at a conference. All those kind of soft skills are what we focus on. We have a lot of, what we call, our leadership sparks that are focused on weekly lessons that take less than 5 to 10 minutes to do, to help you build those skills over time. Instead of one course that's hours, and hours that you might not complete, we try to partition it out in small actionable pieces. Larry: You've really answered this next question that I have in my mind, but let me just see if I can rephrase it. Now, just why is it you are an entrepreneur, and then what is it about entrepreneurship that makes you tick? Kate: Let's see. I am an entrepreneur because when I first started my career, I thought I wanted to work the corporate ladder, and I was promoted a lot by companies like Microsoft and Amazon. I started off as an engineer, became a manger, and then a senior manager and so forth. I realized, as I was climbing the ladder, that what I really wanted to do was not just be in charge of the technical team. I really wanted to be involved with strategy, and I wanted to learn the business. The only way I saw that could really happen was to join a small company, and that really started my passion for start‑ups. I've been on the team of three successful start‑ups as you mentioned in my interaction, and now I do own start‑ups. I just love, when you get the ability to work with customers, to build products, to make the money. All of those things are very fun, and it really caters to my desire to learn all these new things, and constantly be pushing myself and challenging myself in a new way. Lucy: It's the variety of tasks that entrepreneurs... Larry: Yeah. Lucy: Have to do that... Kate: Challenges too. Lucy: And challenges. Yeah, exactly. On your entrepreneurial path, who influenced you along the way ‑‑ mentors, or others potentially? What kinds of help did you get along the way? Kate: I've had a lot of help, including from people who didn't necessarily even know they were my mentors. There's a ton of resources on mind. There's philosophies you can follow, but I also have some people who I'm very close to that I've learned from. Binders to my company are, one of them is named Dan Shapiro. He's had several successful companies. He's the one I've looked towards. Another one is Ethan Shot. His metrics is also in several successful companies. They're people that I follow, and use as my own personal advisory board, but there's also a ton of other people. Just looking at Sheryl Stenberg, and looking at the people who are even just executives in the bigger companies that have had a lot of success, and being them, and being able to emulate the things that you like, the things that you don't like. Even from afar, you can learn their philosophies, and the way they do things. You always take the best of what you see, and integrate it into your life. Larry: Yes. Wow. I have to ask this, Kate. You have done so many different neat things. You've helped companies grow, you've grown your own company. What is one of the toughest things that you've had to do in your career? Kate: I think it's letting people go. It's the hardest thing. Lucy: We hear that a lot. Yeah. Kate: I think any time you have to let someone go from a company, or a roll, whether it's to take care of your underwear like a layoff, it's really hard. Because the hardest problems, they're always people problems. They're not business problems, or technology problems. In many ways, I feel like those are figureoutable, but the people problems are always the most difficult and challenging, I think. Lucy: We do hear that. We do hear that a lot. That is one of the hardest things. Larry: I think it's greatly in part, because leaders really care about people, and that's why it affects you that way. Kate: I think you have to care about people to be a good leader. Lucy: Absolutely. People follow leaders, and I think they care about them. I think it is a very difficult thing no matter the circumstance to let a person go. Switching tracks just slightly in terms of advice to young people, what kinds advice would you give to young people about following an entrepreneurial path? Kate: I would say that the best thing you can do is focus on building your own career capital, and really try to do the hard work. I think that building what I call career capital, which is like knowledge, and know‑how, it's a network, it's a track record of success, and projects, whether you're at a different company, or you're in school. Building that capital on my own to accomplishments, and all of that will palate into whatever success you have. Whether you follow up as an entrepreneur, or you decide to stay and become an executive in a big company. Consistently working on building yourself, and increasing that capital is the most important thing. I wish someone had talked to me so much about that, because I think you optimize, otherwise, for the wrong variables. Sometimes you're like, "Oh, I need to know finances," or, "I need to know sales," but I don't think you need that. I think you just need to be the very best at what you do, and when you do that, it's actually easy to build a company around that. It's easy to bring that into a company. I think that focusing on being exceptional is the number one thing that would help people. Larry: Very good. I like that advice. Lucy: I do too. Larry: Yeah. Lucy: I don't think we've heard that yet in all of these interviews. Larry: That's right. Lucy: Yeah. Larry: Now, what personal characteristics? Now, having a look at yourself for a minute, a little introspection here, that has given you the advantages of being an entrepreneur. Kate: I think that I work incredibly hard. [laughter] Kate: I always talk about, that what I make up for in to like intelligence, or experience. I make up for and just share. To me, it's just hard work. I'm not afraid to work nights, I'm not afraid to work weekends, I'm not afraid to get a 100 percent. I think that that has definitely made a difference because I don't give up, and I am willing to do what it takes to make things happen. Lucy: Relentless, tenacious. Larry: Yes. Lucy: You work really hard, and that's what it takes. Focus on being exceptional, right? Larry: Yep. Lucy: That's all hard work, but we also have personalized. How do you, in some sense, balance the two, although we don't like the word balance particularly, but we can't think of a better way to ask the question. How do you bring balance into your life? Kate: Well, I just had a baby in May, so I'm a new mom. Lucy: Congratulations. Yay. Kate: The question is actually really close to my heart, because I really feel, I know this is so clichÈ, but having a baby, and becoming a parent changes your perspective on what's important, and time, and the lack of sleep, and the fact that you want to spend a lot of time with your baby. Like makes you prioritize. It forces that function of balance, whether you wanted to or not. You can call it balance, you can call it managing, or you can call it living. It's all part of it. How do I do it? I think there are kind of like really to see things that I do that I think make a big difference to my ability to keep everything in a way that makes sense. The first one is that I don't plan my personalized, my profession life separately. I treat it all as one life, so I use one calendar, I use one giant to‑do list, and I think that's the difference than a lot of people who'll be like, "Here's my personal work, and here's this." Part of it, I think, is because I'm an entrepreneur. I will work on the weekend if it means I get more time with my family during the week. I don't say, "OK, starting today, it's just family time." I say, "OK, I work fast after my child goes to sleep, so I'm going to work seven days a week in the evenings when he goes to sleep, so that I can spend dinner time and breakfast times with my husband, and my child." I think building through how you manage your time in a more holistic way, then like this is work, and this is weekend, for example. My other tip around this would be planning. I am ruthless about how I spend my time, and what I do, and what I don't do. The reason I'm able to do that is I plan my day every day before I start doing anything. I set out a goal of like, "Here's what I want to get done, here's what's important. I do this at a weekly level too." My co‑founder said like one of the smartest things I ever thought, which is that the secret of time management is knowing what to do with an hour. When you have 15 minutes, or you have a set hour, do you know what you can do? That is actually going to be the most important thing you can do. If you don't, then that means you're not planning you time well enough. Lucy: I think that sounds like a Popforms lesson. [laughter] Larry: Yes, exactly. Lucy: Absolutely, and this whole idea about treating things as one holistic life is spot on. Larry: You and I both with kids. We understand that. Lucy: Would be totally right. We're simply not nodding like, "Yep, yep." Larry: [laughs] Absolutely. Kate: Well, you have to, right? It's better to work some on the weekends, and to be able to have that time every day with your children. I think, anyway. Lucy: Yeah. I did that with my two sons. Exactly that same approach. Plus, I found that if you send busy people, not that I'm advocating this, but sure works for me. If you send busy people email on a Sunday afternoon, you actually get it answered. [laughter] Larry: With busy people. Lucy: Yeah, because they're always checking anyway. Larry: Oh boy. Kate, you've already accomplished a great deal in so many different ways. By the way, your listeners out there will have, on all of our sites, and podcasts and everything. The website address for Kate's business, and you'll learn a lot there. What I'd like to do is to ask you, what's next for you? Kate: What is next? This year, I've been setting my goals already, I'm really focused on continuing to grow Popforms to make it even more successful. I have a baby, I'm really excited about watching him grow. That's a big part of my life right now, but yeah, just making Popforms bigger and better. We're launching some software products in 2015, so I'm really excited about that, and yeah, it's going to be a great year. Larry: That is super. Lucy: Well, wow. Larry: I'm really proud of you. Lucy: Yeah, really, and this is really interesting, and especially a lot of the things that Popforms does in terms of careers. Larry has done some work in that space himself. Larry: Yeah, a little bit. Lucy: A little bit, yeah. Well, thank you so much Kate. It was great spending time with you, and we really appreciate all the tips. Larry: You bet, and you listeners out there, you can tune in to 3333.com, and listen to this any time. Also on our podcast, and our blog, but also, and most important, is ncwit.org. You'll see the site, and you'll have links to everything that she said. Lucy: Thanks Kate. Kate: Thank you. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Kate MatsudairaInterview Summary: Kate Matsudaira is the founder of Popforms, which creates tools that are designed to help today’s technical leaders shine in their roles. Their tools empower leaders with the knowledge they need to keep growing their skills, plus strategic tools to help them engage and grow amazing teams. "I think that building what I call career capital, which is like knowledge, and know‑how, it's a network, it's a track record of success, and projects, whether you're at a different company, or you're in school," said Kate about building a successful career. "Building that capital on my own to accomplishments, and all of that will palate into whatever success you have. Whether you follow up as an entrepreneur, or you decide to stay and become an executive in a big company. Consistently working on building yourself, and increasing that capital is the most important thing. I wish someone had talked to me so much about that, because I think you optimize, otherwise, for the wrong variables." Release Date: March 22, 2015Interviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 17:53
Audio File: Download MP3Transcript: Lucy Sanders: Hi this is Lucy Sanders, the CEO, co‑founder of NCWIT. The National Center for Women and Information Technology. We have another one of our really fabulous interviews today with women who have been very successful in the entrepreneurial space. Today we're interviewing a woman who has experience across for profit and the non‑profit entrepreneurial sectors. Larry Nelson: Good. Lucy: Good. With me is Larry Nelson, w3w3.com. Hi Larry. Larry: Hi, I'm really happy to be here. I really loved your site and our listeners are going to learn it. A number of wonderful lessons and were posted on our home page and NCWIT channel as well as a podcast directory and blog. Of course, we're in really shine is on the ncwit.org site. Lucy: Yes, very excited about that. Today we're talking to Christina Wallace and as I mentioned before, Christina has a lot of experience in both for profit and the non‑profit sectors. She was also named as one of Mashables 44 female founders to know. Now, all of our listeners are going to know Christina. Larry: There you go. Lucy: That's absolutely awesome. Today she's the founding partner of BridgeUp: STEM and certainly near and dear to our heart. For those of you listening, STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering and Math and BridgeUP: STEM is a new educational initiative at the American Museum of Natural History and it's focused on introducing girls and minorities to computer science again, something that we care passionately about. Before her role at BridgeUP STEM, she was vice‑president at Startup Institute and the founder and CEO of Venture Back eCommerce brand, Quincy Apparels. A management consultant with Boston Consulting Group, who we used to hire when I worked at AT&T, and an arts manager at the Metropolitan Opera. Wow, what a span of things. I can't wait to hear about it in addition to, she has an MBA from Harvard University. Christina, welcome. We're really happy to have you here. Before we start and get into the interview questions maybe just a little bit more for listeners about BridgeUp: STEM. I'm sure they'll be curious to know what you're up to there. Christina Wallace: Sure, we're very excited. We're about six months into a five year grant to build BridgeUP: STEM. Helen Gurly Brown Foundation was very generous in being our founding partner to support this. It is a new portfolio of programs actually. There's several pieces of this that we're building over the next five years at the museum, really focused on diversifying the pipeline of talent going into STEM. Really trying to get more girls, more minorities, under‑served students into the pipeline, getting them into computer science and encouraging them and inspiring them. Our first piece of initiative is what we call our Brown Scholars Program and that is intended as an intensive two‑year after school program for 9th and 10th grade girls to come to the museum two days a week after school and we'll teach them to code in python. We'll introduce them to some statistics and data science and a little bit of algorithms and databases and data visualization. We'll do that through using the scientific data sets here and letting them become mini data scientists. Getting to play with genome data, getting to play with our digital universe atlas of the universe and, in their second year, do real research with some of our scientists here and the opportunity to really contribute to some of the work being done. That's our first big kick off for this program. Our girls start in our first cohort in February and we'll do another cohort sort of every trimester. Fall, Spring and Summer for the next few years. Then we're adding additional programming this summer for middle school students, boys and girls, trying to get out into the boroughs of New York City so it's not just something we have on the upper west side. Then we're really looking into professional development and curriculum development opportunities for public school teachers. Trying to bring computational thinking and computer science into existing math and science classrooms. Trying to really give the students of New York an opportunity to get exposed to this discipline and hoping to piquÈ their interest so that they're, you know, thinking about this as a real opportunity when they go to college. Lucy: And we like that at NCWIT, I'll tell you what. [laughs] Larry: Yes. Ain't that the truth. Lucy: That is the truth. Christina, why don't you tell our listeners a bit about how you first got interested in technology and, as you look out there with all the great technologies you mentioned, data science for example. What other kinds of technologies do you see that you think are really exciting? PARTICIPANT: Sure. So, I got into technology pretty young without realizing that it was a thing, or a thing that I could get into. My mom was a secretary in the computer science department and Michigan State University. We got to play with one of the very first laptops. It didn't have an internal hard drive, it was a dual floppy with a green screen so you could boot it up on one floppy and then you could run a program off the other. And got to participate in some of the early experiments that some of the professors at Michigan State were doing with fingerprint scanning, which seemed so out there in 1991. And really got to see that this was something kind of cool and exciting from the future. I've always was a math nerd, was a math major all through college and took some early programming classes as part of that major. I didn't really put one and one together until business school. I started my career, as you said, at the Metropolitan Opera, I started off on the art side. I've always been both the technologist and a creative artsy person and sort of thought the arts was where I was going to be where I made my home. When I got to business school and discovered there were all the tech start‑ups and sort of the creativity that came with creating something from nothing from a product and a business and really getting to kind of imagine something and then go build it, combined with the power of technology and computer science and data and all of those pieces. It just kind of clicked for the first time. That's how I made my path back into this. It's a little bit secluded, but technology is always been there from the beginning. In terms of the stuff I'm really excited about, I think data science is the thing right now. Computer programming, web dev, it's exciting. I like to make pretty things and I like to have them live online. Certainly mobile apps have been of focus for a long time. Being able to ask big questions from giant data sets and really get those in place that can help you design better products. It can help you think about customer segmentation a little bit better. In our case, to help you understand the human body or how different fossils might have originated from different family trees within evolution. In the case of our digital universe, finding new XO planets or seeing what else is out there in the giant universe. I think that's what's really exciting because there's more data now than there's ever existed ever. Larry: [laughs] Christina: It just seems to be compounding. Learning the tools and the skill set to be able to ask those questions and answer them is what gets me excited. Larry: Wow. That's really interesting. Lucy: What's an XO planet? Larry: Yeah. What is an XO planet? Christina: An XO planet is a planet that exists outside of our solar system. Our planet all rotate around the sun. Lucy: I'm such a moron. Christina: The sun isn't the only star that has planets. Our astronomers that search for XO planets are looking for planets that rotate around other stars. Lucy: Thank you for that. [laughs] Christina: You could tell I work at a science museum now. [laughs] Lucy: Yup. That's awesome. Larry: With all of these, this is very fascinating. Just why is it that you are an entrepreneur? What is it about entrepreneurship that makes you tick? Christina: Oh, man. The creating something from nothing is just the thing that drives me. I was a theater director and a producer all throughout college. Going from that, spark of an idea to the plan of how we're going to do it, and then actually building it even if it requires some duct tape and holding two sticks together. Larry: [laughs] Christina: Hoping no one pushes a little bit too hard on the scenery. That's always been the conception to the execution in its first, second and 12th iteration, ideally under intense time, pressure with fewer resources than you would like is just what gets me excited, I think. I've never been at the point of scaling companies. I certainly haven't been at the point to make them big and IPO or any of that. It's sort of that zero to two that gets me really excited. When I created Quincy Apparel with my co‑founder, it's sort of the first time that we got to take this experience from the arts and kind of throw it onto a business model and see how that works and just...I don't know. Butting your head against the wall a hundred times and having it work 101 is just so exciting that I had to do it again [laughs] . When I moved onto Startup Institute and got to open a New York office, it was great to be given a product and ideas that they already figured out, but the question of how do we make it work in New York or will it work in New York? Larry: [laughs] Christina: If it works in New York, how do we make it work in other places too? Then, now getting to be able to start‑up inside a museum that has such an amazing brand and cultural trove. Everyone thinks who about MNH, their first reaction was always, "I love that museum. It's love." Larry: [laughs] Christina: You don't get to build something that's attached to love very often. Lucy: Awesome. I loved the Night at the Museum movie. [laughs] I love them also. Christina: We just had our first hackathon here at the museum, which was a big deal. To say the word "hackathon" in the museum and to let people spend the night and create something on our digital universe is exciting. Lucy: It was at the museum? Christina: It's the best of both worlds. The Night at the Museum, the 3:00 AM in the Hall of the Universe combined with, "Here, take our data. Build something cool on top of it." Lucy: It's so cool. That is awesome. Along this pathway, who has influenced you? You have mentors, role models, or people you've admired from afar? Christina: Yeah. There's been quite a few. One of them that stands out so immediately was a professor I had at business school, Dr. Noam Wasserman. He teaches this course called Founder's Dilemmas. It basically goes through all the ways that a start‑up could fail. It had nothing to do with your products sucking. Larry: [laughs] Christina: It's mostly about interpersonal skills, founder things, legal things, and how to think about who you need on your team. It's just the nuts and the bolts and the playbook for how to actually take an idea and turn it into a business that can continue to exist. It was a complete accident that I got into this class as a virtue of our class selection process. Maybe the second time he was teaching it, it wasn't in demand then as it is now. I actually tried to get out of the class, and I told him that. Lucy: [laughs] Christina: I was going to take this other education class and I couldn't get out of it. I was like, "I'm so sorry. Please forget that I told you I was trying to leave the class." [laughter] Christina: It ended up being one of the best experiences that I had at school. He stayed as one of my close mentors throughout this thing. Always on speed dial when I needed him during Quincy and even post my startup as I thought about, "What do I do next?" "How do I build a career within the start‑up world without being always the founder or always kind of driving this?" He's just been always there for me. I try to pay it back when I can, going back and teaching in his class or contributing when I can. He's been just a huge supporter, from the beginning, even when I told him I wasn't interested in being there on purpose. Larry: [laughs] Christina: And then I think the other person that really just has been driving me, especially in New York is Rachel Sklar. Lucy: Oh sure. Christina: She's the founder of "Change the Ratio" and "The List" and just has been on the forefront of trying to get more visibility and opportunity and access for women in tech, trying to make sure that not every conference is the stale pale male lineup of speakers. Trying to really call out biases when she sees them in media, or in companies, in the way that funders and VC's think about the work they're doing. She's unflagging in this regard. She takes a lot of criticism sometimes. It's hard getting to the forefront of a revolution, but she just does it and she always looks great doing it. She has so much energy and has been one of the reasons I've gotten such a great network of women in New York, from the beginning that have exponentially helped me succeed here and have become some of my best friends, which is pretty awesome to have that kind of a community. Lucy: Absolutely. Larry: Boy, that's better than dessert. Yes, that's good. Christina: [laughs] Lucy: Better than dessert. Larry: Though, Christina, let me ask this, with all the things you've been through and you've developed and you've been a part of and everything else, what's been the toughest thing you've had to do in your career? Christina: The toughest thing I've had to do in my career was to get back up after my company failed. It's something that I try to talk a lot about, because I don't think failure is something that high‑achieving, go‑getter people really think about it until the moment that they're in it themselves. It can feel really, kind of career ending or overwhelming or any of those things, and it's not, at least in the start‑up world. The moment that I knew that we were going to shut down and went through that whole process of unwinding the company. Then I went home and I crawled into my bed and I didn't leave for three weeks. There was this moment of paralysis, of like, "Well what do I do now? " In addition to the, "I have no skills. I'm generalist. I'm a little bit of everything and no one's going to want to hire me," through to the like, "How do I look my investors in the face again," and say, "I lost your money. I'm so sorry. That was never something that I thought would happen." To, "What about my employees?" They pay their rent with paychecks that I was giving them and they don't have them anymore. I've had kids on my health insurance plan. All of these things are going through your head and it can feel overwhelming. I gave myself a couple of weeks to watch The West Wing and to eat seamless and not see anyone. Then I got back up. That four‑week period was probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do personally or professionally, but I did it and it all worked out. I don't think any point in the last two years, anyone has asked me, except from a "I want to learn perspective," no one's asked me "Why did your company fail? That's such a terrible reflection of you as a human being or an indication of your ability or your potential or your worth as a person." It's never came up. That was surprising and something I hope especially more women experience, at least in a lot of the public speaking I do and the mentoring I do. High achieving young women have never really failed at basically anything. The potential for failure, I hope, doesn't prevent them from trying. Lucy: That is so well said. In many of these cases, in both of the last questions you answered, you said like in the case of your professor, you know, "I didn't want to be there and yet, I learned so much." Nobody wants to fail, but definitely it's one of the places you learn a lot. Larry: Yep. Christina: Oh yeah. Lucy: You learn how to lead in hard times. That's very hard. I don't want to say it's remarkable experience because you don't say, "I hope you fail," but there's a lot of learning that can happen there. Sort of along those lines, you've already given us great advice about being an entrepreneur. If you were sitting here now, with young people talking about entrepreneurship, what other advice would you give them about being an entrepreneur? Christina: Not everyone should be an entrepreneur. Right now, it's being very popularized. It's in the Zeitgeist. We're sort of turning a lot of entrepreneurs into these rock stars. That's great that we're giving the visibility and the platform to sort of show off that this is one potential path, but it's not the path for everyone. There's also a lot that can be done, and it can be very fulfilling. It can be the right path to be an early hire at a start‑up, and to be employee number two or number one or number ten. To recognize that I want to be in a place that creates value. I want to be at a place that is very close to it's customers and listens for their feedback and iterates. I want to be at a place that values learning of it's employees and is really focused on professional development and opportunity for us as well as creating value for investors. Identify that start‑ups or technology companies or however you want to define this is a sector that you would really like to be part of without being the first one off the ship, with the idea and no money and living on the couch and taking all the risk. There's a lot of great experiences and obviously, we need entrepreneurs in order to drive innovation. But you don't have to be an entrepreneur to be entrepreneurial. That's the distinction that, when I'm talking to a lot of the young students that I'm mentoring, really trying to help them define "Why do you want to be an entrepreneur? What specifically are you impassioned about solving a specific problem. Do you just see a potential opening in a market that you want to take advantage of?" Or, do you say, "I'm looking at the jobs in front of me in consulting and banking and brand management. None of those look exciting. I really liked that startup movie. I'm going to go start a company because it's not that hard to get $25,000 and two friends to build something at a hackathon." Those are very different things. To really identify where you think you sit and that it might change over time. You might not be ready to be an entrepreneur right out of school, or even in your 20's, but you want to get that experience. At some point, when you find that thing that you can't stop thinking about, and that opportunity that you just have to build, because no one else can build it except you, then you go and take that plunge. You risk everything to build it and that's totally legitimate. It doesn't have to be just his second and you don't have to be the founder to still get that entrepreneurial experience. Lucy: That's very wise. Larry: Boy, that's for sure. Christina I want to thank you for sharing the experience that you went through a few years ago. It's really a great turn on for a lot of people who really could use that extra push. Now I'm going to ask you another question... Christina: Sure. Larry: ...That kind of ties in with that. What are the personal characteristics that you have that given you the advantage of being an entrepreneur? Christina: This is a great question. I was reading a Steve Blank blog post on this today on the "First Round Capital" blog about what to look for when you're basically dating for co‑founders or what specific traits to look for. I don't remember the exact quotes that he put in there, but he basically outlined it as someone who can focus in the midst of extreme turmoil. Larry: [laughs] Christina: And it's function and moving pieces. Someone who is resilient and has endurance, that this is not a sprint, and it's such a clichÈ but it's so important to especially if you've never run a marathon. To understand what it means to run a marathon because it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. To have that resilience to keep getting back up and continue to try and push through. Someone who just has that work ethic to put in the hours. It's not just about long nights so that you can claim that you're working hard. But it's not like a work‑life balance thing. At least that's the beginning. To have that understanding of the discipline required for the home marshmallow test. Can you wait till tomorrow to get two marshmallows versus getting one marshmallow right now? Do you have the discipline to push through for a delayed gratification? Do you have the resilience and the endurance to pick yourself up even after you've been thrown to the ground 20 times? Do you have that ability to focus and make decisions when you're in sort of extreme chaos and dysfunction? Or does that paralyze you? Because that's an early stage company, the very beginnings of entrepreneurship. It's not about executing against an idea, it's trying to narrow down what that idea is. Triggering out what type of business plan that you are trying to execute against his and being able to prioritize and assign resources to different things when everything is priority number one. Some people have life experiences that just naturally prepare them for it. Thanks to you for saying that the ideal founder in his opinion of someone who grew up in a dysfunctional family and was a platoon army leader. [laughter] Christina: That gives you that perspective of chaos but decision making and leadership. Some people have those experiences. I would argue that, I was a costly trained pianist, and challenged for 16 years. That honed my discipline side of my brain, the ability to sit still and practice six hours a day. In hopes that three months from now, this piece will be ready to perform. I certainly grew up in a slightly dysfunctional, crazy things moving around and changing all the time kind of home life. From the endurance and the resilience piece, I run marathons and I climb mountains. I don't do either those things because I really like sweating. It's a way to sort of build that endurance muscle to push through and kind of recognize that head space that you've been there before and you can kind of get to the end of it. Lucy: Here in Boulder we have mountains and marathons. [laughter] Larry: Uh‑huh. Christina: There you go. Lucy: We have all those things here and we have craziness too. Larry: That's true, that's true. Christina: I believe that. Lucy: Totally crazy. You mentioned the work‑life balance and that's actually our next question around. How do you then sort of in some sense blend your personal and professional lives? Because we all have something that we do outside, what we call "work." Right? Larry: Yeah. Christina: Again, it's sort of a horrible not answer, answer. But it also sort of depends. It depends on what stage of life you're in, it depends on how you need to balance those things to make it work. It depends on who else is involved in the room with you right? So with Quincy, I made the decision very early on that it was all I was going to do. I worked seven days a week at it. I didn't sing in a choir, I didn't run marathons, I didn't date, I didn't see my friends, I didn't really see my family. It was just all I did, seven days a week. All I could think about even when I was sleeping. It was the one I needed. At the beginning we were getting from a running start with no money. We had a very specific length of time before we were out of money so that was the runway we had, it was about eight months. It either had to work or it was over. At the end of those eight months, we did managed to raise a venture capital. We had some resources and we were able to hire some people and my co‑founder and I looked at each other and said "We have to have slightly more work‑life balance, or we're going to burn out." So now we're in a different stage in our company. We're able to say, "OK, now we're working six days a week. We'll take one day off every weekend." She was married so she tried to find time and space to make room for her husband. I decided to take up long distance running and I got to go back on audition for a choir, so I'd have something. We got eight months more into that and we were nearly to a point where either was going to work or we were going to have to shut down. In either case, killing ourselves wasn't going to make that difference. We said "OK, now we're going to work five and half days a week" and make a little bit more space for ourselves. In the case of per jobs done at MNH, it's a very different culture here. It's a museum, it's a non‑profit. We have hours that the museum are open, we have hours that the education programs happen. A lot of the partners that I meet to interact with in order to build this program, they're not going to be on their email at four in the morning on a Sunday. There's no point in me being on email at four in the morning on a Sunday. There's a lot more space for me to have a work‑life balance here because the other partners in the room, insists on it. It's the culture that we have here. It can be frustrating sometimes. It can feel a little bit slow sometimes and that's the pay off, right? The nice thing is, I'm not competing with other companies to be the first to market with our product. It's a different type of a start‑up and a different type of an organization. Larry: Wow, that's really something. One of the things I would like to ask is, what mountain are you going to climb next but I'm... [laughter] Christina: Well I can tell you, I leave in two days. I'm going to Nepal to go to average base camp. Lucy: Oh my gosh. Wow, be careful. Larry: Oh wow. Christina: Thank you. Larry: Yeah, you have a great time. Yes. [crosstalk] Larry: Well, you've already been through a great deal, you achieved a lot. What's up for your next? Christina: I mean, I'm excited for project STEM. This could be a program that isn't just something we run at the American Museum of National History. But something that other museums and other informal learning areas might be able to adapt. One thing that we're already seeing in our early development here, is that by teaching coding in computer science through the lens of a subject that girls and minorities already know and are familiar with. We're getting a much higher sort of response rate to the applications and to the programs than we were expecting because if you look at biology, they don't have the gender gap that we have in computer science. Or at least not nearly as much, and certainly in a place like museum where a lot of these kids have been going on school trips since they were in kindergarten. It's a place that they recognize and that they feel comfortable in. We're not having this "Oh I'm not sure I fit in there" piece. For me, the big question that I wanted to ask with this program and I hope that will be able to publish the results and help others think about replicating is, can we teach computer science a lot like we teach English? Which is a tool to help you do other things. If the thing that you're interested in is biology or if it's fashion, or if it's art, let me teach you different languages and process season. Algorithms and things that it might be interesting tools for you to do that other thing that you care a lot about. We might be able to really see this change in this diversity of the talent that's interested in it. This is my big focus, what's got this grand for five years and I intend to take the most of it. But I really want to see this as something that scales beyond just MNH and beyond just New York City. As a way to think about computer science and STEM education. Or populations that aren't necessarily just attracted to the idea of "Let me learn to code, cause I want to learn to code." Lucy: Amen to that. If NCWIT can help you, we are here. Christina: Excellent. Lucy: We are absolutely here. Larry: Wow I'll tell you, that's a fact. We'll have your interview course up on our home page at w3w3.com, in our blog, in our podcast directory, in our newsletter. Most of all, go to ncwit.org and you'll see some fantastic information and stories. Lucy: Well, thank you Christina, very much of just great advice. We always love these interviews. We ask the same questions to everybody and they're all different, the answers of course. Very interesting, thank you very much. Christina: That's awesome. Thank you, I was so happy to be here. This is such a great initials of you guys have. Lucy: Thank you very much. Larry: Christina, I'm glad you didn't ask me to carry your bag on a couple of days so... [laughter] Lucy: Well, thanks very much. We're sort of done with the interview now. But I should just reinforce that offer to help, in any way, NCWIT got a lot of research and practice. What you're doing with bridge up STEM is very much in our will house in terms of interest. Larry: Yes. Christina: Excellent. I will absolutely follow up with you guys on that. Lucy: Yeah. We have a K12 alliance and all the organizations are working together in different things. There's no membership fees for non‑profits so could be some natural affinities there. Christina: Excellent. I will look into that more when I'm back from Nepal. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Christina WallaceInterview Summary: Christina Wallace is the founding director of Bridge Up: STEM which is a new educational initiative at the American Museum of Natural History focused on introducing girls and minorities to computer science. Before her current role at BridgeUp: STEM, Christina was a Vice President at Startup Institute, the Founder and CEO of venture-backed e-commerce brand Quincy Apparel, a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, and an arts manager at the Metropolitan Opera. "I'm excited for project STEM," said Wallace about her program. "This could be a program that isn't just something we run at the American Museum of National History. But something that other museums and other informal learning areas might be able to adapt. One thing that we're already seeing in our early development here, is that by teaching coding in computer science through the lens of a subject that girls and minorities already know and are familiar with." Release Date: March 22, 2015Interviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 27:52
Mon, 22 Dec 2014 12:53:02 GMT 2014-12-22T00:52:00-00:00 https://www.screencast.com/users/MrGundrum/folders/AP+Chemistry+Vodcasts/media/181e59af-4b40-4c17-8e4e-b2e6e6eaae8b https://www.screencast.com/users/MrGund
Audio File: Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Beth Marcus Former Founder and CTO, Zeemote Date: January 22, 2010 Entrepreneurial Heroes Interview with Beth Marcus [music] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders, I'm the CEO of the National Center for Women in Information Technology or NC WIT, and this is another in our podcast series with women who have started IT companies, very successful women I might add... Larry Nelson: Boy, I'll say. Lucy: ...that have started IT companies. With me Larry Nelson from W3W3.com. Hi Larry. Larry: Hi, I'm really happy to be here. This is going to be an exciting interview. Lucy: Well, and these interviews have been very well received at W3W3. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that. Larry: Well we host a special channel, "Heroes for NC WIT, " and we get a tremendous amount of traffic from, everything from small business owners to C level, high level executives from enterprise size companies and it's very interesting and the thing that we like about it so much it's really helping support a push for more young girls to get into IT. Lucy: Well, very good. Well, you know this interview is going to be no exception to our great interview series. Today we're talking with Beth Marcus, who is the CEO, the founding CEO of Playsmart, a new venture for her, she's a serial entrepreneur. She's founded a number of companies including Exos which she sold to Microsoft on the middle of nineteen nineties. And she is, I think easily one of the most technical people we've spoken to in this interview series with a history at MIT, and a PhD and patents and very, very impressive technical entrepreneur. Welcome Beth. Beth Marcus: Thank you. Lovely to be here chatting with you. Lucy: Well we are really interested first to find out a little bit about Playsmart, your new venture. And we understand it is really geared towards having safe environments for children on the Internet. Can you tell us more about it? Beth: Sure. It's a complete media solution for kids, ages one to eight. It allows them to be entertained, educated, connected to other family members around the world and allows the parents to control what's happening with the kids' interaction with those environments and make it totally safe. No commercials are passed to the kids. Once they get into the Playsmart system which can run on any PC or netbook they can't get out of it accidentally or otherwise and they can't get to any content or interaction that their parents don't pre-approve. Lucy: That's pretty interesting. Larry: Boy I'll say. I've got seven grandchildren, I'm happy to hear that. Beth: In fact, one of the features that some of our investors are interested in is Skyping to grandchildren that you can do through Playsmart. All you do is click on a picture of your grandparent and it makes the call for you. Lucy: Oh, that is really cool, you know. My mother's on Skype too and you know she, I mean I actually think the other end could use some help with that, you know? Larry: Yes, I agree. Beth: Yeah. Lucy: I mean she loves Skype. Beth: My daughter is how I got involved in this. I do a lot of advising of other start up CEO's and I thought I was going to be taking a break from being a CEO and just help a bunch of other people, and an entrepreneur came to me and said, you know, "Let me show you what I've got, " and it was for kids and I have a five year old. So I said, "Susie, let's play with this thing, " and she said, "Oh, this is so cool." You know and her interaction with it is what convinced me to get involved with the company and become a CEO. Lucy: You know, we've had a couple of people we've interviewed whose children have helped them form the idea for their next venture or at least encouraged them to get involved. That's really interesting. So Beth give our listeners a sense of how you first got into technology. I mean you have a very extensive technical background as I mentioned before. What first interested you in technology? Beth: A million years ago when I was in school I liked science and math and I played around with computers. And I'm probably going to give away my age, but wrote programs in Basic that ran on paper tape into a terminal. Lucy: I did that too. So don't feel bad. Beth: And then, I ended up going to MIT because they had a lot of interesting science and math. And what got me into more core technology was freshman year at MIT they have a seminar series that you do, typically in January and I took aluminum bicycle frame building because I loved bikes and I thought that would be cool. I had never seen a machine shop, I didn't know what welding was. I had never done any of the stuff and through that seminar I got fascinated by making stuff and ended up being in mechanical engineering. Lucy: Well and we noticed you were judge for First Robotics which I think further extend... Beth: Ten years, which is a lot of fun. Lucy: Yeah, you're love of making things. Larry and I both judge as well with First, so it's a great program. So what technologies do you look out there today across the technical space? What technologies do you find really cool and interesting today? Beth: Of course the last company I was in was the mobile space so I think the evolution of mobile devices into computers that you carry around with you is very interesting. I mean, when I started Zeemote in 2005, when I said, "These are the computers you're going to carry with you 24/7" the potential investors looked at me like I was from Mars. Larry: Yeah. Beth: And now people do. Lucy: They certainly do and in fact the number of people are looking at mobile devices as a real tool to help third world developing countries as well. Larry: Awesome. Beth: Well, they don't have land lines. Lucy: Exactly. Beth: And even though we have them, a lot of people don't use them anymore. Larry: Yeah, let me kind of switch gears here for a second. Two part related questions. One is, why are you an entrepreneur? And what is it about entrepreneurship that makes you tick? Beth: Well, I think it's a challenge. The first company I started, I remember we had built some high end controllers, exoskeleton controllers for robots in space for NASA and other people. And I got this idea that we ought to be able to take this technology and make it into a consumer product. And I was giving a talk at a Virtual Reality Conference and somebody from a not to be named defunct computer company said, "Well if you can't spend two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a reality engine you shouldn't be doing VR." And I said, "We're going to do it on PC's and we're going to make a hundred dollar joystick and everyone's going to use them but they're not going to know that it's VR." And that sort of a challenge where somebody says, "Oh you can't do that." [laughter] Or even sometimes why would somebody want that. And then you put it in front of them and they go, "Oh wow. That makes my life easier"or "That makes my health better." You know. That exciting to me. Lucy: It's a very incredibly important point I think, you know, maybe I'll just digress a moment and say that you know there's always this tug of war in any corporation big or small between the business side and the technical side and often I think the business side can't necessarily see the power of technology until a technologist puts it in front of him. And... Beth: That's why I advise all the companies that I get involved with to get those prototypes built as quickly as possible with as little money as possible and get it into the hands of the end users. Because there's where you're going to find out are you smoking something and convincing yourself there's a market or does somebody really care about this. Lucy: Absolutely. Beth: And you learn so much that most entrepreneurs will tell you that the thing that they thought they were starting their company on is not the one they made money on. And it's the ones who iterate and spend time with the consumer whether they're a consumer or a corporate customer or whatever kind of customer, the ones that spend the time and listen to the customer are the ones that figure it out and succeed. Lucy: That is a really important point and I think, looking forward, we may have to ask you again a month from now but you know we do a Toolbox series as well and I think that it would be great to hear your advice for entrepreneurs because that advice around prototyping is excellent. Beth: I was going to be writing a book this year. Lucy: [laughs] Now you are running a company. Beth: Company...My God. I spent some time on it this summer capturing things like that and interviewing other entrepreneurs and then I said, "OK, I got to put this aside until I do this center and I'll come back again." Lucy: I think it will be fabulous because of your technical background. I'm sure you'd have some really valuable insights there. Beth: And I am a published poet. So... Right in the way that is intelligible to the rest of the world. Larry: So now there is a third interview. Lucy: A third... [laughs] Larry: A poetry. Lucy: Yeah. You are really digging yourself into a hole. So, along the lines of entrepreneurship, we found that many entrepreneurs can point to a particular person or a group of people who influence them or help them along their way as an entrepreneur. Who are your role models and how do they influence you? Beth: I think the first person who got me the sort of excitement at making stuff work was this professor in MIT Woody Flowers who was involved in the First Robotics Company. Lucy: Absolutely, I have seen him. I have never met him. Beth: But he was an early mentor of mine and I became a judge for this mechanical engineering design contest while I was still a student. And then that's sort of got me excited about the excitement of innovating and trying new things and testing your ideas. And then when I went to start my first company, I joined the MIT enterprise forum and there were a number of people there who I had no idea even what a business plan was. And I was going to write one to raise money. So I listened to other people talk about their businesses and I got some of those people to help me write my first business plan. And then later on, a man named Don Spero started a company called Fusion Systems down in the DC area that successfully flowed against the Japanese and the patent area. Kind of taught me about intellectual property and the value of it and also mentored me generally because of his long experience in running companies. And then when I was running Exos and I realized that I was out of my debts from a management point of view. I hired a guy named [indecipherable 10:03] to come in and run my company. And he became a mentor of mine and he is still to this day a friend. So all along the way, I think the lesson for an entrepreneur is to talk to anybody you can everywhere about what you are doing and try and connect with them because you never know when you are going to stand next to the person who is going to get you a deal like I did when I was in a party in MIT. And I stand next to Bob Metcalf who introduced me to the Logitech guys that told me what product to build for an Exos to get an exit. Or whether I am going to hire somebody who turns out to be my mentor and teach me about business that leaves the exit in the company. Larry: Wow. Beth, let me ask this question. First of all, you just mentioned about you are going to write a book this year but now you are running a company instead. It took me three years to write a book that I just had published called Mastering Change. So I just want to let you know that you can do that too. Beth: Yeah but I have a five year old and a puppy. Larry: Yeah, I got you. [laughs] Beth: So I said my daughter is most important, my business is second most important and the rest will just have to wait. Larry: There you go. I agree with that. Lucy: Although I could throw little barb in here and say Larry is a five year old but... [Larry clears his throat] Go ahead Larry I was... Beth: Anything about relationship in any of that. So? Lucy: [laughs] Larry: I have been married for 40 years. What are you going to do? Beth: Adolescence. I am not married so... If any of your listeners want to apply for the job, I take resumes. Larry: We make a little commission on this... Lucy: Yeah... [mumbles] Larry: Yeah. Speaking of all that stuff, what is the toughest thing that you ever had to do in your career? Beth: I think the first time I had to fire people was probably the worst moment because at Exos we started out as a medical company and we grew to a million and a half in revenues selling orthopedic rehab devices using our technology. And we realized we probably sold all the units that whatever be sold because we were teaching people how to turn on the computer not have a measure motions and force in patients. They didn't care about that. They use a plastic protractor and so we figured that out and we had to restart the company, went from 32 people down to about eight in one day. Lucy: That's tough. Beth: And I believe that I had helped outplace...anybody who wanted to be outplaced in great jobs elsewhere, and I am friends with some of the people who left the company at that point for years. And some of my hired again into other companies. I feel good about it. I remember at the end I closed my door and I just cried because these were my friends. Lucy: We hear that a lot from entrepreneurs. I think that is a very tough thing to...not just let people go but it is theirs loss and also downsizing the company and restarting it. That is all tough stuff. Beth: Yeah. Perhaps to tell you that I learned in that experience that if I had done it sooner, everybody would have been happier. Both the people who did not fit the business we are getting into and the investors and everybody would have done better. So, my advice to entrepreneurs is don't be afraid to hire but don't be afraid to fire the person who is the wrong person for the job. You are not doing them or you any favors by keeping them around if they are not working. Larry: Yeah. Lucy: It is the truth. We have learned that lesson unfortunately in the Telecom downsizing. Well that's great advice and it gets us to our next question about advice for young people about entrepreneurship and you have given us some perils already. And I wander around online and I found some presentation you made about naming your company. What I found was pretty interesting. Beth: That is a new one. [laughs] I give that to an MIT class because I am still on the faculty there. So occasionally faculty members will call me up and ask me to come, give lecture to their class and the senior mechanical engineering design class didn't have a clue how to name their product. So I came and I gave a lecture. Lucy: That's good. I can't wait for your book. And so, what kind of advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs that you haven't already told us? Beth: I think the most important thing that I talk to any entrepreneur that I coached from day one is why are you doing this? What are your personal goals? What are your financial goals? How does that fit with your family? And if you evaluate that first and write it down and keep it in front of you and then say, is what I am doing today serving my goals, the company's goals and my family's goals? And when those things start to not match, that is when you get into trouble. And if you don't bother to figure it out first, then you don't have a road map because I made this mistake. I ran a company called Glow Dog which was a failure. It was a failure because we were just about break even and about a million plus in revenue and our Christmas shipments were on the water on 911. We had just grown to the size where we need to manufacture in China instead of the United States in order to compete and they were in the container on the ocean and they could not get in the United States so there was no Christmas. And we had to sell the assets and fold the company because I didn't feel like there was going to be a return on investment if I brought in more capital. But what I didn't think about when I started that company was what was the right size for this business and did that kind of a business match what I personally wanted to do? It was just interesting. People loved the product. They were reflective coating for people and pets. And you walking your dog at night, you don't get run over, right? Well, it turned out our customers were fashion stores in Tokyo who liked the logo I designed. I didn't even know it was reflective and it was a 33% margin business in an industry that is not very protectable and that I had no expertise in. What was I doing, doing this business? So, I raised a bunch of money to make a big play, before I realized that this really was a brand company, not a technology company. I raised the right amount of money for a technology company to get launched, but it turned out technology didn't matter, and to make a brand like Tommy Hilfiger or Ralph Lauren, you need tens of millions of dollars. Lucy: Absolutely. Beth: ... and you need expertise, which I didn't have. So, if I had understood my own personal goals and what kind of a work environment I wanted, and what the end game looked like at the beginning, I probably wouldn't have made those mistakes. Because Glow Dog could have been a very profitable, between $2 and $10 million dollar clothing company and pet product company, if that was its goal. It wouldn't have raised as much money. It wouldn't have spent as much money, and it might still be around today. Larry: You obviously didn't know all your life that you were going to become an entrepreneur and since we're... Beth: I thought I was going to be an academic. Larry: There you go, see... Lucy: Well, you're that too, so there you go. Larry: A little change. Beth: So, I'm an academic. I play at academia. [laughter] Beth: I actually have on one occasion taken money from MIT to teach a class, and I realized that it was not for me. Because along with taking the money, comes a lot of faculty meetings and policies and procedures, and entrepreneurs don't really love those things. What's good about a company that's under 25 people is you don't need a huge amount of that stuff to be successful. Larry: Right. Beth: Some people are really good at structure and organization and detail, and that's not me. Larry: Not you, no. Well, then, what were the characteristics that made you really become a successful entrepreneur? We want to reach out this way, because we have many young people and employers and parents, who want to know what secrets they should look at when it comes to entrepreneurism. Beth: Certainly, like anything else it can be taught, and it can be learned over time. So, if you want to be an entrepreneur and you don't really understand what it is, go get a job or an internship with an entrepreneurial firm and get to know that person who started the company and watch them. Do it a couple of times. You'll learn whether it suits you or not. But in terms of what I think gives me an advantage; first of all, unbridled optimism to the point of stupidity at times. [laughter] Larry: I love it! Beth: You know, "You can't do that! You can't do that!" "Sure I can! Sure I can!" You know there is a limit, you beat your head against the wall a few times and you walk away, but hammering on and being tenacious at getting your objective. If it doesn't happen the way you think, you think of a second way. If it doesn't happen that way, you think of a third way. Maybe you don't end up accomplishing what you set out to do, but in the course of trying to accomplish it, you figure out where the real value is. So, it's a combination of being tenacious, and also being aware and being willing to change, and willing to take advantage of what God, the world, whatever, has presented to you in terms of opportunity. So, if you're trying to build widget A, and nobody wants widget A, but in order to make widget A, you had to make a fixture. And it turns out loads of people want that fixture, well go sell a fixture. Don't keep trying to sell a widget that nobody wants. Lucy: Exactly. I like that, 'unbridled optimism on the verge of stupidity.' I am just going to have to remember that one. Larry: I was looking in a mirror when you said that, yes. Beth: Also, you have to be able to learn from everybody around you. Lucy: That's totally right. Beth: Willing to talk about what you do in a pleasant way, not obnoxious, but to anyone who will listen. Because you never know where you're going to learn something, or who's going to have, "Gee. I know the guy who started that company that you want to have buy your company" or "Gee. I had a company like that, and we made this mistake" and so you can learn to avoid that mistake. Lucy: Absolutely. Beth: Or somebody you want to hire. And don't be afraid to hire people who know a lot more than you do. Lucy: Totally. Beth: It's a matter of risk right. If you're an investor, and I've done some investing as well, you look at what's the total risk package for this business. And anything, absolutely anything you can do to reduce the risk is a good thing. And so the more experience you have that's relative to the business you're in, even if you don't know it yourself or understand it. It's going to reduce that risk. Lucy: Well and that's great advice I think. It's all pointing towards another interview I think Larry. Beth: You could have me talking for days. Lucy: I know. No, no ...I've got all kinds of plans for you know now. So you've already mentioned to us that you are a published poet and we know you're a judge for many years with First Robotics. What else are you doing to bring balance into your professional and personal lives? Beth: Well, I mean it's a struggle. I mean I'm a single mom, so there is no such thing as balance in my life. But, I do things like, I've got a calendar I just printed out this morning because I wasn't sticking to my exercise routine. And just like my daughter gets stars for reading books and she turns it in at school every month. I'm going to have her help me put stars on my calendar for my exercise. Lucy: Oh, that's nice. Beth: And I have family dinner night, where I cut off work early usually on Fridays, so that I can cook a meal. And we can sit down and eat together because it doesn't happen that often. And when I was growing up that was something that was somewhat absent and I wanted my daughter to have that, and I wanted me to have that too. Because, there is this idea that, when I was in the beginning of my entrepreneurial career, I obsessed about the business 24/7 and drove myself nuts. You know, I hardly slept, and that's not the best way to be productive. As I've gotten older, I work smarter. And so I do everything that I can do to make every minute of my time incredibly effective. If I'm having a bad day and I'm not productive. I'm not going to hammer my head against the computer or the telephone, which is where most of my work happens. I'll go and do something nice for myself for an hour. You know, call a friend, go have a coffee, or do an errand I need for my home. Go do some food shopping and come back. And then I'm refreshed and renewed. I listen to books on tape at night as I'm falling asleep so that I can't think about business at night. I love novels and I love fiction. So that for me blocks out my ability to think business. Lucy: That's a great idea. Larry: Yeah, it really is, wow. You know Beth, you have achieved so much in so many different ways. Going back to your first company that you ended up selling to Microsoft and all the other Wins and that challenges along the way. You've achieved a lot what's up for you next? Beth: I would like to have a huge exit in Playsmart. So if anybody is listening who wants to buy a company like that, that's the goal. To build this to where there is enormous excitement about the product and many, many families are using it. And then get a bigger company with huge resources behind it. And then I'll be happy to step back, finish my book and invest and advise in others. Lucy: Wow, and we would love to see you write that book. Larry: Boy, I'll say. Lucy: That would be I mean great, great advice here and we thank you for taking time to talk to us. I want to remind those who are listening to this interview that they can find it at W3W3.com. Larry: That's right and we'll have it up also on our blog as well as our podcast directory so you can download it 24/7. Lucy: Well, I'm pleased to pass it... Beth: And if there are there any moms of kids interested in Playsmart. That's at Playsmart send me an email, I'll make sure you find out about a product when it's out this summer. Lucy: Absolutely, and we'll have that as well in the bio up on the site. So everybody can find it when they come to download the podcast. Very good, well thank you very much. Larry: Thank you. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Beth MarcusInterview Summary: Beth Marcus has been Founder and CEO of several successful startups, most notably EXOS, Inc., which was venture-backed and sold to Microsoft in 1996. Since then she has been involved in 14 start-ups in a variety of fields as a founder, investor, or advisor. Release Date: January 22, 2010Interview Subject: Beth MarcusInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 24:00
Audio File: Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Dina Kaplan Co-founder and Chief Operations Officer, blip.tv Date: December 22, 2008 Dina Kaplan: blip.tv [music] Lucy Sanders: Hi. This is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology or NCWIT and this interview is part of a series we've been running for a couple of years now in which we interview women who have started IT companies and we learn just fabulous lessons from these women. And we're very excited today to be interviewing Dina Kaplan. With me today is Larry Nelson on w3w3.com. Welcome, Larry. Larry Nelson: Oh, I'm happy to be here. Believe me, I love the topic that we're going to be talking about. Lucy: Well, and with us is Dina Kaplan. Dina has had a very interesting career all the way from being a news reporter and I know is our first interviewee who has won an Emmy Award. Dina Kaplan: Oh, is that right? Oh, my. Thank you. Well, it's an honor to be here. So, thank you for having a good memory to have dug that up. Lucy: Well, Dina is the CEO and co-founder of Blip TV which is a very interesting site and provides a valuable infrastructure for the video blogging community and has some very interesting episodes on there. I had fun watching 'Drinking with Bob.' Dina: Actually, this is high brows weekend I have to say. Lucy: Is this high brows you get? Dina: I'm just teasing. Lucy: Well, it's really a great site. So, welcome. We're really happy that you're here to share with us today about entrepreneurship. Dina: Thank you, Lucy. And thank you, Larry. It's really great to chat with both of you. Lucy: So, we really wanted to ask you first how did you first get into technology? What caused you to make that jump between being a TV news reporter and now you're founder of a technology company. Dina: Right. It's a definite jump from the traditional media to the new media. I had worked at MTV News as an associate producer producing stories about the very early days of the Internet, about music and about politics. Then, as you mentioned, became an on-air TV reporter. And now, I'm definitely firmly in the new media world. So, I would say, first of all, that it's a big jump from the mindset of a traditional media person to a new media person. But, you'll notice that that word 'media' is still in both of those terms and I think that's very important to mention. We definitely at Blip.tv on TV view ourselves as a media company and I believe that for a lot of these new media companies, or digital media, whichever term you prefer, if the technology is good enough which, hopefully, it is, at a certain point, it feeds away and you think more about the media than the technology that enables it. If you go back a few decades, NBC, and CBS and all those broadcast networks that we now think of media companies, back in their early days, they were considered technology companies. So, I think we'll see that same transition happen with the new media companies. But, I will answer your question and I will say that it's incredibly rewarding to be at a new media company that's not betting on hits and banking on hits. And essentially, having the authority to give a green light or a red light to a project. So what Blip.tv is a very democratic network where anyone can upload a show and if it's good, the show will amass hundreds of thousands or, potentially, even millions of viewers and can also have the opportunity to make money as well. You're never going to have that type of democratic platform with a traditional TV network because just by their nature, they need to invest in hits, and bank on that and hope that something is really huge because there's a limited number of bandwidth over those airwaves. So, part of the reason that I jumped over to new media that it met with my values and my beliefs that anyone who's talented should have a chance to succeed and it shouldn't be up to one programming chief to decide what gets a green light and what does not. Lucy: Well, it's a great value proposition for sure. Larry: It certainly is. Dina, would you mind just giving us a quick differentiation between YouTube and Blip.tv. Dina: Sure. Blip.tv is essentially a media company that has 3, 000 active shows on it. They are uploading an average of four new episodes a month, so about one new episode a week. And on that, we get overall for the whole mackerel of all of those shows, we've got 62 million video views a month and I should add that that goes up about 11% a month, month over month and has for the last twelve months straight. So, whereas YouTube has lots of great content, they have viral videos that may be a one off video that's funny or amusing, or it might be a trailer from a new film that's coming out. They might have some broadcast programming. They might some original shows. They have a huge and wonderful variety of clips. Blip.tv is much more like a television network that's on the Internet. So, the only thing that we have on Blip is original, serialized shows that have loyal and persistent audiences that are building up over time. And they have brand names. So, the people that are creating shows on Blip, many of them think of this as a business, not as just a hobby and it's a very different mindset than the mindset of someone that's just going to do one clip and hope it gets a lot of views, but really just do one thing. Lucy: Well, it's an exciting company. You have a lot of passion just like lots of entrepreneurs have which leads me to my next question. Why are you an entrepreneur? What about that makes you tick? Dina: I have to say there is nothing better than calling up a show creator and saying, "Hey, you know what? This show that you have been toiling over and doing one new episode of every week for the past year," or for some people, even a few years, "Hey, we just brought in a sponsor for your show and you're not going to make money doing that." That is an incredibly rewarding feeling and, look, if we succeed at Blip.TV, which really just means that the shows are succeeding. We are hoping to create a new media and, in some ways, a true new media type which is that anyone who has talent, and an idea for a show, and a camcorder, or a digital camera, or a very well shooting cellphone can create a show that could be every bit as good as a show that you might see on broadcast television or on cable. So, I really fundamentally believe in what we're doing. It's exciting to be part of a team, and there are five founders of Blip, so I'm one of five founders. But, the only female founder, relevant in terms of the topic of this show to feel that we've created this and we built this up from nothing to having 62 million video views and we're sending out lots, and lots and lots of checks to content creators every month is an incredibly rewarding feeling. So, I absolutely love it and the other thing that I love, which is going to sound funny to you guys, but I like the idea of being part of the functioning New York economy and part of the functioning American economy. I love that we're hiring people. I look forward to even paying some taxes. It's a great feeling to be contributing value. To content creators, hopefully lots of entertaining content for millions and millions of viewers. And then, just to be part of the whole functioning economy and building value in that sense is something that I'm very proud of. Larry: Dina, whether it be a mentor or someone who was a great role model for you, who is the person that probably influenced or supported you most in your career path. Dina: The person that I think of first when you ask that question is Jerry Layborn. The first thing she did when I did not even know her, but I graduated from Wesleyan University. I'm not on the national board of Wesleyan. So, I'm involved in the school and a huge supporter of it. She didn't attend there. But, I believe it's her husband attended there and one of her kids attended there. So, I knew she had that connection. So, I emailed her out of the blue and said, "Hey Jerry. My name is Dina Kaplan. I'd love to work at MTV. I know that you're working at Nickelodeon, which is part of that ViaCom family. Would you maybe forward my resume to someone over at MTV News?" And without knowing me, she agreed to take a call, and then she agreed to take a meeting and she ended up getting me a job. Or, helping me, I should say, get a job at ViaCom and I'll never forget that. But then, just as importantly, or perhaps even more importantly, when Blip was starting, we were doing a number of small deals. We were bringing on some content creators, we were doing some distribution deals, we were syndicating content to iTunes, to blogging platforms such as Word Press, Type Pad and a few others. But, we had no revenue deals. So, I remembered this Jerry Layborn connection, she, at the time, was running Oxygen and I happened to be at a cocktail party that she was at. And someone at the party asked me, "Dina, I love to support women entrepreneurs. I know you're starting a young company. Who at this party would you like to meet?" And I said I'd like to meet Jerry Layborn. So, she walked me over. She said, "This is Dina Kaplan. She's starting a company that runs video on the web and you guys should talk." And Jerry said, "Can you come see me tomorrow?" I said, "Yes." She said, "Here's my number. Call me. I'll block off whatever time it is that you can come in." So, sure enough, she did and I came in the next day. And I pitched her on, essentially, enabling content that they needed for Oxygen that would've required some money from them. It was a big meeting for us. It was very important. We walked out of that meeting and she said, "We're going to close this deal. We are going to make sure you get some revenue for the company." And I envisioned my job as being - enabling the next generation of women who were working in media to take leadership roles. So, sure enough the deal closed. Sure enough, that deal enabled us to get a much bigger deal with CNN and eventually the whole Turner brand. And I am not sure that Blip.tv would have taken off if it were not for Jerry Layborn. So, I will always be grateful to her and her mentorship for the rest of my life. Lucy: It really sounds like she gives a lot to entrepreneurs. Dina: She is incredibly supportive of women. She's wonderful person and all that I can hope for is the opportunity to pay that forward to many other women who are coming up behind all of us. Lucy: Well, that gets me to the next question around advice to young people around entrepreneurship. If you were sitting here with a young person and giving them some amount of wisdom about entrepreneurship, what would you say to them? Dina: I think that the most important thing is two key bits of advice. One of which is to just do it. If you have an idea for a company, you should not belabor the thinking about whether you should jump into this or not for years on end and ponder every possible scenario. There's something to be said for just getting started and I am definitely putting my money where my mouth is, or however that expression goes, because once we had the idea for Blip, we literally launched the company three days later which brings me to the second point of advice, which is that it's very important to build your business by getting feedback from your customers. So, we launched Blip. Our product was not great when started and we knew that it wouldn't be. But, what we did do was identify thought leaders in the audience that we were seeking to grow from which was content creators; people producing original web shows of which there were about five to ten when we started. But, we sought out the best ones and we asked for their advice and said, "What should we do, and what do you need and how can we help solve problems for you?" And we just iterated the product. At that point, we were doing new releases every two weeks. So, we learned from them. It was very much of a grassroots, bottom up development rather than saying, "OK. We thought about this for five years. Here's the product. Take it or leave it." So, I'd say start, and then iterate and constantly listen to people and learn from them. Larry: Dina, with all the things that you've been through and everything else, what would you say is probably the toughest thing that you had to do in your career? Dina: I think the toughest thing is figuring out time management and figuring out how to balance your priorities. I should mention that one of the tough things should not be questions about values. I think that, as an entrepreneur, you have opportunities to make very short term moves that would be greatly, say, financially beneficial to your company or greatly drive up your number of users. But if, in any way shape or form, anything you do ever compromises your ethics, that should not even be a consideration. So, we are so proud of the way that we are running this company to try to, just essentially, say, "All we're doing is supporting shows." So, we have no goals for ourselves for Blip other than trying to make life easier for really talented producers on the web. So, that makes a lot of decisions really easy. In terms of the tough scenarios, it's just trying to prioritize your time and trying to stay in very, very close touch with your customers, and just always being really humble and really knowing that you're never going to have all the answers. Whatever it is that you're looking at, there's someone out there, there's a group of people that know that area of expertise incredibly well because they're doing it all the time and you're probably doing 50 different things. So, as much as you can engage the experts in every aspect of your business and continue to learn from them, listen a lot and not talk too much, then I think you'll be in pretty good shape. Lucy: What personal characteristics do you have that you think make you a successful entrepreneur? Dina: I think one of the things is listening and engaging people. As an entrepreneur, you have this tendency to just put your head down and work, and work something like 18 or 19 hours a day. You have all of these things that require your time at the office whether it's setting up your P&L or getting the whole pro formas projected out for the next ten years correct, to getting all your bills paid, making sure the product works. All of these things that require you to be in the office. But I believe it's as important to be out within the community that you're serving so go out, go to cocktail parties that are related to your space, go to tech meetups and video meetups. Those are some social elements that are important to our community. And then in terms of advertisers, go to advertising meetups, take every meeting that you can with advertisers when you're just beginning to bring in revenue from brands and from agencies. Another part of our world is distributors. So we need to spend time with iTunes and find out what's important to them, and the folks at AOL Video and Yahoo Video, and all of the other great video destination sites. So I have a tendency to be pretty social and to enjoy engaging in dinner parties and cocktail parties, and just spending a lot of time listening to people. And I think that that's very valuable to your business. It's going to be valuable when you want to raise money - it's much easier to raise money from people you know than to make cold calls - and it's also going to be valuable when you do business development deals. I will say that almost every startup will be part of an ecosystem. It's very hard for a startup to just exist on its own. So for us the early players in that ecosystem were WordPress, Typepad, Flickr, iTunes, a number of other distribution platforms and then also content creators. And we had to get out there. We had to hang out with them. We had to be in a position where those folks trusted us both personally and also trusted our product. So I think the inclination to engage with people and learn from them is a helpful aspect when you're starting a company up. Lucy: Absolutely, and you know with all the interviews we've done, I think this is the first time someone has answered this question this way. Larry: Yes. Lucy: And it's a very important observation. Larry: Yes, and obviously meeting Jerry Labon at one of these networking events, cocktail parties, I think that was a fine example. Dina: Yeah, I mean that was a huge turning point. And if I think about other very crucially important deals that we made for Blip early on, we did a pretty early partnership with Google AdSense for Video which is their video ad product. And that relationship was forged through someone that I met at a conference, sitting at a big lunch room around an eight person table. And we struck up a conversation, and it took a few months to close that deal but we ended up closing that deal which was lucrative for Google, I'm not going to say hugely lucrative, we're a small blip on their radar screen at this point, but it was a beneficial relationship for them. I think they actually tested that product on Blip before they did on YouTube. And it was incredibly important for us. If I look back to almost ever early business development deal that we did, it was through someone that I or someone else from Blip met at a conference, or at a digital media meetup, or at a digital media party, et cetera. So it is definitely important to be a part of the ecosystem that you're in. And then I'll add, you also clearly need to spend time on the product, and you need to spend some time in the office as well. Larry: And that's a fact. Dina, you've already accomplished a great deal. Here you've got Blip.tv, 62 million viewers per month and that number is growing constantly. What's next for you? Dina: So the next thing for us is to vastly expand our distribution platform. So we have this belief at Blip that every show created for the web has what's called a total potential audience, and you are never going to reach that total potential audience on one site. Why is that? That's because a music lover in Britain may only want to watch their video on Bebo, so we have to get our videos to Bebo.com. And someone that's old school Internet user may only want to go to AOL Video, so it's very important for us to make our content available on AOL. Other people just love their MySpace of Facebook pages, so we need to make our content available there. So what you'll see in 2009 is Blip.tv announcing a number of significant distribution deals to get our content into every nook and cranny of the web, and then some places off the web as well. We've already announced deals with Tivo, with Sony Bravia and with Fios, but we'll have some other deals as well. The second thing that we are going to focus on in 2009 is making things a little bit easier for advertisers to "buy" web video content. Right now it's very difficult for them to make buys because they need to come up with one type of creative for one side, a different type of creative for Blip, a third type of creative for another publisher. So we're going to be working with a number of other video destination sites and a number of the top web show creators such as Michael Eisner's team out in LA called Tornante, DECA Group which does this great show called "Boing Boing," another show called "Project Lore," "Momversation," and others. 60Frames and other key producers such as those to figure out, how we can come up with standards so that it's much easier for advertisers to make buys across multiple shows, on multiple platforms. And then there are some other tools that we are going to be collaborating with other folks in our ecosystem on to essentially streamline the whole system of buying for advertisers. Lucy: That's going to be a busy year. Larry: Boy, I'll say. Lucy: And we really do appreciate your time. This has been really a great company. And I wrote myself a little note here that you are democratizing TV. [laughs] Dina: No, that's exactly right. I mean if you really wanted to have a show on the air in the past - I mean a big show that has say, millions of viewers to it - you'd have to knock on the doors of NBC or Bravo or Sony Studios and just pray that you would get a deal. Now, you can just do the show and you can build up huge viewership for it and you can make money too, and do all of that not having a boss, not having a network chief telling you what to say or how to wear your hair. So I think that's an incredibly exciting thing for us and for talented show creators. But I think it's a little bit of a nervous time for the traditional networks in trying to think, how we compete with the massive content that's on a platform like Blip. Lucy: Well I have an idea for a show: "I Love Lucy." [laughs] Larry: Oh. Lucy: That's just a little joke. I'm sure someone took that one already. Larry: I love it. Well one of the things that I really appreciate is the fact of what you're doing. Pat and I, we have had w3w3.com talk radio for 10 years now, and things sure have changed over that time. Lucy: Yes, they have. Thank you, Dina, so much. Dina: Thank you, thank you for your time. It was wonderful to chat with both of you. Larry: By the way, you listeners out there, make sure you pass this interview along to others that you think would be interested. They can listen to it on... Lucy: NCWIT.org. Larry: And w3w3.com. Lucy: Thank you, and thank you Dina. Dina: Thank you. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Dina KaplanInterview Summary: blip.tv wants to provide a great service for great shows. A new class of entertainment is emerging that is being made by the people without the support of billion-dollar multinationals. blip.tv's mission is to support people by taking care of all the problems a budding videoblogger, podcaster or Internet TV producer tends to run into. They take care of the servers, the software, the workflow, the advertising and the distribution, leaving clients free to focus on creativity. Release Date: December 22, 2008Interview Subject: Dina KaplanInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 21:46
http://www.ccbartlett.net/n/john_21-0.html Recorded 5/22/2019 by Pastor Garet Rehling 2019-05-22T00:00:00-05:00 jarrodstueve@gmail.com (John Pillivant)noJohn PillivantCalvary,Chapel,Bartlett,Calvary,Chapel,Bartlett,
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
