MeetInnovators™

This interview is with Keith Richman, CEO of Break Media, formally Break.com. Break Media started as bad-boys, a video entertainment site for guys. It has expanded to now include quite a few sites as well as an ad network selling inventory for many other sites, targeting men ages 18 to 34. Keith shares how Break Media started, how it has grown, and how it gets its users to come back. He also touches on why the company decided to start its own ad sales team along with how they sell their advertising.

Aaron Broder is the co-founder of Gorilla Nation. He's working with some sites which do considerable volume, and spends his time putting together branding deals. He has combined his expertise and family background in entertainment to create an online ad rep company for Web publishers. Aaron shares how Gorilla Nation started, how it found its niche with mid-tail sites, and how it plans to grow internationally. Many of us are direct response focused; it's about time we learned a little about the branding side of things; there's a lot higher CPM's in it.

Matt Wise is the CEO of Q Interactive, and a really nice guy. But you're here for interviews, and so Q Interactive's interview is a good one -- they actually started out as a coupons company (Cool Savings) and in the last few years completely reworked their direction to be a lead generation company. I think it's yet another clear indicator that lead generation is one of the most powerful business models on the internet -- many companies have reworked their business model in this same direction. We talk about the different methods of driving leads, what signifies "permission" and some sophisticated techniques to improve lead quality.

PV Kannan runs 24/7, a $120M call center with 6000 seats. This was one of the top interviews. He's doing some very sophisticated data prediction to make his business extremely efficient; it's very impressive. Also impressive is the fact that his company is funded by Mike Moritz, the top VC from #1 VC firm Sequoia Capital. Mike Moritz is well known for funding Yahoo and Google and currently sits on the board of directors of Google. It's relatively unusual to hear about a call center in Silicon Valley (the HQ is based there), but as we all know direct response marketing is becoming more important so over time I expect to see more companies like 24/7 Customer.

Meet Martin Toha. He owns VoIP.com, a smaller competitor to Vonage. They've basically built a business model around making everything as simple and cost effective as possible, which really came through in this interview. Martin has spent a lot of time working with international call centers and has come up with a rather unique solution for working with call centers with his company.

This week's interview is with Mike Filsaime. He's another one of these viral guys. Except he's different. Most viral business models don't generate much revenue. And while Mike's company is relatively small ($5M), he has very low acquisition costs due to the (mostly free) viral customer acquisition, so it's very profitable. For anyone interested in viral marketing being used with lead generation or information product marketing, you should check out this interview.

I have tracked Ian Clarke for several years now and was very excited to have the opportunity to interview him. He founded FreeNet, a p2p network that enables people living in non-free countries (like China, Cuba, etc) to get secure access to the Internet. He has helped the Skype guys with their latest project Joost, co-founded Revver and is now running his own startup called Thoof. Thoof is a generic targeting engine designed to accurately provide predictions about users like Amazon's "customers also bought" page. That in itself is nothing new, but Thoof is designed around providing accurate targeting for very small datasets. Ian's technology can be applied in a many areas online including behavioural targeting and personalization.

This interview is with Ryan Allis who is the CEO of iContact. Ryan runs an ESP, or Email Service Provider, geared mainly to small businesses. I use it and their deliverability is great - we tested many before settling on iContact. I wanted to talk with Ryan to understand the latest on email deliverability - which I definitely got in this interview. However what I didn't realize was that this market he is serving is actually quite large. Constant contact, his main competitor is a $500M publicly traded company. Given Ryan founded iContact and they're a year or so away from going public, Ryan will probably be running a $300M public company before long.

This week's interview is with Yanik Silver, who runs Surefire Marketing. His business model is very different to most of you -- he runs a $3M business out of his house, with very high profit margins, no employees, and only works 5 hours/day. If any of you are feeling burned out, you may want to consider his model.

This week's interview is with Gary Swart, the CEO of oDesk. oDesk is like Elance except it's primarily for programmers, and it incorporates a lot of tools to make working with programmers easier. I also spoke in depth with Gary about how to hire an experienced CEO -- Gary was brought in to take over the management of oDesk.