Landed in NYC on Thursday, fitting, since I owe you folks Part 5 of the Barbara Corcoran interview, where we chat about NYC and the hit it has taken since September 15 2008. Here it is, below. Honestly, now that I am back here for the third time in four months, something tells me New York will be just fine. This city is relentless.
I asked her what she thought about NYC since Lehman Bros. went down.
WatchMojo: So much has happened in the last year since Lehman Brothers shut down. How is New York doing, and how has New York changed in the last year?
Barbara Corcoran: Well, you know when there is trouble in Wall Street, there is trouble everywhere else. The real estate market immediately took a knee jerk reaction, and most importantly it affects the status properties. Park Avenue, 5th Avenue, Central Park West, Greenwich Village, you know anything big and expensive, immediately feels the injury of a bad year on Wall Street, bad bonuses, short bonuses, less than expected.
So New York is so tied into the financial market, real estate New York is so tied into the financial market. Not that we don’t have so many other businesses here, you know great thing about New York is not a one horse town unlike many other places around the state, it’s not a one horse town, yet the horse that everybody has their eye on is the financial factor.
WatchMojo: NY is very diversified, but finance seemed to be the economic engine. But let me ask you - as a New Yorker, as an American, as a business person - is New York rising or is it falling?
Barbara Corcoran: NY is a very comfortable city to live in, and people with a lot of money buy fourth homes, fifth homes, six homes here. You know, people with money can disappear in New York. The kids aren’t kidnapped in New York, celebrities go walk on the street with a good pair of sunglasses and not be recognized. You can get your kid into good private school in New York, more rarely than in many other cities even though it’s tough, but there is a school for everybody.
So, people like having families here, and most importantly in New York I’ve witnessed it now for thirty-five, maybe more years than that, I have witnessed that when New York falls out of favor with one nationality there is always somebody working there online to pick it up. So, I remember worrying about when the Japanese who were producing 20% of corporate group sales for us disappeared, because their market went into the dumps. We were selling their properties, 30% discounts to the Taiwanese who were laughing their way to the bank. When Taiwan had a bad spill, we started selling it to Germans, the Italians; when they kind of disappeared we had the Russians. So, there is always someone who wants New York City, and I think people don’t give that as much credit as they should. And, in that way New York always proves itself as form of resilient than other places; not everybody wants to have a third home in say, what would be I am thinking of in Moscow.
But, so many wealthy people want a third home or fourth home or fifth home in New York City. I am not, you know it’s much more akin to say London, and so is New York as part of the US going to do as well as parts of Asia? Is that economy growing faster, maybe not, but I say the Asian economy if it grows faster and there is more money, or the Russian economy always finds its way into New York.
WatchMojo: Complete my sentence, to be successful in New York you have to…
Barbara Corcoran: Oh, you are telling me to fill in the blanks?
WatchMojo: Yes.
Barbara Corcoran: Oh!
WatchMojo: I am interviewing you, right?
Barbara Corcoran: You just have to come here, because New York, you just have to come here and get start, because New York puts absolute, it’s the easiest place to succeed in America.
I really believe that, alright because what New York has that no other city has is they don’t give a damn who you are, where you are from; all they want to know is what can you do for me, okay? And so, if you could fill in that blank as an entrepreneur you’ve got a business going. Now, there is so much raw talent here; there is so much money here. There is so much even pressure to produce, because in the competition here there is so much overcrowding here that even if you are the laziest person in the world you can’t walk through the city street without feeling the beat and getting with it, you know if you are a good entrepreneur.
So yeah, you just have to come here and answer your question.
I always wondered about what happens to your holdings when you accept a government job. I figured you had to sell them… but I did not know about the tax free loophole.
Henry Paulson sold his 3.23 million shares in Goldman, worth about $500 million at the time, when he took the Treasury job, according to regulatory filings. He was exempted from paying capital gains tax on the sale of those stakes under a rule meant to avoid penalizing wealthy people who take government jobs and are forced to sell assets.
Hmm… I think I need to get me a government job. Read more. On the one hand, it seems like a great way to avoid paying taxes (accept a government job even if your heart is not in it), it’s not, after all, like the government ever appoints unqualified people.
Update 1: More on Slate, and here is the government paperwork. I wonder if there’s an equivalent thing in Canada.
Update 2: Thank Goodness, it’s not an open-ended exemption, it’s simply a deferral: “the act lets you defer capital-gains taxes triggered by the transaction.” More interestingly, the Slate article was written in 2006 and suggests letting Paulson keep his shares, asking “what’s the worst thing that can happen”:
The most likely scenario is that Paulson will sell his Goldman shares and place the money in a blind trust. That would be a smart move, and a profitable one, since he’d gain some tax benefits. When you sell assets to conform to government ethics requirements, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics issues a certificate of divestiture that lets you defer capital-gains taxes triggered by the transaction. That will likely save Paulson several million dollars in the next few years. And when your annual salary is falling from $35 million to $183,000, every penny counts. The blind trust would also give Paulson an excuse to dump all his Goldman shares at once and diversify, just as things are getting choppy—something he couldn’t do if he stayed on the job.
Once he sells, Paulson—or whoever will manage his blind trust—will have a new problem. In order to qualify for the certificate of divestiture, the cash must be invested in a diversified fund, such as a stock mutual fund. But Paulson’s portfolio is so large that it doesn’t make sense to put it into a mutual fund, or even into a whole bunch of funds. A nest egg of this size should be broadly diversified—some real estate and a few hedge funds, a few private equity funds, commodities, stocks from all over the world, a private island or two. And of course, all of these have the potential to be affected by Paulson’s actions while he is in office.
Given recent activities in Washington, the notion of suggesting that we make exceptions to ethics rules seems highly dangerous. But here’s a bold idea: Maybe we should just let Paulson keep his shares. That would be the simplest and least costly thing to do—for him and for the government. The transparency provided by Goldman’s daily trading would act as a great inhibitor to favoritism.
What’s the worst thing that could happen if Paulson held on to his Goldman stock? It’s possible that a government in which the treasury secretary had a gigantic stake in Goldman might recklessly cut marginal income taxes on the very rich so that he and his fellow executives could keep more of their bonuses. Or he might push to cut income taxes on capital gains and dividends so that Goldman employees and clients would pay fewer taxes. He could help enact legislation to reduce and ultimately eliminate the estate tax so Goldman’s private banking clients would be able to pass on as much cash to their heirs as they want. Why, such an administration might run up massive deficits so that the bond desks of Wall Street firms like Goldman would have plenty of material to buy and sell! Oh, wait—the Bush administration has already done all that.
Judging by events that are unfolding this week, I’d say the answer to that question is a “flagrant conflict of interest”.
On the one hand, distinguished financiers such as Bill Hambrecht are one step ahead of others… on the other hand, hearing them say that everything will be fine does suggest an element of being, you know, out of touch. Anyway, here’s an interview Om Malik did with Mr. Hambrecht, founder of legendary tech investment bank Hambrecht & Quist…
Now Om, maybe you can hit up True and buy some microphones!
For the longest time, I’ve been hinting at private equity firms to give me a call so we can rescue Yahoo! That might happen, it might not. But to pull that off, you need a good $40B or so. With Yahoo! at $25B - and reporting earnings as we speak - it might happen.
But today, an easier target. No, I’m not talking about CNET - though I’d love to manage CNET and whip it into shape, too. CNET is in fact facing a hostile takeover from Jana Partners, who has built up a 20% stake in the company.
I’m talking about About.com, the company founded by Scott Kurnit, first sold to Primedia for $690M, then unloaded to the New York Times for $410M in 2005.
Just this past Sunday, I mentioned that I was surprised at how little NYT had invested in developing the videos on About.com. I mentioned that with much lesser resources, we had built a video library twice the size of About.com.
Anyway, Alley Insider is now reporting that NYT wants to sell About.com :
It’s on track to do about $100 million in revenue for 2007, and perhaps $30 million in operating profit, up from $44 million and $11.7 million in 2005 (those numbers include results from recent acquisitions like ConsumerSearch–$33 million purchase price–and UCompareHealthCare.com, $2.3 million). At a 15x Ebitda multiple, About could fetch $450 million. Bump that up to 20x, and it looks a little better: $600 million.
I think About.com will have a hard time finding a buyer because big buyers won’t know what to do with it. With so much focus on social media and networking, an old school Web 1.0 company such as About.com won’t be able to command $500M from many obvious buyers because such companies would rather spend $500M on more high growth opportunities - basic risk and return.
So devoid of such upside, here’s my two not-so-subtle suggestion:
- Lend me $500M.
- We’ll buy About.com for $500M
- We’ll leverage our expertise and library at WatchMojo.com and invest some of that $30M in profits in developing About.com in a video content powerhouse to match its text content strength.
- We’ll integrate our MetaMojo.com vertical search technology to better develop and profit from niche vertical opportunities.
- We’ll let About.com’s columnists use the BloggerMojo.com blog network to publish timely pieces that drive traffic back to the millions of pages deep within About.com.
- We’ll use the StreetMojo.com application and create mini comminities matching users with marketers (b2c) and users with users (c2c).
Overnight - or in 1 quarter - About.com goes from a really useful but stagnant old, new media company, to a rapidly growing company with considerable exposure to both social media and video.
Adding our existing video content alone on About.com’s thousand of SEO-optimized pages alone would reap considerable strategic value. But with video advertising set to cross $1B in 2008 - and cross $7B in 2012 in the US alone - I am pretty sure that I can make About.com be a $10B market cap company in 5 years (7x growth in video market alone in 4 years).
Let’s face it, About.com can attempt to build up video alone etc., but within About.com, that will be hard. With About.com being a part of NYT, it’s impossible.
Something tells me that making a run at CNET is counter-productive. They don’t seem to be a willing, motivated seller. But NYT Company? I think they’d sell that puppy to me in a heartbeat.
Now all I need is a banker. A private banker with $500,000,000.00. Hmm. Where can I find that?
Any takers?
Related:
The past few years have seen a balancing of the playing field between investors and entrepreneurs, one of the many manifestations of this trend has been a site launched by Nivi and Naval, called VentureHacks.com. HipMojo.com sat down with one half the terror twins to learn more about the venture, what exactly is a venture hack and what entrepreneurs and VCs can take away from it.
Q - Tell me about your and your colleague’s background?
A - I (Nivi) am an entrepreneur-in-residence at Atlas Venture. I’ve worked with startups in roles from Vice President to Inventor, including Songbird (Sequoia), Grockit (Benchmark), Kovio (Kleiner), and Newroo (MySpace). On the venture capital side, I’ve also worked with Bessemer and one of Softbank’s funds.
Naval runs Hit Forge, an early stage fund which offers friendly seed capital and viral marketing help for social networking and Facebook application companies. He has worked with startups in roles from Founder to Advisor, including Epinions (Ebay), XFire (Viacom), Vast.com, and Mercantila. He has also invested in half a dozen companies as a VC including Scintera, Neopath, and Technorati.
Q - What’s the concept or big idea behind VentureHacks.com?
A - We show entrepreneurs how to negotiate better deals with their investors. At best, first-time entrepreneurs negotiate sub-optimal deals. At worst, they negotiate awful deals. And they don’t know how their first deal will affect the rest of their chess game with investors.
This isn’t surprising—investors play this game once-a-day while entrepreneurs play it once-a-lifetime.
Startups have one chance to raise money right. You can fix almost any mistake in a startup—if you hire the wrong guy, you can fire him. But you can’t fire your investors. You can’t fix bad investment terms.
We level the playing field so startups can do this critical job right.
Q - What’s the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make?
A - In the context of a financing, entrepreneurs focus on valuation when they should be focusing on controlling the company through board control and limited protective provisions. Valuation is temporary, control is forever.
The easiest way to maintain control of the company is to create good alternatives while you’re raising money. If you’re not
willing to walk away from a deal, you won’t get a good deal. Great alternatives make it easy to walk away.
You create alternatives by focusing on fund-raising: you pitch and negotiate with all your prospective investors at once. This may seem obvious but entrepreneurs often end up meeting investors one-after-another, instead of all-at-once.
Focusing on fund-raising creates scarcity and social proof which close deals. Focus also yields a quick yes or no from investors so you can avoid perpetually raising capital.
Q - What’s the biggest mistake VCs make?
A - The biggest opportunity for venture firms is differentiation. Firms compete for deals, and differentiation is the only way to compete.
Most firms offer the same product: a bundle of money plus the promise of value-add. And the few firms that are differentiated don’t communicate their differentiation to entrepreneurs effectively. Y Combinator is one example of differentiated capital with excellent marketing communications.
It’s ironic that firms which thrive by investing in game-changing businesses have barely differentiated themselves, let alone changed the rules of their own game.
Q - All factors being equal: should entrepreneurs accept VC or angel money?
A - There is no typical VC or angel. Instead of pitting VCs versus angels, consider the perceived pros and cons of each and pick the best investor.
Angels are perceived to have less money, invest for fun, make their decisions quickly, and not ask for control. VCs are perceived to have more money, invest as if their careers depended on it, make decisions slowly, and ask for control.
You’re looking for an angel or VC that has follow-on capital, supports companies in tough times, invests like his career depends on it, makes decisions quickly, and doesn’t ask for control.
Q - Is there really such a thing as dumb money?
A - If smart money is money plus the promise of value-add, then dumb money is just money. Dumb money sounds bad but it’s what entrepreneurs primarily want from investors: money.
Some angels, venture funds, and hedge funds provide money and get out of the way—they’re somewhat “dumb”. But there’s very little money that says “our primary responsibility is to provide capital.” And there’s too much money that thinks “smart” means “we know how to run your business better than you.”
Before you raise dumb money, you need to determine whether the investor can provide his pro rata in the next round, whether he will support you if the company is going sideways, whether you trust him, whether he has impeccable references, et cetera. But these are the same questions you need to ask before you raise money from
anybody.
Wherever you raise money, you should raise it as if your investors were dumb money, i.e. just money. In other words, unbundle money and value-add. Get money on the best terms possible and get value-add on the best terms possible.
Whether you want advice or introductions to customers and recruits, you can buy it for a tenth of what most investors charge. A hand-picked advisor or independent director will only ask for 0.25% - 2.5% of your company. He will be more aligned with you than an investor because he will own common stock. And he won’t have conflicting responsibilities to his venture firm, other venture firms, or limited partners.
Smart and dumb investors will add value. To decide if you should pay for it, ask yourself whether you would add an investor to your board of directors/advisors if he didn’t come with money. If the answer is no, you should treat him like dumb money. If the answer is yes, you can subtract some dilution from his proposed investment because he
offsets the cost of a value-add director or advisor. But if the investor ends up not adding value, you can’t fire him like you can fire an advisor or director. You can only hope to ignore him.
Instead of looking for value-add from an investor, first look for money-add and second, look for someone who is humble, someone you trust, someone who will treat you like a peer, someone who shares your vision, and someone who is betting on you, not the numbers.
Q - Do you get any slack from VCs?
A - No. Smart investors like educated entrepreneurs.
Q - What does it take to be a successful entrepreneur?
A - Successful entrepreneurs delight their customer, execute relentlessly, and enjoy lots of luck. Like porn, you recognize great entrepreneurs when you see them and you get better at recognizing them every day.
Q - What does it take to be a successful investor?
A - Successful investors have access to capital, great dealflow, good judgement in picking companies, and, in competitive markets, the competitive advantage to win deals.
Q - Your website claims, “We’ve raised $100M or so in financing from firms including Sequoia, Benchmark , August, and Bessemer . We’ve also invested another $20M in about 12 companies.” So the question is: Who really has it tougher? Entrepreneurs or VCs when you consider their predicament: in other words, VCs have to actually make their investments
worthwhile; whereas entrepreneurs ultimately pitch to people who’s job it is to invest money?
A - Entrepreneurs and VCs both work hard before and after an investment.
Investors are typically personally wealthy and draw a very comfortable salary from their management fees, in addition to their potential carry in a portfolio of startups. Entrepreneurs are often strapped for cash and fully invested in a single startup.
The premise that investors “make their investments worthwhile” is incorrect. Companies make themselves worthwhile. In theory, investors prefer investments that require no work, have no risk, and have a tremendous return. In practice, investors are part of the team that makes a company a success or failure.
Q - Finish the sentence: The top VC in the world is…?
A - It depends on the startup’s market. And we avoid applauding or criticizing individual firms on Venture Hacks.
In general, the best firms don’t care what anybody else thinks, don’t take up your time with a lot of diligence, never pull out their Blackberries in a meeting, and don’t ask dumb questions.
They make decisions quickly, show up to meetings on time, pay attention when you speak, let management run their companies, treat entrepreneurs like peers, and conduct themselves with humility and trust.
I will give a shout out to Atlas Venture and their General Partner Jeff Fagnan who is crazy enough to support me while we write Venture Hacks. They don’t agree with everything we say but the whole firm is very entrepreneur-friendly. And a shout out goes to Naval, my Venture Hacks partner, and his Hit Forge fund—I’m lucky to be working with him and I recommend him to any entrepreneur.
Q - Naval gained notoriety from his lawsuit, did that help or hurt VH?
A - Neither. It’s a non-issue for us. The plaintiffs in the suit included 3 founders and 50-odd employees—it wasn’t “Naval’s lawsuit”. Since then, he has raised money from venture firms for several startups and for his Hit Forge fund—he has plenty of good VC relationships. Thanks for the opportunity to clear this up.
Q - What’s your biggest accomplishment?
A - I prefer contribution over accomplishment. Accomplishment is about me, contribution is about customers. I’m happy to have contributed to promising startups like Songbird and Grockit.
Q - Why should entrepreneurs check out VH?
A - Entrepreneurs can get a better deal by following our advice. Even companies with great exits can benefit from a better deal because a better deal makes more employees rich.
Fund-raising advice is abundant but mostly bad. Entrepreneurs usuallyget their advice from other entrepreneurs who are inexperienced, investors who are biased, and lawyers who know how to do things right (legally) but don’t know the right things to do.
There are a few people in the world who know the fund-raising game cold and we’ve been lucky enough to learn from some of them. Now we’re open-sourcing everything we know. I’ve learned a lot from my partner Naval, serial entrepreneur
Jim Pitkow, Jeff Fagnan at Atlas Venture, and Jorge del Calvo at Pillsbury Winthrop.
Q - Is the VC industry doomed?
A - No. Venture capital under management is increasing and VCs are a critical part of the startup ecosystem—I’m grateful they exist.
The rate of innovation is increasing and that innovation needs capital to get in customer’s hands. Capital invested in startups is going to increase, not decrease.
It’s wonderful that you can start a web-based software company with little capital. But after that early stage, even these companies need significant capital to reach their customers and beat their competition.
VC is not doomed but it is changing: see Y Combinator, Idealab, Hit Forge, Squid Labs, and others.
Q - Sell to a biggie or raise VC? what do you recommend?
A - Sell if an acquisition dramatically changes the lives of the founders and the early team. You can use an earn-out at the acquirer to capture some of the potential upside of raising money.
If you raise capital, you risk your current value for a chance to capture your future value. If you sell your company, you capture your current value, do your time at the acquirer, and then create future value at your next company. What’s the difference between creating future value at your current company and your next company?
One alternative to an acquisition is to cash-out some of the founder’s shares so they have enough money in their personal bank accounts to feel comfortable with the risk of building a bigger business. I’m guessing the Facebook founders have been cashed-out to some degree—but that’s a guess!
Q - Is VH a peripheral, tangent occupation or do you have bigger plans for it?
A - We’re always looking for ways to serve entrepreneurs. Our Term Sheet Hacks are a good start.
I want to invite your readers to “cold call” us if they’re starting a company and have questions, need introductions to investors, need help negotiating a term sheet, et cetera. We can’t help everyone but we can
certainly help the most promising companies—you can reach us at nandn@venturehacks.com.
Q - You’re a good man, thanks again for your time and keep up all of the good work at VentureHacks.com.
Monday we mentioned our new deal with Blinkx, Tuesday was Quebecor Media’s Canoe.ca, yesterday was our latest deal to go mobile with our deal with MyWaves, and today’s it time to accounce our latest deal, adding to WatchMojo.com syndication network by signing up Voxant’s The Newsroom as our latest partner. Here for example is one of our travel clips on Denver, Colorado:
The Newsroom is the latest to join our network, others include YouTube, Joost, Roo, and many others. See more clips on The Newsroom here.
Related:
- Blinkx Joins WatchMojo.com’s Video Syndication Network.
- YouTube and WatchMojo.com Make it Official.
- Joost What Does WatchMojo.com Have in Common with Viacom, CNN, Turner, Sony, CBS, NHL, Warner?
- WatchMojo.com Partners with GoFish.
- WatchMojo.com celebrates 1-year anniversary with move into wireless via Sprint partnership.
More announcements and news to come…
The headline of this post ends with !? because Yahoo!’s name includes a “!” and the sentence is in fact a question.
But, even were it not the case, upon finding out that Yahoo! had shelled out $680M for the 80% of Right Media it did not own (after paying $45M for 20% of the company six months ago), any headline would have been followed by !?$%$(*&#.
The Business Model: Do ya get it?
When Right Media launched in 2003, I got a call in my capacity as VP of Ad Sales of an online publisher. Right Media told me what they did: in the words of a current executive, Right Media is ”an enabler that provides tools and techniques to participants and creates a virtual space to do business more efficiently. We serve like a stock market, we price display ad inventory and allow participants to discover as much as players allow to be discovered within the ecosystem and we make the data transparent…”
In 2003, I spoke to a couple of brothers who worked at Right Media, they wanted me to grant them a portion of our ad inventory for them to price and auction off to other networks. We did 250M ad impressions per month, and we sold out some 75% of the ad inventory, the remaining 25% we doled out to networks. These networks paid us anywhere from $0.25 CPM to $1 CPM. On the premium inventory, I’d be able to sell that for anywhere from $1 CPM to $20 CPM.
CPM stands for cost per one thousand of ad impressions. For more on CPM and other terms, as well as a landcape of all of the participants of the online ad ecosystem, click here.
A Practical Example
At the time I was as cordial as could be, but I did not have much time to allocate to Right Media’s offering, because we generated $190,000 per month from the 75% of our ad inventory that we sold out to advertisers large and small, and made about $10,000 from the networks. Even if that grew 100%, to $20,000, I figured that my time would be better served focusing on the 75% of premium inventory that we had.
To some extent, I was right. To some extent, I was wrong.
We had 250M ad impressions, selling out 75% to premium advertisers was feasible. When you are a large publisher with billions of ad impressions, you tend to sell out even less. At the end of the spectrum, for sites like MySpace and Yahoo!, you sell out a lot of less and are left with remnant inventory.
Long Tail of Ad Inventory
Yahoo! sells out a lot more of their inventory as premium compared to MySpace, the reasons for that are numerous, but one major one is that MySpace is user-generated content and less desirable to advertisers. If you add all of the variables and consider that today user-generated content accounts for more aggregate traffic than adult content does, you start to understand that times have changed, and many people found value in Right Media’s - and networks’ in general - offering.
Right Media, knowingly or unwittingly, was positioning itself for the burgeoning traffic coming from the explosion in user-generated content. This is not to say that all of Right Media’s business emanates from user-generated content, it’s to demonstrate one source of demand for Right Media’s offering, an exchange matching buyers with sellers of ad inventory in an auction format.
That last part, my friends, is the key. What eBay did for Pez dispensers, Right Media sought to do for the $20B online ad industry. In other words, the ad inventory I represented was largely irrelevant to Right Media, but the large majority of the ad inventory that was to mushroom online would be a perfect fit for Right Media.
Times, They Change
Fast forward that to yesterday’s announcement that Yahoo! was paying $600M+ for Right Media’s 80% that it did not own.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying the deal was a bad one, I am saying that as both a writer covering the space, someone who had worked with Right Media in the past, a shareholder in Yahoo! and a web entrepreneur positioned in online advertising, I fell off my chair.
Some people like Fred Wilson shouted hooray, others did the opposite, questioning the rationale:
“Now that they’re owned by one of the largest sellers of space on the Web, does that make Right Media less of a middleman?” said Jeff Ratner, North American digital director of MindShare Interactive. “Will I find more of my inventory winding up on Yahoo as opposed to somewhere else?”
I am not sure, maybe, who knows? All I know is that Yahoo! has a lot of impressions, of which little is premium. Yahoo! needs a better way to monetize this long tail (hate that word, because people apply it to everything, but it does apply here…) inventory. As a Yahoo! shareholder, that gets me excited, but the flip side is that Yahoo!’s CFO Sue Decker was quick to add: “Yahoo’s shareholders shouldn’t expect to see profits from this investment until at least 12 months after the deal closes, if the companies follow through on their immediate intentions to improve the marketplace, then media planners, buyers and publishers may see the changes quickly.”
Hmm, that’s a lot of “if’s” for a company that quadrupled in value in six months. Of course, Right Media itself has soared in size, particularly since the Yahoo! 20% investment.
According to itself back in February 2007:
“Right Media Exchange revenue has increased 81% over the past six months, with 566 billion ad impressions traded during the period.”
The milestone represents only a partial measure of Right Media’s broad, substantial growth since it formally launched the Right Media Exchange last summer. In that period, the company has also seen a 50% increase in headcount, a 49% increase in Exchange membership and an 84% increase in impressions served. Over one trillion impressions have been served on the Exchange since the company launched its auction platform in April of 2005.
“All signs point to the fact that the digital advertising market is embracing the exchange model,” said Right Media CEO Michael Walrath. “Buyers and sellers on the Right Media Exchange are getting a fair opportunity to develop new relationships, increase scale and drive more value, and they’re clearly taking advantage of it.”
There are currently 127 network, advertiser and publisher members with seats on the Exchange, including Yahoo!, Fox Interactive Media and LookSmart. Exchange members represent over 6,000 buyers and 13,000 sellers. More than 175,000 creatives are currently active in the Exchange.
There are cases where Right Media has done wonders, ZDNet points to Tickle.com as an example where it saw a 771% spike in revenue. That’s not bad at all. I wonder how much the $10,000 I generated from 25% of our non-premium inventory would grow at a growth rate of 771%. Of course, demand for online ads have changed quite a bit since then, but you get my drift.
Value is in the Eye of the Beholder
Is Yahoo! getting something valuable? Of course.
Would I pay $800M for it? Well, as I said yesterday, iVillage fetched $600M, MySpace parent Intermix got $580M and my former one-time employer IGN got $650M from News Corp. Of course, this was all over two years ago. Last month, Google paid $3.1B for privately held DCLK.
Wait a minute… Right Media too is privately held… could it be suddenly that public shareholders are showing restrain while their private brethren are not? Of course, Right Media and Doubleclick were acquired, not by public shareholders directly, but by managers of these, at Yahoo! and Google respectively.
When the Google/DCLK deal went down, I wrote aplenty on that:
- Google Buys Doubleclick for $3.1 Billion; Blocks MSFT Acquisition
- Questions in Wake of DCLK/GOOG Deal; MSFT/YHOO Repercussions?
- Two Variables in DCLK/GOOG Deal: Dart for Publishers/Advertisers; All Cash Deal
- Why GOOG’s DCLK Makes Little Sense (To Me)
- DCLK Winners: Hellman & Friedman; Losers? DCLK’s Shareholders?
- aQuantive Under Spotlight
One of my main points of contention in that deal was that saying that DCLK gave Google an “in” into the display business was akin to saying that MSFT was in real tight with ad agencies because agencies use powerpoint in client pitches, in other words, DCLK’s strength was in software, and not media, ever since it unloaded its media business to MaxOnline/L90.
One reader of this blog who agreed was Right Media’s own Vice President Bennett Zucker, as he commented to one of the old posts.
I’d argue that Google was practically reckless in paying so much for DCLK, and Yahoo! showed some eagerness to maintain its lead in display advertising, and perhaps arguably fear as well, and Right Media did the sensible thing for its shareholders by gladly accepting this offer. Their venture capital backers Redpoint must be ecstatic, as are the staff at Right Media.
I spoke to Bennett today about the deal.
Hailing from the world of publishing, Zucker serves as an evangelist for Right Media’s exchange, trying to convince publishers to give it a try. He’s also served some time at Tacoda (wouldn’t they love an exit like this one, by the way?) in the area of behavioral targeting…
I asked Bennett:
Q: What on earth transpired between last fall and this spring besides Christmanukwanza?
A: “We had been working with Yahoo! for a year before the 20% investment materialized, and Yahoo! did a lot of tire kicking before it became a customer. Yahoo! has since been trading a lot of its non-premium, and I mean deep, real deep inventory on the exchange. And, the result validated things and they were really successful.”
Q: Did other companies show an interest to invest or buy them afterwards?
A: “Once that happened, the floodgates opened and all lingering doubts evaporated.”
Q: What was it that made Yahoo! value you so much more today than they did six months ago?
A: Sue Decker pointed out three things in her analyst call yesterday:
1 - increased value of YHOO’s own inventory;
2 - extend YHOO’s inventory across the Web;
3 - create new businesses working together.Q: Do you expect changes in structure, personnel?
A: We had aggressive hiring plans, and they got more aggressive. CEO Michael Walrath will now report to Sue in Sunnyvale.
Q: Is this an answer or challenge to Google, or are we all supposed to think it’s not?
A: We were working with Yahoo! months before Google and Doubleclick closed, so while it is certainly related in some ways, it’s not totally coming out of nowhere.
Q: Fair enough, but isn’t this an acknowledgment or admission by Yahoo! that they see little growth in their core premium inventory and need to look at non-premium?
A: Clearly there is a lot of value in boosting rates on non-premium, which runs deep on Yahoo!, but I would not rule out high-end opportunities.
Q: Are we in a period of euphoria? I mean, Yahoo! paid what they did for you, good for you. But today we hear that MSFT might buy TFSM for $1B, which is madness, it was worth $400M on Nasdaq two weeks ago… I would not call it a bubble, because stock prices of TFSM, AQNT (a stock I own) and VCLK actually fell because an analyst at Citigroup cut the rating for AQNT… which shows some common sense… but don’t you get a sense that something is off?
A: Well, we certain are happy and euphoric. We will obviously eventually reach a limit. But in the end we feel that we can do a lot with Yahoo!
As a Yahoo! shareholder that just paid a chunk for your business, I sure do hope so.
Interestingly, while everyone got excited about this, the main story of the day - in my humble opinion - was Comcast’s deal with Yahoo! That was a great one. Read more about the details here. Of course, the irony of it all is grand, Yahoo! just got the right to sell ads on Comcast, which means a little bit more of premium ads with a helluva lot of non-premium inventory… having Right Media in-house might make that deal even better.
Nice interview by John Battelle with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
A lot of good points from it,
- Schmidt describing Google’s four areas of focus
- Schmidt confirming that mobile is indeed the next growth area
I did forget that Schmidt is on Apple’s board, which means that there is a lot of anti-MSFT strategizing going on I am sure during board meetings.
But of note, technically, if both companies are coming out with phones (Apple’s iPhone is confirmed, Google’s phone is “sort of confirmed”) then that is an interesting storyline to watch out for. Being in the process of assembling our own board, I do wonder about potential conflicts and confidentiality issues.
Battelle also interviewed Schmidt for his interesting book The Search as well, one of the few books I have read cover to cover in my life, despite having actually written a couple myself.
Ted Rheingold has good reason not to return my calls, answer my mails, or want to talk to me.
Step 1: Take Content…
A few months ago - November 13th to be precise - I wrote something about the cooky state of consumer internet media, and used the craze surrounding his website, Dogster.com, as prime example of that. My argument, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, was that the same wave of euphoria that surrounds a social community for dogs, such as Dogster.com, preceded the dot com bubble bursting when investors drove shares in Pets.com to stunning levels, hitting $11 in February 2000 and finishing up at $0.19 at liquiditation.
In other words, if history repeats itself - and it always does - then the tea leaves are suggesting an ominous future, right? Could it be that we have a short memory: after all, dogs, while cute as a button, a business do not make.
Or could it?
Step 2: Stir up a Community…
Having studied Pets.com and always broken down the consumer media space online between the famous 3 C’s: effectively Content, Commerce and Community, I sort of understood his reaction to the post:
Hey,
Thanks for checking out the site and taking a hard look.
Pets.com was a epic eCommerce play. Dogster and Catster are online communities bootstrapped and only augmented by user demand.
Today’s our third birthday and 2006 was a profitable year. It actually does deserve looking deeper if you really are interested in why one is a sustainable growing company and the other failed. They really have nothing in common in all.
Of course, his answer was fairly laced with sarcasm, had I really “taken a hard look”? Probably not. But even in my first post, I understood that this time, things would be different, because, well, Dogster.com is very different than Pets.com.
Before we delve into all of the ways why and how, it should be noted that the recipe for success for practically all internet consumer media companies has proven to be the following:
- create or aggregate Content
- develop a Community around the content
- monetize the site through Commerce.
For transactional companies such as eBay and Amazon.com, it’s a different story, but those are largely marketing driven strategies.
But for online media companies, it’s a time tested approach. I lived through it myself in 2000 when I worked in the men’s publishing space. Our company focused on content, leveraged that to create a community, and then monetized it through ad sales. Our main competitor had little content, tried to focus on commerce to generate a community, and ultimately failed, burning through $17.5M in financing from Highland Capital Group. As such, I sort of understood that Pets.com was very different than Dogster.com. But, the fact remains, until Dogster is barking and kicking, the comparison will come up.
“If Pets.com did not go extinct, there is a good chance Dogster.com would not exist,” admits Rheingold when I spoke to him yesterday. “But the two companies are very different, Pets.com is like Amazon.com for pet products, whereas we do not sell any products, carry inventory or anything like that. We might have affiliate programs but we really have a different business model,” continues the 36 year old CEO of Dogster.com, a profitable social community for dog lovers, created in January 2004.
While I was exchanging emails with Ted to set up the interview, I imagined he was a pet-loving idealistic who just wanted a place to post pictures of his dog Max and hence was born Dogster.com. Naturally, that was not to be, when we finally talked, I asked him where he got the idea for Dogster.com:
“I was looking for repeat, recurring revenue, to ensure that I could pay the rent,” starts off Rheingold.
“Hmm, what about Max?,” methought.
“My girlfriend and I lived in studios, so we could not have any pets, and I would see my girlfriend going to the ASPCA website to look at pictures of pets, and it was sad cause many of these dogs would be getting euthanized,” explained Rheingold, “I asked myself why there wasn’t a site to share images and stories for dog owners.”
Step 3: Generate Commerce.
“I was hoping to have an advertiser in place by June, 2004, but by March I had clients,” and while the ad offerings were simple and modest ($50 for your banner to run in equal rotation for the month), the potential was clearly there, according to Rheingold. The problem was, he had a day job building and managing websites for clients, and that took precedence, even though Dogster.com was growing and eating up a lot of his time. The clients were lucrative but the cash flow sporadic, hence the desire for “repeat, recurring revenue.” But of course, until a consumer media destination gets big enough, it’s a large hole sucking money, time and energy.
An Expensive Hobby
In other words, Dogster.com was an expensive hobby, something that I know all too well from my first year running Mojo Supreme, and mainly, WatchMojo.com Web TV. Because of the resources it was eating up, Rheingold sat on it and would add features slowly but surely, waiting to see if “Ad Sense would make more money for us the next month than the previous one before really diving in more, I didn’t want to invest more money,” he admits, adding “Dogster.com was starting to show signs that it would be a bigger success than I thought it would be.”
The Realities of Startups
Listening to Ted talk, I could not help but get what he was talking about, mainly on two important realities:
- Many entrepreneurs start a company because they see something or look to satisfy a need, there’s no magical story. Pierre Omidyar started eBay - not because his girlfriend wanted to trade her Pez dispensers (that was a PR story) - but because he knew that the Web was perfect for auctions. Ted Rheingold started his company because he wanted recurring revenue and nothing like Dogster.com existed.
- Bootstrapping a company means that you have a lot of options and leverage down the road, but don’t even kid yourself, for the first months, lest years, you are going to lose money, plenty of it, and there’s no real guarantee of getting that back, let alone making any. If you are comfortable with that, start away.
By 2004, Ted brought on two partners, John Vars and Steven Reading. They were doing it part-time, but by 2005 they had some marquee advertisers joining them for the ride: Animal Planet and Target.
As a consumer media site, once you get major advertisers, you sort of know “this will work.” I had that moment at my old job when I closed a deal with Universal Pictures. We felt great about ourselves with my ex-boss displaying one of his usual moments of gratitude, mind you…
The Financing Equation
At that time, Dogster was getting the usual invites from venture capitalists to come in and talk about their little operation. I asked Ted what it was, in particular, that excited the VCs, to which he was very quick to add: “passionate communities.”
“But I could not see, how we could take in $3M in financing, when we had something like 50,000 registered members, mainly, we were worried about being pushed out…” - things that all entrepreneurs who talk to VCs naturally think of and are concerned, no matter what anyone says before a deal is signed.
The Tipping Point
By July 2005, “we were paying ourselves a salary, expenses were paid and we became profitable.” At that time, the dynamics change. As an entrepreneur, there are many tipping points, or milestones, you look forward to. One is when the product, website or service is complete, the other is a simple launch. Once you have launched, there are specific milestones in terms of usership that you get excited about. Generating revenue is a major one and hitting profitability is arguably a coup as well. When these things happen, you effectively see the balance of power shifting from potential investors to yourself. Of course, there are other tipping points, where you see how large the opportunity is and want to explode your business, but monetization and profitability are easily two of the major milestones in any company’s life, and it was no different for Dogster.
Dogs and Cats
Of course, by now, Dogster had a sibling: Catster.com was born in August, 2004. Both names were registered by an artist who appreciated what Ted wanted to do with the URLs, so Ted was able to acquire these for… $400 and $750 respectively. Indeed, no Pets.com similarities here.
Once the company was profitable, “we ramped up, hiring more people and adding features. The advertisers began to sign 5-digit deals, a few even agreed to 6-digit deals, and we were constantly making improvements to what we offered them,” boasts Rheingold: ”We were a 14-person compay!”
At that time, Rheingold and company wanted to realize the potential of Dogster.com and Catster.com so they turned to outside investors. The group was wary of VCs, “we didn’t have a good feeling, we met with a lot, many who said they would be fine with doing a small round, but we did not want to lose control by doing a large equity stake,” so they turned to angel investors instead.
Touched by an Angel[s]
“We also had a lot more to prove,” confides Rheingold, so they put together their own angel syndicate and raised $1M in financing from 24 investors, who are now trusted advisors who are in it “for the long haul, and believe in what we do.”
It should also be noted that the list of investors are no mom and pop investors, they include the cream of the crop of what you could dream of amongst angels: Jeff Clavier, Michael Parekh and Michael Arrington, Joshua Schachter - del.icio.us./Yahoo, Adam Beguelin - Truveo/AOL, Michael Tanne – Wink, Jim Young – hotornot, Mike Jones - Userplane/AOL, George Sarlo - Walden Funds, Frank Caufield - Darwin VC, Aydin Senkut - Felicis Ventures, Robert Simon - Alta Partners, Brad Feld – Mobius Ventures… and more.
[as a very interesting, related sidenote, most of the blogger/investors asked readers of their blogs to comment on their investment after visiting Dogster.com and Catster.com, in a sign that they knew - like Rheingold - what they were getting themselves into].
Over the years, Rheingold has gotten himself a dog. Initially, you think that not having one and running a site like dogster.com would be blasphemous, but Rheingold has the right priorities in sight. Indeed, while the backers and management of a company like Pets.com was thinking short term and thinking fuzzy by thinking that people would be interested in paying $20 in shipping and handling for a $10 bag of pet food they could get easily from the mall around the corner, Dogster.com has tapped into the power of social communities to build something that has a lot of value to advertisers and members of the community: in 2006, the company generated $1.1 million in revenue, spread across 40 advertisers, with “a couple of big-hitting, brand awareness-type advertisers leading the way,” according to Rheingold.
Rheingold’s team has charted an impressive trajectory and the growth targets he has set are nothing short of ambitious: he wants to hit 1M registered members, and sitting at 325,000 in March today, he says organic growth will take him to 500,000. In other words, marketing savvy and luck will have to play a role to hit the remaining 500,000. Can he hit it? I don’t know. I do wish him well. Demonstrating a pragmatic and practical sense of things, you know he won’t do it by hiring an expensive pet sock, though. And the beauty of his past management style has allowed him to surround himself with angel investors who won’t ask for his head if he misses by an inch.
Social Networking’s Next Wave: Niche Communities
Taking a step back, you can anticipate (and already see) tremendous numbers of social commuities spawning within niche verticals, Rheingold’s team at Dogster and Catster is to be the largest in their respective fields.
In this context, if history does repeat itself, then maybe it will be reminiscent of how MySpace inspired itself from Geocities and went on to become the largest site in the world, and not how Pets.com fared.
In the meantime, check out Dogster.com and Catster.com.
Check out our previous Interviews and Profiles of People, Places:
:: Keith McAllister - CEO, Mochila
:: Matt Sanchez - CEO, Video Egg
:: Alex Laats - CEO, Podzinger
:: Scott Maxwell - Managing Partner, Openview, Former MP of Insight Ventures
:: Brian Buchwald - GM, NBBC
:: Tod Sacerdoti - CEO, BrightRoll
Syndication is a tough business. In my previous lifetime as an executive of an online men’s publishing company, I had to choose between advertising and licensing sales. I chose advertising because licensing - I presumed - would require just as much time and energy but seemed like a far less scalable endeavor.
Apparently, I was not alone in my assessment. Syndication has proven to be a lucrative revenue stream for media companies, news syndication revenue reached just under $2 billion in 2005 and is forecast to reach $3 billion by 2008. But the problem is that for most media companies, the cost and time attached to selling your content usually exceeds the returns thereof.
Take the following two scenarios:
Company X loves company Y’s content Z but the cost associated with it does not make it worth their while to acquire it. In other words, not only is the cost prohibitive but the revenue that company X can generate off advertising or their own subcription is immaterial.
Company Y would love to sell content Z but the time it takes to do so makes it prohibitive.
As a result of these scenarios, the licensing model, while lucrative, does not scale as well as advertising does. For example, take into consideration that advertising was a $15B industry in the US in 2006, a $20B industry in 2007 and set to represent anywhere from $30B to $60B by 2010 (depending on whether you trust eMarketer, Morgan Stanley or PriceWaterhouse more). These numbers are far larger than the $3B generated in news syndication.
Syndication Market = Served + Unserved
Of course, therein lies the value of a marketplace that could aggregate, index, price, exchange, track and sell advertising in content.
Enter Mochila. Mochila started off as an XML software company in 2001 but morphed into a free, online-supported, licensing engine that enables transactions between companies looking for content and those looking to sell it.
Being a producer of video content (via WatchMojo.com) and an aggregator of text-based content ourselves (via our vertical search engine MetaMojo.com, blog news service BloggerMojo.com), we find a service like Mochila intriguing. I should disclose that we will probably be looking at partnering up with Mochila in the weeks to come. But it’s a solution all media companies can consider in their marketing and sales mix. Of course, the larger you are, the less marginal value you might get out of it. As well, the larget you are, then the more you might want to exert more control, which in turn leads to less benefit.
Needle in a Haystack
The challenge for Mochila lies mainly in marketing. There are various other companies vying to become a marketplace for content, but these usually focus on print, or images, or video. In video, Brightcove, Roo and NBBC (all three partners of WatchMojo.com) are competing in a space that some say could mushroom to be a $6B market by 2010: $3B in ad sales and $3B in download sales. And of course, if online advertising is to be a $30-60B market and TV advertising is currently a $75B industry and the increase in the former comes largely at the expense of cannibalization of the latter, then clearly this market can be huge. Of course, Mochila is not yet in video, it will be in April 2007.
What on earth is a Mochila?
I had to ask.
“Mochila is the name of the bag used by the Pony Express to carry mail. In its day, it was a nice bit of technology that allowed the riders to safely and efficiently move their cargo to where it needed to go,” explains McAllister: ”The name was suggested to us by a publisher of newspapers and magazines who was instrumental in devising the Mochila model.”
Reading straight from the press release: Mochila has a “patent-pending XML technology that allows it to instantly match buyers, sellers and advertiser preferences, allowing members to safely buy and sell their content to each other for the first time at the atomic asset level.”
Atomic asset? In laymen’s term, one of the things that killed content licensing to consumers was the lack of micropayments. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, analysts expected licensing of text-based content to soar, this never did. Ultimately, consumers flocked to the web, spending 25% of their time online, content remained free, advertising shifted from offline to online and licensing became an afterthough: AOL.com became free, CNN.com took its video offering and made it free when it saw that online advertising was more lucrative than subscriptions.
But, while all of that makes a lot of sense at the business-to-consumer level, at the business-to-business level, there is a clear need to offer an eBay of sorts for content. Those looking for content need an a-la-carte, on-demand model, and not a “take it or leave it” solution. The web clearly has the traits to provide such a flexible ecosystem and Mochila is intent on being that player for all forms of media. “Distribution has historically been constrained by legacy technology systems and business models,” argues Mochila CEO Keith McAllister, whom I spoke to this morning. McAllister, whose previous stint was at CNN (can you call it a stint when the tenure lasted 18 years?) as executive vice president and managing editor of national newsgathering, views the tip of the iceberg of the “served syndication market as a $5B market, with the unserved market being much larger.”
Mochila has one thing right in that it aims to mesh text, image, audio and video content into one cohesive marketplace. I am not one to drink the “all content will be digital tomorrow and platform agnostic” mantra, I’ve argued that what you see on TV will probably be very different than what you see on the Web, which in turn will be different from what you see on a handheld device. The line separating TV from Web is economic-driven whereas the difference between Web and wireless is technology-driven.
Regardless, I do see the need and place for a media-agnostic marketplace as a powerful tool, because content is worth more in some media that others at different times. This is why, for example, I have taken the contents of my first and second book and created sub-sections online here and here respectively. A reader walking into a bookstore or Amazon.com for that matter is in a different state of mind than a reader surfing the Web. I don’t do books, for example, but reading something online, any day. By taking that content from print/books to online, I am carving out a new frontier.
In many ways, what Mochila is doing here is the same concept, but on steroids.
Mochila’s Business Model
Mochila is taking a hybrid model, which is potentially risky, but one that it needs to:
1. Members apply to sign up.
2. Once they get approved,
a) Ad Match: Publishers can pick and choose content to include on their sites. They can do so for free in an ad-supported model. Under this scenario, Mochila inserts ads from companies it works with - currently Quigo, 24/7 Real Media - within the content and splits these on a 30-40-30 share. In other words, 30% goes to the web publisher, 40% goes to the content owner and 30% goes to Mochila. To illustrate why I am so impressed with this, it’s this: when we launched our blog network, of which HipMojo.com is part of, we effectively used blogging software with the hope of creating a news service that blended individual writers’ two cents (like yours truly is doing here), press releases from companies, news wires, etc., we’d never afford a service like Associated Press, but Mochila makes it possible for us to scale content and share the ad revenues. It’s a win win service in the sense that it’s all incremental: we get content we would not get otherwise, AP gets additional reach it would not get otherwise, and Mochila creates value where nothing existed, hence upping the served market to a much larger market than $5B, or so goes the theory.
b) Companies can purchase content from one another, at which point 70% goes to the content owner and 30% goes to Mochila. WatchMojo.com generates a nice stream as is from syndication, licensing, etc., but to most content owners, we view the opportunity to put our content on Mochila’s storefront, NBBC’s marketplace, Brightcove’s network etc. all as accretive.
The company came out of stealth mode in April 2006 and now employs 40 full-time people. As of January 2007, it boasts 1,500 newspapers, magazines, wire services and websites combined. That’s not too shabby at all.
The Smart Money
No wonder the firm has lined up major financial backers: Charles River Ventures led the Series B round, joining Mochila’s previous investors: Mission Ventures, The Greenspun Corporation, and Jerry Colonna. Mr. Collona was Fred Wilson’s partner at Flatiron, one of the most successful Web VCs of the 1990s.
Of course, smart money follows a proven team, and at Mochila, McAllister is surrounded by a team whose experience and expertise is impressive. The technology leadership has powered some of the leading websites, including those of GE, Delta, Fedex, WebMD, Sony, Toyota, and Disney. The media DNA pedigree in the company is enough to bring Walt Disney back to life: CNN, CBS, American Media, Yellow Pages, and many others.
Since the company closed its Series B financing round, it has opened up its content mall to buyers. We presume a lot of the business generated in marginal for most of the members, but the fact is that most companies are not structured to really handle this in-house, because there are more lucrative opportunities elsewhere. Mochila brings a new flow of deals and opportunities their way. Mochila allows content owners to protect their content against competitors and make real-time changes to their profile to maximize the revenue and distribution potential.
End Game?
Ultimately, a marketplace succeeds when it has scale and reach: Mochila seems to be winning that game: media companies are adding their content at a fast clip: 100,000 new assets added every month. That is a lot of content, and like all other ecosystems, one other welcome challenge is finding what you are looking for.
Of course, content owners are always looking for ways to further distribute and monetize their content, so it is not really a surprise to see content owners flock to Mochila. What about buyers? Mochila’s press material suggests that newspaper companies are heavy buyers, and we know just how volatile the newspaper landscape is these days. But the flip side, of course, could be argued: Mochila helps newspapers reap efficiencies. Ultimately, content will become increasingly digital, and that means that it can be exported and distributed anywhere, anytime. From that vantage point, Mochila should target the broader, comprehensive $250B global advertising market and not any one particular subset, which means that McAllister’s ”unserved” target market size is quite enormous.
Previous interviews/company profiles:
:: Matt Sanchez - CEO, Video Egg
:: Alex Laats - CEO, Podzinger
:: Scott Maxwell - Managing Partner, Openview, Former MP of Insight Ventures
:: Brian Buchwald - GM, NBBC
:: Tod Sacerdoti - CEO, BrightRoll
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