Adrian: Today I'm talking with Matt Moog from Viewpoints Networks. Matt was the former CEO of Cool Savings and helped drive that company through a lot of its changes. Matt, tell us a little bit about your personal and business history before we talk about what you are doing at Viewpoints.

Matt: I was born in upstate New York and lived all over the East Coast. For the past 14 years, I have lived in Chicago. I went to college at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. After college, I started working for Microsoft.  

After four years in business-development roles, which included working on both the launch of MSN and their Internet platform, I left Microsoft and joined a couple of entrepreneurs who had launched a company called CoolSavings.

I was at CoolSavings for 10 years and was the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing when we went public via a traditional IPO. Six months after we went public, I took over as the President and COO. Six months after that, I became the CEO and ran CoolSavings as a public company for five years … » more »

Adrian:  Abed Abusaleh has joined me for today's interview. He works in the direct response television field. We have not yet had the opportunity to talk with someone in this field. Abed, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your company has done?

Abed:  I am the Executive Vice-President of Long-Form Media for Euro RSCG. Basically, I head up the long-form television buying and planning division of our agency. As an agency, we do just over $500 million a year in both television and online advertising. Almost $400 million of that is television and direct response television advertising between long-form and short-form commercials. The other $100 million is split evenly between production and the online services we provide.

We place media in every media market across the country as well as on every national cable network. Steve Netzley and John Shearson started the agency 17 years ago out of a garage. Since then, we've had 17 consecutive years of growth.  

Adrian:  Can you elaborate on the difference between long-form and short-form commercials?

Abed:  … » more »

Adrian: Today I have the pleasure of talking with Laura Fitton, who is also known as Pistachio on Twitter. She actually makes money off of Twitter. Laura, can you tell us a little bit about yourself as well as talk about Twitter? 

Laura: I'm originally from Connecticut and now live in Boston. My company is called Pistachio Consulting. I help people talk less and become more effective with Power Point, speaking, and presenting. It's a variety of helping them develop their message by consulting, coaching, and team training.

Twitter has completely changed my life, my business, and my community. It has changed how I approach the world and how I make money both on business and personal levels. 

On its surface, it's an SMS-based service where you put out very short messages. It is a comprehensive mix of every communication tool you've ever interacted with on the Web: a bulletin board, an IM session, a chat room, and a blog. It is called micro-blogging because you're putting up these little tiny posts of a 140 characters each.

Everybody is putting up their little series of messages, … » more »

Adrian: Today, I am talking with Hamlet Batista from RankSense. His software program helps with the ranking of sites. Hamlet, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and share how you started with the Internet?

Hamlet: I was born in Puerto Plata, but I was raised in Santiago, Dominican Republic. I have always been attracted to technology. When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games and kept a notebook of all the games I was able to complete. I went on to study Telecommunications Engineering, which had a mix of Electronics Engineering, Computer Science, Programming, and Internet classes.

When I moved to Santo Domingo, I worked with Codetel for two years as a System Administrator. I then worked with Party Poker for a year as a consultant developing software.

After I started to see all the problems at Party Poker, I decided to start my own company. I spent three months testing different things such as e-mail marketing. A marketer, who used to work for Party Poker, informed … » more »

Adrian: Today I'm talking with Ethan Willis of Prosper, Inc. Ethan, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are, where you've come from, and what you're up to these days?

Ethan: I grew up in Pasadena, California and lived in Brazil for two years. I moved to Utah after receiving a scholarship to go to Brigham Young University. I graduated with a degree in Marketing Communications.

Prosper has three different parts to the company. AdCafe.com is the front-end lead generation side. In many ways, it has all of our offers for affiliates to run and take to the market. Currently, we have six or seven offers on AdCafe.com. Our leads come from those we directly receive, from our database of over four million names, from partners with whom we work, and from new business.

The second part of our business is selling to those leads. The third part is fulfilling those leads through the coaching arm, the product development arm, and the content development side. We're the only company I know of that can do all … » more »

Adrian:  Today I'm talking with David Weekly, who runs PBwiki, which is short for PeanutButterWiki. David, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

David: I'm very much a nerd by birth as much as by training. I started programming at the age of five. We had an Apple PC lying around the house. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I copied programming columns that were in the back of kid's magazines I was getting at the time. I actually did some programming work in high school for MIT Lincoln Labs and Harvard Physics Labs. I grew up in Boston and went to Stanford where I received my undergraduate degree in Computer Science in 2000.

At that point, I had been involved in a lot of start-ups, especially around digital audio. I did the last thing anyone expected me to do. I went to work for a large corporate enterprise back-up company called Legato. It was definitely an important part of my education that I don't regret at all.  

After being there for a … » more »

Adrian:  Today, I'm talking with Matt Hill, who is the CEO of Shopit.com. Matt has a pretty diverse Internet marketing background. Matt, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and the companies in which you have been involved?

Matt:  I'm originally from Canada. After I went to Boston College, I moved to California. In 1997, I started working at Shopping.com. I was introduced to that company and its founders through an investment opportunity. I went in as an early member of the founding team.  

I learned everything I know about early e-commerce during my time in that first business. We raised over $15 million in a year-and-a-half period. We built the business over a nine-month period and added about a million SKUs to the database. In early 1999, we signed the company to the Compaq Computer Corporation.

After that, I went to work for a company funded in part by the Hong Kong government's Asia Tech Fund. They were launching a company in San Francisco that had initially started as a B-to-B toy distribution company … » more »

Adrian: Today, we are talking with Patrick Byrne, the CEO from Overstock.com. Overstock has been in the news recently because of lawsuits filed in New York related to affiliate taxes. Now, we're going to hear Patrick's side of the story. 

Patrick:  I'm glad to be here, Adrian. As background, I was born in Indiana, grew up in New England, and spent a few years outside of Washington, D.C. I have lived all over the country and in different places around the world.

My father, who was the CEO of GEICO, knew Warren Buffet. As a result, Mr. Buffet would stay at our house at times. When I look back through the course of my life, the whole trajectory of my life was changed with the half-dozen conversations I had with him as a teenager. He taught me ways to think about business and other aspects of life.   

Through the nineties, I moved around the United States. I spent a lot of time bicycling, backpacking, climbing, and skiing. I made Salt Lake City the base of my business … » more »

Adrian:  Jason Fried from 37signals is with me today. 37signals is a Web 1.0 company. Jason, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do at 37signals.

Jason: I am 33 and live in Chicago, Illinois. After I graduated with a degree in Finance from the University of Arizona, I realized I didn't want to work in a bank or the stock exchange. Instead, I started my own business. I've always been interested in design and was doing freelance Web site design during and after college.  

After college, I moved to San Diego to work as a creative director in a small Web design company. After three or four months, I realized I wasn't built to work for other people. I decided to move back to Chicago and start my own company. Around 1999, I met a couple of other guys, and we started 37signals. For the next four years, we focused on Web design.

Around 2003, we were really busy and needed a tool to better manage our client projects. We looked at tools that already … » more »

Adrian: Today, Joe Abrams from The Software Toolworks is with me.  Joe, why don't you tell us who you are and what you've done.

Joe:  My background as an entrepreneur began in the early 1980s when I co-founded a small entertainment company called The Software Toolworks. My cousin and I started the company in his garage in Sherman Oaks, California. We did programming tools for operating systems. This was before the Mac and the IBM PC. We eventually had six or seven people and moved out of his garage. By 1988, we had grown to $2 million in revenue.

At that point, we branched out from pure publishing tools, such as C compilers and macroassemblers, to publishing applications. We had two hit products in the late 80s. One was a chess-playing program called Chessmaster. The other was a typing tutorial product called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. We had grown the company all by sweat equity up until then, and we needed to raise some capital. Through a combination of circumstances, we did a reverse merger in 1988 and raised a couple of million dollars. … » more »