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Summary: In this episode of COMMERCE NOW we discuss how retailers need, now more than ever before, more modular and flexible software, services and systems when selecting their self-service partners. Related Content:  Modularity Whitepaper  Related Links: LinkedIn Profiles - Jerry Langfitt Matt Redwood DieboldNixdorf.com Transcription: Jerry Langfitt (00:16): Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I would like to welcome today's guest Matt Redwood, who leads our advanced self-service global solutions at people Diebold Nixdorf. Welcome Matt, and thanks for joining me today. Matt Redwood (00:27): Hey Jerry. Thanks for having me always good to speak to you. Jerry Langfitt (00:30): Now let's start off at a 50,000 foot view of what's going on in retail. There's certainly experienced a hyper compressed and instantaneous change in consumer behavior, of course, caused by the pandemic. This ended up being a massive shock to their operation and it infrastructure. The quick fixes have now turned into long terms needs and rubber banded and duct tape journeys. Now have to last longer, be more scalable and continue to evolve. As consumer sentiment continues to change, regardless of what's going on in everyone's health systems in their countries, retailers need to react with the same speed as the customer. This is more than just putting up plexiglass barriers. They have to really rethink many of their current consumer journeys while adding new ones immediately. What do you think retailers are experienced and learned about what their legacy systems and current infrastructure both can and unfortunately cannot do. Matt Redwood (01:23): Absolutely. So it's a great question, Jerry. So generally trends in retail happen over a period of time. It's an evolutionary step. If you take the shift to convenience store shopping as an example, that's a trend that's happened over multiple years. I think what retailers have really experienced in the last 12 to 18 months is a revolutionary step. That's been forced by the global pandemic. And what that's done is it's exposed the weakness in their infrastructure, the weakness in their current store, operating best practices and ultimately the technology that enables that. And it's really forced retailers to think very, very differently, not only about the strategy of the day, but also how they can build in flexibility for tomorrow. God willing that another pandemic doesn't happen, but this could be the start of a very volatile stage where they're retail, where retailers really have to change on the fly constantly to changing demands either from a legal standpoint or from a customer driven demand aspect. So they need that flexibility. They need that scalability, and ultimately they need the ability to change extremely quickly and to react to any demands that are effectively flipped in upon them. Jerry Langfitt (02:42): Now, one thing I don't understand is how did we get here? What got us to this point of difficult to change and the mobility of some it processes? Matt Redwood (02:53): Oh, so I think that's just honestly legacy it. So I'll ask VP of retail cause at a washing business where you buy the hardware, you buy the software, you buy the services for that particular application in isolation, from everything else and the legacy. It was a very good example of that type of infrastructure, where you had maybe a supplier who specialize in self service and now they want to kiosk another one at point of sale. And you always had these isolated solutions that existed on their own and there was no interconnectivity. So it was very difficult for retailers to really piece together. I had different customer journeys or react to new customer journeys because they either had to make changes across each touch point, which was costly, expensive and took time. Well, there just wasn't the flexibility in the infrastructure to be able to do it and really modularity and a need for openness has been driven out of this pandemic, modularity the ability to be arranged or fit it together in a variety of ways is the dictionary definition. Openness is openness. And it's the combination of these two factors. The retailers are really looking forward to make sure that they don't fall into that. Jerry Langfitt (04:06): What got us to this point of difficulty to change and the immobility built into it processes. Okay. Matt Redwood (04:12): I think honestly it was just his legacy technology. The technology environment with particularly within big retailers is a very complex one. If you think about, you've got a hard way, you've got software, you've got ecosystem, you've got services, even taking the hardware in isolation, you have different components with different life cycles. You have different stuff like compatibility. And on top of that, I think we've had a legacy situation where suppliers in the industry have created solutions in isolation and RSVP Highland limit it. The dishwasher situation. You have one provider of a piece of hardware with a piece of software and services to run it. I'm not saying closed loop system. And what it means is that retailers are almost forced to take different touchpoints with different solutions and implement them into their environment. And these solutions would also almost operate in complete isolation to everything else in the store. Matt Redwood (05:11): So not only does that build in complexity and in flexibility, because if you make a change on one, you have to replicate changes across multiple touch points. It's very complex to manage very costly to manage. And ultimately you're not getting that level of flexibility. I mean, two very positive things to come out of this pandemic is the retailers have really understood that actually what they need is modularity and they need openness on the Southwest side to be able to take more control of their own destiny in terms of what functionality they have, what roadmap they want to drive and ultimately what experience they want to implement in their stores and what modular hardware do they need to be able to support that. And I think we tended to really focus now instead of having these in isolation is to have an ecosystem of technologies or touch points within their stools or talking to each other. That means that they can move in a great degree of flexibility they can have at the LT and responding to trending trends or requirements that may be happening in the market. I don't want to bet they're not boxed into a corner as they've been. Jerry Langfitt (06:19): Yeah, it's funny. You should say that Matt, because despite the pandemic we saw progressive retailers evolving even before 2020 S Watson Tesco and others were already looking at new journeys and building greater flexibility into their operations and it processes, what do these progressive retailers see and how did they react? What did they do different? Matt Redwood (06:39): I mean, ultimately that shift that those retailers took, which was, I guess, proactive ahead has become dynamic. I know that they will see the pandemic catheter, but they, they witnessed the fact that retail technology is a very complex environment and it's only going to get more complex. And if you look at the landscape of self-service over the last 10 to 15 years, we've gone from really an environment where you might have point of sale and one type of self-service device within your stool. But now they have a whole plethora of options available to them from point of sale, to multiple different stuff, service touchpoints to us, mobility as well as the influence, the online is now happening. And they recognize these early movers recognize the need for flexibility in order to be able to react and obviously take advantage of as many of these touch points within their schools. Matt Redwood (07:30): And the shift that these retailers made really enabled them to pivot very, very quickly to be able to cherry pick the right solutions for that store today, knowing that as trends change, I may need to update and flex that model to react to future trends and that fully baked in that flexibility. So retailers that really took advantage of a modular touchpoint approach from an open software approach, but a pandemic finally not easier. It would be able to pivot and operations and react quickly to the changing trends or legal aspects that were inflicted on them during the pandemic. Jerry Langfitt (08:10): So it sounds like a lot of the retailers want to blaze their own path and be the master of their own roadmaps. How can a retailer like that? What kind of demands should they be giving their technology partners, Matt Redwood (08:22): Ultimately it's flexibility. And this trend of, of openness and modularity it's been spoken about for many years, but I don't think many technology providers have really enabled retailers have that controlling flexibility until now. You know, I'm very proud of Diebold Nixdorf as one of the first in the industry to really open up that platform and to really allow return is much more control, much more flexibility. And I want you to ultimately future proof themselves against any upcoming trends. It gives them more control to give them more and ultimately destiny of what experience they want to deliver in their stores. And it really is the convergence of everything that we've been booking over the last couple of years and tell them multichannel and different customer journeys. Technology has always been the disabler. And now we're really saying that all of those rules have been stripped back and we've got a very flexible, very open, very modular environment, which really gives retailers what they've been asking for for years, which is flexibility. Jerry Langfitt (09:23): Well, and I think that's one of the key points I've seen with retailers. Their decision-making processes getting much more complex because they are saddled with legacy it infrastructure, and they are concerned that any decision they make will just create the next inflexibility. So I think each retailer needs to buy into someone that has that kind of modularity. So it's like, look, I'm buying into a philosophy that says this partner will be with me later and they'll keep evolving too. It leads to, you know, let's flip the script a little bit and ask, what is the retail technology partners and providers done both wrong and right in our industry, Matt Redwood (10:05): I didn't necessarily think that there's a Roman a right, that cause it's all relevant to time and situation at that particular moment. But as I said previously, it has been this trend where technology providers have been, I guess, very wooden in terms of locking down the systems so that they're very closed. You have to buy the hardware, the software, the services, the innovation from one particular supply what's starting to change. And it's very much the ethos of the board next door is you provide a platform, a platform for that retailer to invest in, and then they can build their own technology touchpoints. Within that stool. We definitely combinations of hardware, software services, and innovation, and ultimately build the right in-store experience that they want within that store. And I think that's key. Sometimes we get too focused on the technology and less so on what we're trying to actually achieve here. Matt Redwood (11:00): What we're trying to achieve is the best in-store experience for the end consumer. And we use the technology to drive that it shouldn't be the inverse of that, which way are hamstrung by the technology. And therefore that dictate what type of consumer experience we should walk on. What, because you are experienced to retailers want to achieve in that stores, what is the right technology for them now, but also where do they see that consumer experience moving to in three to five years time and ensuring that they have the flexibility within that platform in order to Fletch change, evolve our offering over a period of time to get to ultimately where they want to go? Jerry Langfitt (11:38): No, I was actually going to say, you had said the best possible experience, and I wanted to add a time element to that the best possible customer experience for today for today's consumer. And one thing that's evolving, consumer trends and habits, but the other thing is, is the separation of consumers into their own journey of what each person needs in their particular mission that they're doing in their retail environment. So I might, I might have a quick trip or I just need to grab something fast, two items that I forgot, or I might be taking a longer trip. This is no longer one consumer that shops one way the same consumer can shop many different ways. And you're constantly going to have a changing need within today. Matt Redwood (12:19): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, ultimately if you look at your eye, it may be the same consumer that's shopping in multiple different ways, but ultimately there may be five, six, seven, 10 different customer journeys that a retailer has to deal with within their store. And rather than forcing those consumers to shop in a particular way, it's really about giving a consumers, the flexibility and the choice to shop in the way that they want to within that store, giving them the empowerment to shop that particular brand, that particular school at that particular time of the day and what experience they want, as you say, it may be the same consumer that shops on a weekend that may spend an hour in the store browsing with their family because they're picking up that weekly drop where they've gone shopping for the day and maybe the same consumers are like Tuesday, lunchtime, the coffee into the store and pick up a coffee or a sandwich to go same consumer, but very different consumer journeys and therefore very different expectations of what a good consumer experience look like. Matt Redwood (13:20): What we've seen during the pandemic is, is the road versus a lot of that flexibility and diverse arrange of consumer experience. So what we've really seen with the restriction of movement as a result of the pandemic is the consumers that may be interacting with a brand multiple times during a week of being forced to only shop maybe once a week or once every two weeks because of the social distancing rules on that, you know, the rules around staying at home. That's the flexibility that retailers have really had to combat over the last 12 to 18 months, moving from an environment where they're trying to be as flexible as possible to enable the best consumer journeys and multiple consumer journeys, always back to the shopping journeys of 10 years ago, where consumers would only go to a supermarket. Once every two weeks we'd buy a large amount of items. And that would be the only interaction with those consumers. Not saying that that is going to be the trend that extends into the future, but that shift almost overnight has been very difficult for a lot of retailers to contend with. And that's where ultimately they need to build that flexibility into that, into their infrastructure. Jerry Langfitt (14:26): One thing though that happened, happens to an it company or their department is that it departments hate complexity. That just once I have 10 different journeys, I have now have to contend with tracking and keeping 10 different technologies up. I mean, what can an it director do to try and simplify or minimize? Cause the journeys are going to stay. The consumers want this ops needs it. Everyone knows they have to do it. So what can an it department do to try and minimize the complexity they have to manage? Matt Redwood (15:01): So the complexity doesn't necessarily come from the number of different consumer journeys. It comes from the number of pieces of technology that enable those consumer journeys that may operate in isolation. If you've got to replicate changes across multiple platforms, multiple solutions, not only does it take time and money and resource to implement even the simplest of changes because you're having to replicate it. It's a very complex environment, very, very easy to get them wrong. And that's where we're really shifting, seeing the shift to requirements of retailers to have a platform based approach, open API APIs and an architecture so that they don't have to replicate those changes over multiple. It just happens. They make the change once and it's been applicable for all touch points within that store. So it's almost, it's not a restriction with the amount of customer journeys, but it's a centralization of the technology to enable those customer journeys in a more sustainable and easier to manage way. Jerry Langfitt (15:59): Yeah, it sounds like if they tried to do it the old way, which was each technology being separate, it would be complex, but if they try and implement in a much more progressive and newer way using modularity that way more tech is similar, but still supporting multiple journeys. That way that should reduce the complexity that they're they have to do. Matt Redwood (16:23): The other element is that retail technology is not going to get any simpler. If anything is going to get much more complex and much more diverse. And I don't say that as a negative, but if you look at the competition between retailers now take the grocery industry as an example, hugely competitive, hugely competitive space, where everyone is failing to get the consumer's attention and ultimately business. On the flip side, you're seeing brand loyalty at an all time low because the competition is so tight consumers know that if they have a bad experience with one particular brand or one particular store, they go next door, they go down the street and they can get as competitive as an offering, but maybe a better experience. Well maybe a, you know, more fulfilling journey within the store. So retail is a really, really good, a tough situation. They're battling each other for competitiveness, but they've also got to deal with the reduction of brand loyalty. Matt Redwood (17:20): So they have to focus on what can they do to enhance their in store experience and how can they differentiate that brand. And multi-levels it ultimately is going to result in is a lot of retailers taking bets and moving in different directions to try and differentiate themselves. And back to the openness question as why openness is so key retailers are going to want to take innovations or technology on the market and integrate it into their own ecosystem to create that own ecosystem of technology is going to enable the customer journeys and experience, but they want investors that will hopefully be different from their competitors and therefore able to differentiate themselves Jerry Langfitt (17:59): Well, they, and they need to make sure those are sustainable. They make a change and they get it right once and they can't just get it right once they have to keep it going always on and make sure that the customer always gets that great experience every time. So it's, it's going to be a challenge, but I think like you had said, building their needs onto a platform mentality is going to be the way forward. Matt Redwood (18:26): I mean, a great, a great example of that is really cash. So I felt like we've been talking about the demise of cash for years and years and years now, but ultimately what we're seeing is the long tail of cash. And even during the pandemic, when there was nervousness around, you know, safety and hygiene, and suddenly we saw a big, big drop off in the amount of consumers that you're willing to pay by cash, it didn't disappear. And actually we're now seeing cash utilization start to increase. Again, it may never go back to the level of it was, and we may be how accelerated the delays of cash, but it's still left. So what are retailers supposed to do to make sure that they can serve consumers today that want to pay by cash? Knowing that cash may disappear in three, five, 10 years, whatever the time period is. Matt Redwood (19:18): So they have to really look up the experience, the operations and the requirements that they require in the store today, as well as building the flexibility that that can shift and change tomorrow. And so a modular hardware platform is really important. How do we deliver the right experience today with the right combination of technology modules, but have the flexibility built within that, that can flex and change to support the customer journeys of tomorrow without throwing that investment away. And that's really, really crucial bit. How can we prolong the return on investment made in a piece of technology without completely throwing away every time a consumer trends Jerry Langfitt (19:57): That is absolutely correct. And it's going to be a difficult for the retailers, but they need to learn this new philosophy of being way more flexible. But thanks, Matt. I think that's a good place to close. Really appreciate your sharing, your thoughts and how critical modularity and building greater flexibility into retailers it and operational strategies and how it benefits retailers themselves and consumers. And thanks to you. Our listeners for tuning into this episode of COMMERCE NOW to download a free copy of the white paper on modularity mentioned during our discussion, please visit the dieboldnixdorf.com/self-service solution.

Hey Jerry, I think you should step away from both teams, the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Bulls and do Chicago a favor. Take your buddy Tony LaRussa with you. What a pathetic situation for the fans. Something is not right. Nah, not gonna work for me. I'll tell you why in today's rant.

Jorge Velasco via @FoxUrCode on Twitter asks "Hey Jerry, what are some tips you can give a struggling entrepreneur stay positive and with a strong mental attitude?" Hear my response here! MEMBERSHIP? https://jerrybanfield.com/university/ Love, Jerry Banfield --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jerrybanfield/support

Hey Jerry help me out give me a good advice

The Chicago White Sox aren't that good. But they aren't that bad either. Host Chet Coppock wonders aloud what Sox management will do if they are a couple games out as the trade deadline nears. Hey Jerry, if you're close on July 31st, step up and become a buyer!

The Chicago White Sox aren't that good. But they aren't that bad either. Host Chet Coppock wonders aloud what Sox management will do if they are a couple games out as the trade deadline nears. Hey Jerry, if you're close on July 31st, step up and become a buyer!

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