Jon Praed from Internet Law Group
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Jon Praed is a total stud! He spends his time tracking down hard-core black-hat spammers. The kind that run illegal viagra, casino, porn and phishing spam. A lot of guys have made money in "grey" areas of internet marketing. Jon explains how gradually people are being forced to choose sides and that all the aggressive stuff is slowly going away. If you want to get an overall understanding on where the internet is going long term, this is the interview to check out. It was one of the most powerful and fascinating ones I've done. I think you’ll find this interview worth listening to yourself. The audio is freely available; after the Fast Track Interview.Full Interview »
Renata Hesse from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR) is with me for this interview about US antitrust law. Renata is a high-powered antitrust attorney who has been in the middle of some of the biggest antitrust cases in US history including the massive Microsoft antitrust case of the 1990's. I have found WSGR to be a great law firm to work with and they have helped me on a number of critical issues. My brother Matthew, who some of you have met, works for WSGR also on antitrust issues as in-house counsel at Google. I'm often surprised by seemingly smart internet companies making a lot of money have really poor legal representation. I think its a competitive advantage to have a great law firm on your side like these guys. They can be difficult to be accepted as a client (they normally represent companies like Google), so if you do want to switch your law firm and you know me personally, drop me a line and we can talk offline.
Alfred Lin from Zappos is with us for this interview. Alfred is the Zappos Chairman and COO - he's Tony Hsieh, the CEO's right hand man when it comes to handling finance and operations for Zappos. We've previously published an interview with Tony 
Eben Pagan from Hot Topic Media is with me for this interview. You might be more familiar with him by the name David DeAngelo and Double Your Dating. He has helped a lot of guys who are lost when it comes to getting a date. I thought we would cover marketing, split-testing, and Double Your Dating. Instead the conversation went in a completely different direction. We ended up talking about philosophy, Ayn Rand, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and insight from psychologist Claire Graves. Eben talks about how and why the Internet gives us all opportunities to make a difference in the world. I think it is the first time I’ve had a conversation like this during an interview.
This interview is one I've been waiting to do for quite a while. This guy is one of the most financially unsuccessful internet guys I know. At the same time he drives absolutely monster traffic and has a huge amount of influence in the internet world. For millions of people he is an absolute rockstar. His name is Andy Scorcini and his handle is Mr Babyman - he's the number one poster to Digg, the social news site. He controls a huge amount of traffic volume and IMHO is effectively the leader of the informal network that has developed among Digg's top users that decide which stories get posted to the site. The number one question Andy and the others is always asked - do they get paid for what they do. We discussed this in detail in the interview.
Have you ever wondered how the fortune 500 use direct response marketing? This week's interview is with the Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, Barry Judge (Fortune 500 rank: 72). Barry has a $500M annual advertising spend at his disposal. Most of their marketing online is direct response driven. But one of the really interesting things from the call was learning how they track and analyze everything within each store to find out what performs best - and everything is tracked back to overall demographics via your rewards card. Its working, since Best Buy is bringing in $35 billion annual revenue.
Brad Geddes, who used to be with Local Launch, is the smartest guy I know when it comes to pay per click marketing. Brad has managed campaigns with so many keywords in them that they have 6 adwords accounts linked together - we're talking 2.3 MILLION keywords! He's also managed to generate consistently 18% clickthroughs from some of his campaigns. There are so many guys out there teaching and running pay per click programs. But Brad is among the best, and he's been doing a bunch of training for Google in adwords as well. He was known on webmaster world as ewhisper for many years.
Anne Mitchell of SuretyMail can help you get your mail delivered if you want to handle your own e-mail deliverability. I have known Anne for a number of years and have learned a lot from her. She has a long history of working with Internet and e-mail. She even helped author part of CAN-SPAM - she's a Stanford lawyer, as well as being an e-mail tech-head. And talking about CAN-SPAM, Anne explains recent changes to the law and gives some pointers to consider to make sure you're in compliance. We all have the same goal: get our e-mails into the in-box instead of the junk folder. Anne helps us understand what it will take to do just that.
Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos. They're on track to do $1 billion dollars this year, all online. Tony previously founded LinkExchange which he sold for $265M to Microsoft in 1998. While Zappos started by selling shoes, Tony shares how Zappos' focus is really on the customer experience and customer service it provides. Tony talks about how he went from investor to full-time employee at Zappos because it was really taking off, and as Tony said, seemed fun.
Matt Moog was previously the CEO of CoolSavings and before that did presentations with Bill Gates at Microsoft. Matt talks about his time at CoolSavings (the original coupon site on the web), which included taking the company public and then back to being private. He also talks about how Viewpoints is creating a modern version of epinions, and which could become an amazing lead generation platform for advertisers, offering hot transfer leads from customers who are ready to buy. He's doing this while providing a lot of value to consumers. He's finding a way to generate leads which should generate a lot of loyalty from consumers.
Abed Abusaleh from Euro RSCG is one of the very top media buyers from one of the top TV agencies so this was a pretty rare insight to get. Some Internet guys will be saying this is a pointless interview - but actually many direct response techniques we use to sell on the web came from TV. And these guys do a lot of volume, around $500M/year and run about 30% of the TV marketplace. Abed gives us an inside look at what it takes to get a show produced and enter the world of long-form (i.e. 30 min) infomercials. You can also find out how you can get your Internet products started on TV for $5k.
Laura is a consultant that gets almost all her business on Twitter. She builds relationships with senior executives of F500 companies there! Twitter is becoming really important. It's going to become another level of infrastructure on the Internet, a little like email. I started using it regularly after Laura explained it to me. Twitter is a fascinating service that lets users post short snippets of text from the web and cell phones and IM. Laura shares how she incorporates Twitter into her business and personal life and how it serves as a pipeline for her consulting business. Laura also talks about the various uses of Twitter, and the role it plays in networking between friends and potential clients.
Hamlet Batista is the best SEO I've ever met. He cut his teeth by being at the top of Google for keywords like Viagra and Phentermine. You can't always tell who is good and who isn't in SEO. But I saw Hamlet on the front page of Google for the keyword Phentermine for at least 6 months. Hamlet has spent quite a bit of time in some controversial areas of the Internet and I present it without comment. It's rare someone like Hamlet speaks so directly about what he has done. Since that time Hamlet has evolved from being an affiliate to being a merchant to creating software, called RankSense, which helps people do their own SEO.
Ethan Willis from Prosper, Inc. joins us for today’s interview. He's very undercover - I have been trying to get this interview for at least a year and finally managed to convince him. I think a lot of you don't even know what he looks like. Prosper focuses on producing leads, selling to those leads, and then providing fulfillment. They work with people like Ken Blanchard, Donald Trump, and Robert Allen. Ethan also talks about his new book with Ken Blanchard (from the One Minute Manager series).
The nerd level of David Weekly from PBwiki is rather high since he proudly informed me during the interview that he started programming at the age of five. I've been watching David from a distance for a couple of years. He hasn't made his fortune yet, but he will. He's from the same mold as the Google founders and is always involved in interesting projects in Silicon Valley. His current site is PBWiki, which is a managed wiki service. The MeetInnovators publishing process is run on a PBWiki. My family also used a PBWiki for planning our family holiday. PBWiki is even being used by some US presidential campaigns, although David won't tell us which ones.
Matt Hill is the CEO of Shopit.com. Shopit is like eBay for social networking sites. According to Matt, Shopit is now the fastest growing e-commerce application on Facebook. EBay has had a lot of fraud problems, and a lot of people don't like using it anymore. After interviewing Matt, I wrote about 
Patrick Byrne from Overstock.com and his company made headlines for suing the state of New York over the issue of 
Jason Fried from 37signals joins me for this interview. 37signals builds Web-based software and service products for small businesses. They're pretty famous in the web2.0 crowd for being easy to use. They are a relatively tiny company - typical of today's best startups, with a small team who are all high-caliber guys. Jason talks about how the company is able to meet deadlines and deliverables even though all 10 employees work remotely. They even have an 
Joe Abrams from The Software Toolworks was the key investor in the company that built MySpace - Intermix. He's extremely low profile, and it was something of a miracle to get this interview. Joe's made it through two boom periods - in the 90's he ran Software Toolworks, which was sold for around $450M. And then he did it again with MySpace. One of his companies distributed Defender of the Crown, a breakthrough game on the Commodore Amiga, which I spent many years on when I was growing up. I hope his interview inspires you as much as it inspired me. This was my interview of the year!
This interview is with John Marshall. He started his first software business around the age of 13 by making and selling video games. His most recent businesses have included ClickTracks, which is a Web analytics company, and now Market Motive, which provides online marketing training material. John talks about what prompted him to eventually sell ClickTracks. He also explains why he involved an investment bank in the selling process. John never took VC money to grow his business, and talks about why that is a better approach.
