Web Masters

Raj Kapoor is the Chief Strategy Officer at Lyft. But before joining Lyft, Raj was the founder and CEO of another well known consumer tech company called Snapfish. In fact, the startup strategy he’s deploying at Lyft is a strategy he began developing at Snapfish over two decades earlier.

Snapfish is a digital photo management service that lets users print digital photos either as traditional photos or on things like coffee mugs, face masks, calendars, shirts, and lots of other things you've probably never even thought of. While those are common services now, they weren’t common back when Raj launched Snapfish in 1999 and built it into a company he’d ultimately sell to Hewlett Packard for $300 million.

Instead, when Raj launched Snapfish, few people were using digital cameras. Sure, it might seem strange to target a market that doesn’t exist, but, as you'll hear in this episode, the lack of digital camera users was actually a huge part of how Snapfish became so successful.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Jean Armour Polly was a librarian who saw the internet and had what was, at the time, a crazy idea. Since libraries are critical repositories of information and knowledge in most communities, she believed that libraries should offer public internet access.

Most of her peers disagreed. In fact, most librarians thought of the Internet as a competitor. And a poor one at that with unreliable information. But Jean wouldn't be deterred. She became one of the biggest advocates in the world for public Internet access via libraries. Thanks to her pioneering work championing public Internet access, Jean paved the way for millions of people around the world to discover the Web.

In this episode of Web Masters, Jean shares the story of how she discovered the Internet, fell in love with it, and then taught people all over the world to love it just as much as her.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

In recent years, the term “fake news” has become a common phrase. It’s a shorthand way of describing informational content related to current events that’s intentionally misleading. While the term itself is relatively new, the concept is much older than most people realize.

The earliest recorded example of fake news goes all the way back to the 13th Century BC when Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II convinced his population that his army clobbered the neighboring Hittites despite signing a peace treaty with them that essentially declared a draw.

Fast forward a few dozen centuries all the way to the 1980s. The World Wide Web hadn’t even been invented yet, but misinformation was already spreading on the Internet. However, it wasn’t misinformation about things as important as wars and government. It was actually just misinformation about the Walt Disney Company. And a man named David Mikkelson wanted to debunk it.

Over the ensuing decades, David kept debunking more and more rumors and online myths until his website, Snopes.com, became one of the most trusted fact-checking resources in the world. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear the full story of how David went from researching urban legends for a few die-hard Disney fans to debunking fake new.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

In 2002, Joe Colopy launched a simple email newsletter tool, naming it Bronto Mail in reference to his favorite dinosaur. But Joe wasn't the only person trying to help companies with their email marketing. Pretty soon, Joe and Bronto found themselves facing a crowded market and better-resourced competitors. So Joe did a textbook MBA strategy shift. He identified an underserved niche market in need of better marketing tools, and he focused his company on it.

That niche market consisted of commerce and ecommerce companies who, at the time, didn't have any email marketing tools built specifically for their needs. By focusing on that niche, Joe and Bronto pioneered the commerce marketing automation space, becoming the market leader in the process and riding their growth to a successful exit.

In this episode of Web Masters, hear the story of how Joe built Bronto and managed the pivot. It's a perfect entrepreneurial lesson in how to best attack a large market when you're a small startup competing against bigger and better-resourced companies.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Unless you’ve only just gotten onto the Internet in the last few years, you’ve surely heard of Napster. In the late 90s, Napster launched an online file sharing service where anyone could download mp3 files from other people for free, and it was wildly popular before getting sued out of existence by the major record labels who obviously weren’t happy about the idea of people downloading their content for free.

But Napster wasn’t the first music sharing service. Years before Napster, a student at the University of Texas named Michael Merhej launched an FTP search engine — called the Borg Search Engine — on a physics department server. At the time, posting music files online was already common, but finding them was difficult. Lots of hardcore music afficionados hated having their options restricted by whatever Top 40 the recording industry was promoting. Those music lovers flocked to Michael’s FTP search engine.

Within a couple years, it had become so popular that Michael moved he search engine onto its own commercial servers and began monetizing with advertisements, changing the name to Audiogalaxy in the process.

Yes, a little later, Napster would come along and popularize file sharing to the masses. By that point, Audiogalaxy already had a bigger catalog, and, while people looking for popular music tracks stuck to Napster, anyone who wanted more options chose Audiogalaxy, turning it into the second most popular file sharing service in the world.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

You've probably never heard of Peter Zaitsev or Percona. And he’s perfectly fine with it. The fact that you haven’t heard of Peter or Percona means you’re probably not his target customer. More importantly, if you have heard of them, there’s a good chance you A) are his target customer; and B) don’t have a lot of other options.

That’s because Percona is a database performance optimization company. They specialize in helping companies using open source databases — MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, etc. — scale their database architecture to support millions of simultaneous users.
 

As you can probably imagine, there aren’t lots of companies in the world who need their databases to be able to handle that kind of volume, so, in relative terms, Peter’s target audience isn’t very big. Compare it with the market size of, say, Apple, and Percona’s market size would probably seem like a rounding error.

But that doesn’t matter for Peter. What matters is that the people who do need database optimization need it urgently, they have the money to pay, and they don’t have many other options.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

In the 1980s, pre-World Wide Web, the Internet was filled with software files hosted on remote machines. However, unlike today, where you can easily find and download pretty much any software you want, that infrastructure didn’t exist in the 1980s. Instead, if you wanted to download a piece of software from the Internet, you had to know it existed and know where and how to access it.

To solve this problem for himself, a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal named Alan Emtage built a script to crawl the Internet at night and compile a database of software. He could then search his database to find what he was looking for.

When other people saw Alan's database, they wanted access, too. So Alan built a public interface, and that became the first Internet search engine. However, rather than patenting his technology and licensing it -- something that could have made billions of dollars -- Alan made a different choice, and the Internet is a very different place than what it might have been.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

In 1999, a Kentucky entrepreneur named Drew Curtis started feeling guilty about constantly spamming his friends with emails linking to funny news stories. Rather than sending emails, he decided he’d build a website and let people come check it out if they wanted to. He called it Fark.com, a humorous play on the F-bomb pulled from old text-based video games on the early Internet that would censor curse words.

The website quickly became one of the most popular communities on the Internet for sharing funny articles about what was going on in the world. However, unlike other humor sites of its day, Fark still exists and has a thriving community.

On this episode of Web Masters, you'll find out how Drew has managed to keep Fark running for over two decades and through a half-dozen of what he describes as "extinction-level" events on the Internet.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Affiliate marketing, in case you don’t already know, is a core part of how “free” websites make money on the Internet. Websites with lots of visitors post ads. When visitors click those ads and buy something from the advertiser, that advertiser pays what’s called an “affiliate bounty” to the website owner.

That might not seem revolutionary, but it was a huge innovation in the way companies could market and sell their products. Prior to affiliate marketing, startups needed large advertising budgets just to get launched. However, thanks to affiliate marketing, startups had a way to sell products without paying any money up front, and that opened the door to tons more entrepreneurs.

Since the concept of affiliate marketing was first invented in the mid-90s, plenty of affiliate marketing networks have been launched. But the biggest and most successful one has been Commission Junction. And, on this episode of Web Masters, we get to hear from Commission Junction founder, Lex Sisney, the man who went from shoveling llama poop on his mother's farm to launching the world's preeminent affiliate network.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Before Facebook became synonymous with “social media,” and even before MySpace was the coolest website on the planet, there was another startup that most people credit with inventing social networking as we know it. That website was called Friendster.

Even if you never personally used Friendster, you've probably heard of it. It was the site that paved the way for all the social networks billions of people use and love every day. It was the first place where people uploaded photos of themselves and connected with their real-life friends.

Yes, that type of website doesn't sound unique today, but, in 2002, it was revolutionary, and people loved it. But it wasn't immediately obvious that would be the case. In fact, when the founder of Friendster, Jonathan Abrams, first had the idea, he thought it sounded wacky. And when he told people about his idea, they thought it sounded dumb.

But Jonathan launched it anyway, and, as they say, the rest is history. Friendster ushered in a completely new paradigm for how people thought about and used the Internet that remains the core of the Web today.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.