Web Masters

In the early days of computers, software was sold as a one-off license. But why let someone pay you once when you can get that person to pay you for the same product multiple times? At least, that's the mantra of the Software As A Service industry, otherwise known as SaaS.

Helping lead the charge on a new business model of recurring, subscription software was Phil Fernandez and his marketing automation company, Marketo. Phil and Marketo wanted to democratize the marketing software industry by selling six and seven-figure pieces of software for a low, monthly subscription. And it worked!

In this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear about how Marketo would help revolutionize the way businesses -- both large and small -- managed (and paid for) their online marketing.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Video streaming is a relatively recent addition to the Web. That shouldn’t surprise anyone with even a cursory knowledge of how the Internet works. Compared with things like text and images, the storage and bandwidth required for online video is obviously significantly higher, and it took a while for the Internet’s infrastructure to be able to handle the larger data loads.

But storage and bandwidth limitations weren’t the only issues. Digital video recording devices are also relatively new. Sure, just about everyone reading this article can easily pull out a phone and start filming high definition video within seconds, but, less than 20 years ago, that wasn’t the case for all but a relatively few video enthusiasts.

One of those enthusiasts was Jacob Lodwick, founder of Vimeo. He’d just graduated college on the East Coast and was heading to San Diego to work on a different startup, and one of his close friends asked him to share updates about life on the West Coast. He decided to share those updates using video, inadvertently helping create the online video sharing industry.

In this Web Masters episode, you'll learn about the origins of online video sharing, the relationship between Vimeo and YouTube, as well as how the platforms grew into having different audiences and purposes.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Every major social media platform has a "like" button. It's a core part of Internet culture and a simple measuring stick to determine how popular a piece of content is. But even though it seems obvious today, it wasn't such an obvious way of judging content in the early days of social media.

In this special holiday mini-episode of Web Masters, Aaron shares the story he learned from Jakob Lodwick, founder of Vimeo, about where the "like" button came from and why it worked so well.

If you're reading this, chances are you'e connected to the Internet all the time. But that wasn't always the case. In the early days of the Web, people would dial into the Internet using their phone lines, do what they needed to online, and then turn off their connections.

That began to change when internet service providers began offering faster, always-on broadband connections separate from people's phone lines. But those faster connections wouldn't have been able to go much faster until one man figured out how to bring the Internet closer to end users. His name is Milo Medin, and he helped found a company called @Home, which introduced cable Internet to the consumer market.

@Home didn't last long, but the infrastructure Milo developed is still the infrastructure we all rely on today for high speed Internet. Find out how -- and why -- he did it on this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Publishing about niche topics used to be too expensive. But then the Web happened, and the costs for publishing and distribution dropped to almost nothing. That change opened the door to an entirely new generation of publications targeting small, focused audiences.

Peter Rojas took advantage of this shift by launching Gizmodo, the Internet's first popular gadget blog. And, it turns out, gadget lovers weren't as small of an audience as he thought. In fact, there was so much demand for gadget-related content that, a couple years later, Peter left Gizmodo to launch Engadget, which became an even bigger gadget blog.

He may have ruffled some feathers along the way, but, it's hard to argue with his results: Peter forever changed the journalism landscape. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll find out how he did it.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

There was a lot of hype and excitement surrounding the early Web. Problem was, it wasn't nearly as refined as it is now. In fact, the early Web was pretty terrible.

While most publications -- publications like Wired Magazine -- were evangelizing and praising the tech revolution, Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman were sharing a different and more realistic perspective on their website, Suck.com. Other people noticed, and Suck became one of the most popular content sites on the early Internet.

In this episode of Web Masters, Joey tells the story of building Suck.com and gives his thoughts on whether the Web still sucks.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

When you think of Foursquare, the popular, location-based social media app, you surely think of things like check-ins and badges and becoming "mayor." That was fine with Dennis Crowley, Foursquare's founder, so long as it meant you were using Foursquare. But it's not what he cared about.

Dennis wasn't building an app for people to show their friends where they were going. Dennis just needed to know where you were going so he could tell other people the best places to go, too. The game layer was just the strategy that convinced people to tell him, but the data was what he really wanted and, ultimately, what he got.

In fact, all that data Foursquare collected is what allowed Dennis to build what he likes to call the Internet's "location layer." And while you may have thought you stopped using Foursquare a while ago, or you might have thought you never used it, chances are you're using it more than ever. Heck... you're probably using it right now. You'll find out why on this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

If you used the Web in the late 90s or early 2000s, there’s a good chance you had a Hotmail email account. At the very least, you knew plenty of people with one. After all, at its peak, 25% of Internet users had Hotmail accounts. As a result, lots of people associate the creation of email with Hotmail.

But Hotmail didn’t invent email. Not even close. The first digital messaging systems current users would recognize as “electronic mail” were being used all the way back in the 1960s, and Hotmail didn’t launch until 1996.

For what it’s worth, Hotmail didn’t even invent Web-based email (a.k.a. “webmail”). Webmail first appeared in 1994. Instead, Hotmail’s innovation was to make email broadly accessible to anyone -- for free -- via a browser.

Of course most people today do -- or at least can -- access their email through browsers. But, in the mid-1990s, that wasn’t the case. Instead, reading emails required an email client. That was fine if you were on your own computer. But what if you weren’t near your computer? Or what if you didn’t even own your own computer? How were you going to read your emails? That's the problem Sabeer Bhatia, Hotmail's founding CEO, helped solve. You'll learn how in this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

The process for selling a product to consumers used to be very different than the process for selling products to other businesses. However, like so many things, the Internet changed that. A big reason was Pardot.

Pardot helped introduce B2B companies to a different type of sales process. It was a systematized and operationalized sales process that helped make B2B sales more scalable. That scalability, in turn, made it possible to sell less expensive products to more companies, which opened enormous amounts of new markets that previously weren't profitable because the costs were too high.

In this episode of Web Masters, Pardot's founder, David Cummings, explains how he came up with the idea for Pardot and bootstrapped it to a nearly $100 million exit, first to ExactTarget before it ultimately became an integral part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Considering one of the most valuable companies in the world -- Google --- makes a majority of its money from web search, it’s hard to imagine a world in which startups struggled to make money from search engines. But that’s actually how the world was in the early days of the Web. Back in the mid-1990s, most search engines were being run as experiments out of either universities (e.g. Lycos at Carnegie Mellon) or companies (e.g. AltaVista at Digital Equipment Corporation). As a result, search engines didn’t need to be profitable, and that was a good thing because they were expensive to operate and nobody could figure out a viable business model.

The biggest exception to this was Steve Kirsch’s Infoseek. Infoseek wasn’t an experiment. Instead, Infoseek was the search engine that was launched as a business from Day 1. And, like any business, someone needed to pay.

In the minds of Steve and his co-founders, the most obvious people to charge were the people they were directly giving value to: the ones using Infoseek to perform searches. As a result, in the earliest days of Infoseek, the company charged users for each search they performed.

Can you imagine that? How different would the world be if every search we performed online cost us money? We'll explore that, and more, on this episode of Web Masters in a conversation with Infoseek founder and well-known serial entrepreneur Steve Kirsch.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.