MeetInnovators™

Learn where Michael Jenkins thinks the affiliate industry is going (hint: its the tip of the iceberg). Find out how Market Leverage handles fraud and international affiliates. See how they handle FTC issues.

Meet Dan Brody, a former American Google guy running a Chinese incubator. See photos of one of the most spectacular offices I saw in China. Find out about how they are building some of the top kids social networking sites.

A rare interview with China's fastest growing social network. Read about Kaixin001, in their first ever english language interview. Get a feel for how competitive copying is inside the online market in China.

Meet one of the few successful foreign entrepreneurs in China. Find out about how he cofounded Tudou, China's version of Youtube. Learn about casual gaming, one of the major growing online markets and the business model behind it. Play one of their most popular games (scroll to the end of the interview)!

HotOrNot.com has inspired thousands of startups. They bootstrapped entirely, built everything themselves, and had a nice sale when they were tired of running the business. While I knew they did well, I didn't know the specifics until this interview - they were making around $7M/year (mostly profits) between the two partners, and then sold for over $20M. And, all that time James and his partner were working 10 hours per week! Read on to find out how they did it, including the critical role PR played in the success of their business. I've seen quite a few other interviews with James, but nothing like this. Its one of the more inspiring interviews I've done.

Vincent is a superstar US technology executive who has moved back to China to lead one of the biggest up and coming startups -- PPLive. PPLive is a p2p TV service -- basically like Joost, except that it works! It has 120M installs, with 30M active users every month. They gave me a demo of PPLive in their office (its mostly only usable in China) and it took about 15 seconds for a new TV show or movie to start, tracking within a program took about 5 seconds. It looked to me like a pretty amazing replacement for network television, and it's all P2P!

This week kicks off a special series of interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs. With the help of Georg Godula from http://www.web2asia.com/, I've been getting interviews with some of the very top guys in China (ie those websites you've seen in Alexa's top 100 listing, but never had any clue what they are about!). China is an incredible market, here are some stats: - 300M people online (biggest in the world) - average US$200/month income - multiple $1 BILLION/year dollar business models already existing, built on this low income population of internet users. However, China has 1.3 billion people in the country, so many more will be coming online soon AND you can expect their monthly income to increase dramatically too, raising CPMs a lot. Bottom line: watch out for China, because this is going to change the internet landscape significantly. Our first interview is with Tao Zhang who is the CEO of Dianping.com basically the Chinese version of Yelp (that started 2 years before Yelp did!). Some of the points we discuss include: - how they handle fake reviews - how the site is monetized (its profitable Judys Book + others failed in this market), - their funding from Sequoia and Google - How US companies can expand to China - How US entrepreneurs can get started in China.

Shuji Honjo, our guest this week has a lot of experience with international companies in Japan, helping major companies like etrade enter japan. He's also a visiting professor at one of the universities and has written a couple of books on entrepreneurship. We talked in depth about how a successful US based company with talent, money and technology could enter the japanese market, and why Yahoo Japan has been hugely successful, while Ebay Japan was a huge failure. Thinking about entering the Japanese market? Here's Shuji's rule of thumb: If you expect you be able to generate more than 10% of your revenue from Japan, go for it. If the number is less than 10%, don't do it.

I met Dave about 10 years ago when I lived in Silicon Valley. He's now with the Founders Fund, a VC fund put together by some of the top entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. In this interview we talk about paypal, the paypal mafia, VC investing, internet marketing in Silicon Valley and how you can raise capital yourself. In fact, right now I'm travelling with Dave on his trip http://GeeksOnAPlane.com, a trip through Japan and China to learn about local internet industry.

Jeff Walker is going to tell us about the Product Launch Formula that is used to launch and re-launch products online. Jeff's a guy that can consistently get $1000 ECPM from his lists and now he'll tell you how he does it. :-) I'm quite familiar with Jeff's Product Launch Formula. I know it works. I've seen it work. It's about time we ran this interview with Jeff because this is good stuff. Apple and other companies use similar methods when they launch new products (another MeetInnovators list member guided Apple through this process using Jeff's methods).