Archive for April, 2007
Along with our site relaunching this week, we announced the hiring of David Becker. You can read the official corporate babble, but the reality is that this was a huge hire for us. David was the President / COO of two major internet companies: Uproar, which was an enormous casual gaming site in the late ‘90s and BeliefNet, which is the largest spirituality site. He brings a deep understanding of web marketing and web consumers.
The other thing David brings us is a sense of style that maybe some of our employees have individually (I don’t want to get flamed by my coworkers) but hasn’t marked us as a corporation. To be fair, trying to be ‘hip’ hasn’t been part of our mission statement. We’re tying to bring authentic consumer experiences to life and an focusing on style would have been out of keeping with the mission.
But (as the whole point of this sub-blog implies….) we’re playing at the intersection of commerce and media. Historically the most prominent resident at that intersection has been advertising. And advertising - regardless of what else we might say - cares an awful lot about being cool. Furthermore, the rest of mass media has been largely devoted to entertainment. So the truth for anyone playing in the emerging space between commerce and media is that we’re going to have to reconcile authenticity with entertainment. No mean feat. There isn’t a risk that the “market” will get it wrong…in this environment, the consumer will be served. But most of the companies that try will get it wrong. The path is too foggy, too many opportunities to fail, the stakes too high. David’s going to help us figure it out. Welcome on board!!
April 28th, 2007
I’m going to do a little spate of “shameless promotion” posts. They’re all related to the topic at hand, so I feel fine about it, but still felt that recognition might prevent reader annoyance. This first one is a link to a post from a couple of weeks ago by Brian Smith, the author of the leading blog on comparison shopping engines. As you might (or might not) know, our Videopinion reviews are syndicated to Smarter.com and Buy.com and we’ll have a couple of other announcements in the space imminently. Brian covers the Smarter.com implementation here …and he notes that he expects video reviews to someday be ubiquitous. Sounds good to us!!
April 28th, 2007
As noted in the first post, a big part of what we want to do here is just chronicle the collisions occurring in this space. This article (Shopping by TV Comes to the PC) came out last week in the Wall St. Journal and chronicles the emergence of ecommerce companies as media providers in the video space. We’ll talk more about the efforts of some of the individual companies over time, but for now let’s just stand back and appreciate the flood of new video content that this could unleash on the market. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but you can potentially see some of the subconscious struggle for context here as Jessica (a very thoughtful, thorough & intelligent reporter) calls the videos culled from HSN’s shopping channel and repurposed to the web, “product reviews.” How will we describe the infinite variants of video flooding into this grey zone? How do we appropriately capture the inherent bias and perspective of each participant…and maintain the transparency which will be critical to maintaining consumer engagement and trust? One of the many questions.
April 27th, 2007
Welcome to the newest area of the Expo blog! This section is going to be much more about Expo’s business and the space that we’re operating in. The point, simply put, is that media and commerce are colliding in unforeseen – and faster – ways than I think anyone would have thought possible. Editorial standards are shifting or crumbling but no one cares because the assumption is that not only are consumers smart enough to determine the bias of the speaker, but the consumer is now controlling and even creating the media itself. At the same time, commerce oriented entities (manufacturers, retailers and others) are flooding into media initiatives with both feet as a way to create, “new brand experiences.” It’s a fascinating, wide open time and we’re going to try to chronicle it right here.
April 27th, 2007
As you may have noticed, www.expotv.com is currently down right now because we are in the midst of launching a brand new site full of additional community features and functionality. We hope you like the new site and look forward to getting your feedback!
April 25th, 2007
David Becker Appointed as Chief Marketing Officer for Consumer Generated Video Product Review Leader
NEW YORK – April 25, 2007 – ExpoTV (www.ExpoTV.com), the leading provider of consumer-generated video product reviews, announced today that David Becker has been appointed chief marketing officer. In this role, Becker will oversee marketing, product management, strategy development and execution. Becker will report directly to Daphne Kwon, chief executive officer of ExpoTV. Click here to read more.
April 25th, 2007
There is a new blog called Found+Read that is a great resource for entrepreneurs. I’m going to try to make our sub-blog “Life of A Start-up” synergistic with theirs since they are building off an existing community and have a dedicated team working on on it. It will also allow me to focus more on writing about Expo’s business vs. some of the general blogs of late. Hope you like it
April 23rd, 2007
This is largely stolen from a buddy of mine who led me out of the entrepreneurial gate by several years. It’s the touch stone I’ve used at each step and it was very clarifying and calming. You owe your investors:
1. 100% of your effort. Your absolute everything to make the business work within the boundaries of legality and business ethics.
2. Honesty about the situation and your prospects (this is why you should absolutely put an angel investor representative on your Board of Directors).
From these two cardinal rules, there are a couple of things that I think follow pretty directly, namely that you should hear them out on pretty much any topic and, finally, even more than worrying about making them a billion dollars in the first year (which turns out to be surprisingly hard), you should worry first about protecting their capital by trying to make sure that there is more capital to keep fighting and by building something – a piece of code, a contract – that someone else would want even if they don’t want your company.
April 17th, 2007
I’d be remiss if I didn’t close out this section on angels and initial board members by talking about importance of finding “the guy”. I’m sure I’ll talk more about this later, but when I was a VC, the CEOs I worked with talked about what a lonely job it was because ultimately you’re responsible for payroll, for hiring and firing and for generating revenues. Remember, these were VC-backed companies, so you can only imagine how hard it is for an angel-backed company.
In our case, we lucked into a solution which was that we had a “guy” who was with us every step of the way. We didn’t know him before the initial round of funding, but he came in through one of the people networks that formed and he became the Board member representing the angels (always give your angels a board representative…see also “What You Owe Your Angel Investors”). He was a great board member. But much more than that, he owned our situation in his bones. Death was not an option and that internal fortitude on his part was critical in getting us over many rough spots early in the business. How do you find ‘the guy’? Great question. But I think you’ll know him when you seen him. If you’re not sure, ask him to read this post and see what he says. Maybe he’ll identify himself as the “anti-guy” (see below) and you can decide it’s better if he’s just a passive investor.
I think some people end up with the “anti-guy” (sees himself as adding value by being a tough on management & trying to make very rational decisions each step along), and that’s pretty much a terminal disease.
April 15th, 2007
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