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TWiST #45 with Tony Hsieh

Monday, March 15th, 2010
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Jason’s guest this week was Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos and author of the soon to be released book Deliverying Happiness (June 7, 2010).  Highlights of the show included 2 points of advice from Tony to entrepreneurs, a bunch of giveaways and multiple mini-guest segments.

00:03 Surprise guests include:
Brian Alvey
Don Dodge
Matt Coffin
Shel Israel

00:13 Tony Hsieh interview

  • Book discussion (why, what’s in the book)
  • Delivering Happiness Bus
  • How to motivate employees

Ask Jason
00:19 Rob May, CEO of Backupify asks, How much focus should I place on competitors?
00:23 Don Dodge, Developer Advocate at Google asks, If you took Tony out of Zappos would Zappos be successful and follows up could Tony turn around an old company like General Motors?  This is one of the things I love about Don Dodge, he’s not afraid to ask questions.  This is the second time he has asked a question on the show, last question was on TWiST #10

Jason’s Shark Tank contest
00:27 Scripped, eBay for scripted content, helps producers find content
00:31 Youphonics, a tool to let musicians jam online together
00:34 Throwboy Pillows, custom pillows (winner)

The winner receives:

  • One year of VPS service from PowerVPS
  • One year of Email service from DNAmail (up to 10 mailboxes)
  • One year of High Speed Internet from DSL Extreme
  • One hour of business strategy consulting from IKANO team
    • The IKANO team will provide up to one hour of strategy consulting to Startup via conference call.  Jason or anyone from Mahalo/TWIST team can join if they would like. The startup can ask IKANO team for advise on any business related questions including social media, marketing, technology or general business questions and the IKANO team will provide insight and feedback.  IKANO services and interacts with tens of thousands of business and can provide guidance based on our experience.
    • Team

00:41 Tony Hsieh interview continued

  • When Tony joined Zappos
  • Zappos culture and it’s development
  • Paying employees to quit
  • Zappos sale to Amazon and how things have changed
  • Tony’s advice to entrepreneurs
  • What Tony reads

00:56 News with Lon Harris

Special thanks to our title sponsors this week: Bing and Sonos

Additional sponsors this week include: Loopt, Redpoint Ventures and Youphonics

TWiST is brought to you by our generous sponsors:

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TWiST #44 with Howard Morgan

Friday, March 5th, 2010
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Jason’s guest this week was Howard Morgan, Co-Founder of First Round Capital and a  30 year veteran of the technology industry.  Highlights of the show this week include: biggest passes that did great, incubator programs and what they offer and who are the greatest tech. entrepreneurs of the 80s, 90s, 00s.

Announcements: next week’s show will be live from SXSW with Tony Hsieh of Zappos on Saturday the 13th at 2pm (Pacific), 5pm (Eastern), 10pm (London), March 14th 9am (Sydney)

Ask Jason

00:11 Pablo Fernandez of Hear a Blog calls in to ask, when pitching to investors do I pitch the necessary intermediate stage of the idea or the big vision idea?

00:27 Stephen Young calls in to ask, what salary range should founders be in when taking an angel investment and follows up with how do you raise your salary once you have investment?

00:35 Shark Tank

Andrew Watson calls in to pitch Othernum a virtual phone system for small businesses.

Interview with Howard Morgan

00:47 Topics:
Biggest company Howard passed on that was great
Investing in competitive companies
Location based companies
Franklin Electronic Publishers business cycle
Mint.com and how being a part of their founders network help them scale their infastructure
How First Capital supports their companies
Idealabs, why it’s successful
Greatest Entrepreneurs of the 80’s, 90’s, 00’s

01:38 News with Lon Harris

Call of Duty Lawsuit

Bing Ad on Framville

01:48:28: Microsoft gains 400,000 users by advertising on farmville.
lon’s Question: is this a way to get users or just click
Jason: Good Idea, social games are massive

01:51:28 Social game advertising is going to be a massive advertising portal, mini cooper being launched through the movie italian job.

01:51:55 Tyler gets scolded

01:52:33 Companies advertising to free samples in magazine.

01:54:00 A large percent of facebook revenue coming from social games, zynga worth more then facebook?

Microsoft’s Project Pink Phones

01:54:35 Microsoft’s Pink Phone
lon’s question: What’s the strategy for Microsoft for releasing these phones?

01:56:00 Jason: Microsoft has a legacy and needs to start from scratch and create a long lasting mobile os.

01:58:00 xbox gets complemented

Sony’s PSP Phone

01:59:21 sony to launch a playstation themed phone, maybe a competitor to ipad.
Question: will this hit a mass audience and what will they need to hit a mass audience.

02:00:00 Sony should use the google OS
02:01:00 Sony has lost it’s relevance

iPad Release Date

02:02:50 Ipad will release late april
Question: are you planning to buy an ipad?

02:03:40 Jason: yes – the ipad without the 3g may not sell as well. Maybe ipad is too expensive for a recession.
02:05:40 ipad needs a USB
02:05:50 Howard Morgan: Overpriced Kindle

02:08:00 Steve Job too controlling

02:08:15 What will happen to apple after steve jobs?
02:09:00 Howard Morgan talks about meeting steve in person.

Fiverr

02:10:51 fiverr job board for jobs worth $5

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TWiST #43 with Andy Smith

Friday, February 26th, 2010
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Jason’s guest this week was Andy Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of DailyBurn a social networking fitness site, that allows you to track what you eat, record your workout, join a challenge and find like minded people for support in your fitness goals.  Highlights this week include an in-depth discussion concerning TechStars and worst VC experiences and the winner of the Bing Perfect Pitch Contest.

Announcements:

00:19 Ask Jason: Sean O’Connor calls in to ask, how do I research market size in preparation for investment discussions?

00:28 Initial Interview with Andy:
Andy’s experience with TechStars
What it took to get in
An explanation of the program
How the TechStars community help each other
The TechStars program application is open.

00:37 Jason’s Shark Tank: Steven Schofield calls in to pitch Fidgetstick a social network site aimed at bringing like minded adventure sport enthusiast together.

00:51 Bing Perfect Pitch Contest, congratulations goes to Erick Arndt of Timeshare Juice.  Jason adds to the winnings in about 6 months Timeshare Juice and Propadoo (community choice) will come into studio to showcase their work.

00:56 Interview:

  • What’s next for DailyBurn
  • Fund Raising goals
  • Bringing the team together
  • Health issues in the US
  • VC stories (Jason and Andy’s worst experience)

01:28 News with Lon Harris:

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TWiST #42 with Michael Robertson

Saturday, February 20th, 2010
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Jason’s guest this week was Michael Robertson, CEO and Founder of MP3Tunes.  This was an incredible show, highlights include a guest that has an incredible amount of experience, battling big corporations, lawsuits and how to deal with them, interesting predictions for the music industry and how MP3.com got started.

00:07 During “Ask Jason” we get to hear Josh Nielsen ask “How do I value equity when being offered a job at a startup?” the question doesn’t end there without spoiling things, be sure to see where this one ends up.

00:25 We get to hear from Erick Arndt of Timeshare Juice pitch how he plans to change the timeshare exchange experience.  He gets some incredible feedback from Jason and Michael regarding his business model and distribution.

00:44 Highlights of the interview include:

  • Michaels story of rags to riches
  • What motivated him to succeed
  • How he started MP3.com and fought the music industry, winning and losing in some cases.
  • How independent label artists helped him succeed.
  • 6 months to IPO
  • Why he gave $15 million to his employees
  • Michael’s opinion on why Spotify will go out of business.

01:49 News with Lon Harris include:

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TWiST #41 with James Segil

Friday, February 12th, 2010
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Jason’s guest this week was James Segil of EdgeCast a content delivery network.  Highlights of the show include an interesting discussion of TED and why he is banned from attending, a celebrity Ask Jason call-in and how companies distribute their content.

Things of note:

  • Open Angel Forum announces two new cities: New York and San Fransisco, to be competitive to pitch be sure to have a working product (beta is ok).
  • This Week In Twitter, hosted by Lon Harris had their second show, please check it out.

During “Ask Jason” we get to hear Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software and Stack Overflow) call in to ask some advice on closing a deal with a VC and Jason follows up with a question for Joel regarding how to help developers experiment and learn new things.

We get to hear two different companies pitch during Jason’s Shark Tank the first is Rob Leclerc pitching Babbleflix a language learning tool basically Rosetta Stone meets Netflix.  Our second caller is Shawn Edmondson pitching thereNow an innovative approach to continuing education for teachers.

Highlights of the interview include:

  • How content delivery networks work
  • Why EdgeCast decided to compete with Akamai
  • A short discussion about the backbone of the internet
  • Is the internet ready and capable to grow exponentially
  • International implications of the internet
  • Debt vs. Equity and Warrants

News with Lon Harris discusses:

Rate the show in the comments 1 – 10 (10 being best)

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Catch TWiST with special guest, James Segil

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

This week’s guest will be James Segil, President and Co-founder of Edgecast, a next generation content delivery network.  Prior to his work at Edgecast, James started his career at Mattel and was the first ever company sponsored MBA student and was responsible for 150 million in sales under the Hot Wheels brand.  He then moved on to Virtualis Systems (now Hosting.com, a CRM software company) as the COO  and helped lead the merger / integration into Allegiance.

His next endeavor was KnowledgeBase Solutions, where he was President and Founder, which was acquired by Talisma.  This leads us to his present day position as President and Co-founder of EdgeCast.  He brings to the interview an extensive background in startups and formal education having earned his MBA from Harvard Business School.

When: Feb. 12th: 1pm (Pacific), 4pm (Eastern), 9pm (London), 8am (Sydney, Feb. 13th)

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TWiST #38 with Stefan Weitz

Saturday, January 30th, 2010
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This week’s guest was Stefan Weitz, Director of Bing Search at Microsoft.  Not only was the show insightful as always but I think this was one of the funniest shows I’ve seen in awhile.  Not to mention Jason’s recent Twitter iPad joke, shame on the journalists who fell for that, Jason and Loren Feldman of 1938 Media put them in their place.  One last comments about the iPad, No USB No iPad.

In the “Ask Jason” segment we hear from Dewayne Carel, who asks “How do I keep momentum with my blog (Modders Inc), the uniques spike then plateau back to original values?”.

During “Jason’s Shark Tank” we get to hear Andrew Hillman pitch MaroonDoor a solution for sometimes sticky Home Owners Association politics.

During the interview we hear a great discussion about, why Bing turned out so well.  Stefan’s past with Microsoft and his vision for search.  One interesting feature that was brought up was Bing and Twitter information.  If you go to Bing.com/twitter you can search Twitter content, I urge you to try it I thought it was interesting, try searching #TWiST.  Lastly Stefan mentioned the theme for the Bing Friday T-Shirt contest “Airports” if you’d like to win a Bing T-shirt simple @Bing with a query that exemplifies the theme and the team randomly picks a winner.

Rich DeMuro finishes with the news:

  • Facebook and a Foursquare killer
  • Roku seeks private funds for engineering and marketing
  • AT&T to launch Yelp competitor Buzz
  • iCurrent know available to everyone
  • Square announces Angels
  • Startup raises $230,000 using only LinkedIn

Please rate the show in the comments : 1-10 (10 being best)

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Posted in Episodes, Podcasts, Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

TWiST #37 with Phil Kaplan

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
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- Show quoted text -

This week’s guest was Phil Kaplan co-founder of Blippy.  Highlights of the show included a great discussion with Phil about what it’s like to work as Entrepreneur in Residence, another great Tyler quote and multiple giveaways (5 Jawbone ICONs, 1 Nexus One, $500 MicroSoft prize pack (congrats Erika)).

Announcements:

  • A new show This Week in Android (@TWiAndroid) hosted by Mark Jeffrey showcasing everything android will follow TWiST each week.  To catch it live stay on the same Ustream page for TWiST.
  • A new Bing Shark Tank contest is announced, I’ll post all the details in a blog post, needless to say submit your ideas for Jason’s Shark Tank, that is step one.

In the Ask Jason segment, Wayne calls in to ask, what is more important to investors being in a hot sector or having a proven revenue model?  Jason follows up with a good question asking Phil how he chose who would be an investor in Blippy due to the large interest.  In Shark Tank we get to hear pitches from Propadoo and Brand-Yourself, two great ideas who received a ton of feedback.

In the news:

I would like to start compiling Tyler quotes can you help me by adding them in the comments.

Please rate the show in the comments: 1 to 10

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TWiST #36 Bonus with OAF

Sunday, January 17th, 2010
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Following TWiST 35 with Brad Feld, Jason had a special bonus show with some of the Open Angel Forum (OAF) inaugural presenters.  Jason starts off by explaining what OAF is “it is a forum to help entrepreneurs raise Angel investment” and then goes on to talk a little bit about the  structure of the event (the audience consists of Angel Investors and five service providers).  The next OAF event will be held in Boulder, CO and hosted by TechStars in February.

A few of the companies that presented were interviewed and we get to hear a firsthand account of their experience.

  • Eric Lagier, CEO and co-founder of TigerTag the world’s first free lost and found service.  The core of our service is the TigerTag – a small, neatly designed tag that you apply to all your valuables that you would like to safeguard.
  • Arun Gupta, co-founder of WakeMate a bluetooth cell phone accessory that will analyze your sleep to find the optimal time for you to wake up and analysis of your sleep pattern.
  • Jason Kiesel, co-founder of CitySourced a real time mobile civic engagement tool. CitySourced provides a free, simple, and intuitive tool empowering citizens to identify civil issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to city hall for quick resolution; an opportunity for government to use technology to save money and improve accountability to those they govern; and a positive, collaborative platform for real action.

For those interested the two companies we do not get to hear from are:

  • Backupify is a service that backs up your online accounts: Wordpress, Facebook, Basecamp, Google Docs, Gmail, Flickr and many more.
  • Postabon where people upload and vote on in-store discount recommendations in your area.  The result is a comprehensive list of relevant, user-tested discounts happening at brick and mortar stores in your area right now.
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TWiST #35 with Brad Feld

Sunday, January 17th, 2010
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Jason’s guest this week was Brad Feld, co-founder of Foundry Group and mentor for TechStars.  Highlights of the show include the appearance of Sith Lord Calacanis and a great discussion about startup team dynamics.

The show starts off with a recap of the inaugural Open Angel Forum event consisting of “Power Angels” such as Chris Sacca, Ron Conway, David Cohen and many more.  Jason has one special announcement, the next Open Angel Forum will take place in Boulder, CO hosted by TechStars in February, details will be posted at the Open Angel Forum website.  After pleasantries we get to hear a bit about Brad’s experience in Alaska and Boulder and how he has helped cultivate the Boulder startup community and what it is like to be part of TechStars.  Things progress to Ask Jason and we get to hear about the necessity of have a developer as part of your team.  Tyler Koblasa calls in and pitches Ming.ly a CRM tool for social contacts.  During the interview segment Brad and Jason discuss: startup visas and their importance, what is important to his firm when investing  and what is important for your startup team.  The news segments highlights: Haiti, Yahoo’s Shopping API, MyTown, Google China and Apple acquisitions.

Here are a couple blog posts highlighting the Open Angel Form inaugural event:

Mark Suster: Both Sides of The Table

Brad Feld: Feld Thoughts

David Cohen: Colorado Startups

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