This Week in Startups #54 with Tim Young

spiked out I trip a referee by my attitude that I most definitely from con yeah hello everybody hey it's Jason calacanis it is Friday is it Memorial Day Tyler is this Memorial or Labor Day I get that wrong Memorial comes first yes Labor Day comes next correct it's Memorial Day uh 2010 mhm I slept two hours last night you can see the bags under my eyes these are my actual non-cgi produced bags under my eyes I look like Mike Arington actually um and uh I slept about two hours last night and then I flew on Virgin here and I am exhausted but I'm going to power through the show because we got a great guest uh s Jason and we got a great Shark Tank you're working on the pro I left you here to work on some projects how did everything go when I was gone in my absence great everything's going well yeah awesome anything I need to know about nothing no how was disrupt ah Tech crunch disrupt um I talked to Mike about it and Mike said to me it wasn't as good without you know us involved uh I think the it was 2/3 it felt like it was about 60% 2/3 you know CEOs of existing companies or panel discussions and that was is not what tech runch Shifty was about obviously it about the companies and they had only 20 people who um they only had 20 people who presented so the field was smaller so a little bit weaker I would say than a tech runch 50 I would say of the 20 companies who presented maybe the top half would have gotten into the tech runch 50 uh and then of those 10 they probably I don't know if any of them would have been top 10 in the tech runch 50y they would have been sort of middle Midfield of a tech run Thrifty uh weren't as prepared on stage which is to be expected since you and I did the preparation for that stuff so it was the first time out but um they did get great Keynotes and whatnot the location was unique some people hated it some people loved it uh so I'd say that was a jump ball and um the crowd was pretty good it was a pretty good crowd uh a lot of young people and uh so good success for them and you know obviously the launch conference uh in the winter of 2011 which we're doing will be much better uh but you know I'm not competitive at all it's not like people are going to compare what he does and what I do after we break up to see who did a better job right I'm on total tilt about not like you like a challenge or anything no now it's like absolutely my mission I'm like Oh my and then so of course I'm there and everybody wants to know what happened to Tech runch 50 so I explained it to everybody like Mike had a different version of what our partnership should be and he came up with a really novel business model for it instead of being 50-50 partner I would give my 50% to him for nothing and then I would become uh 10% of the revenue sh he become 90 which is a very fascinating Revenue model for partners to go through but uh so we uh dissolved it then we each went off to do our own things and I think we had he actually was very magnanimous about it he told me at a dinner party later after the conference was over that the conference wasn't as good without us being there and um and that it was definitely a little bit of energy that was missing but uh Eric shonfeld did a great job moderating hosting and sort of Paul Carr so those guys really stepped up and was great to see everybody in New York I got to see all the angel Investments uh that we involved in chartbeat doing great um gdgt doing great um Poston doing very well actually and uh challenge post totally rocking it so I got to see almost everybody and today Tim young is with us welcome to the program great to be here Tim uh you are the founder and CEO of social cast that's right uh which is an really interesting startup doing uh sort of business to business Enterprise class social tools I guess yeah it's kind of lightweight real-time collaboration for employees yeah that's a nice way to say it and it's actually there was a couple of buzz wordss in there but it actually was coherent usually there's too many buzzword you start to lose but it's lightweight create a group we're going to get into that later uh but at the top of the show we always uh like to do a nice Callin uh and we do ask Jason so let's do one Skype in or are they calling in okay do we have our caller hello hi how are you doing who's on the line uh my name is fui from Germany how are you doing fui from Germany I now see I could tell from your name fui obviously Germany um no uh you're Germany via China um U I came I'm born in born

and raised in Malaysia and I'm doing my studies in Germany ah okay very good so you have a question for us let's hear it yes that's is correct um so I'm am not the expert computer scientist here so uh what I've been doing is that basically I tend to look around for projects and maybe try to build on other people's projects because I have a little bit of skill in uh game design so to speak but I don't have like uh I don't have the computer science skills needed to create a game engine for example so I've been like looking around the internet and found that um there are several game engines that are interesting but they kind of lack these social features for example like uh virality Loops in Facebook or for example so my idea is like uh can I maybe build on top of this like open source games game engines and maybe like probably make a profit out of it do you think it's a good idea to do that because all these games game engines are basically open sourced and yeah when I build on top of that I have to release the source code so do I think in a business sense this is a is it a good way to go forward it's um it's definitely a good idea uh if you're looking to get hired make a product that people are willing to pay for maybe not so much uh you would have to because you're building off of an open source project it's share and share alike so to speak they give you their source code you build on it and you have to give your source code to everybody else that being said just having the source code um is not enough for a lot of people they want to have the person who built it some Consulting they want some Services they may want some specialization so a great way for a developer to get themselves out there is to get into the IRC chat room for a specific piece of software maybe it's Cassandra or maybe it's uh Jango whatever and to actually contribute to code and to build little projects so in the Django project there's 10 different people who built blog platforms on top of it because people kept complaining there's no blogging software or somebody complains there's no game mechanics or uh virtual currency or point system on top of this gaming thing it's a great idea um and that's actually one of the best ways for you to uh meet people who are in the industry but you got to couple it with being in that IRC and maybe having a little blog and a Twitter account dedicated to these topics so that you can sort of virally spread what you're doing uh and also participating maybe in Hacker News when those type of threads come up and mention hey I'm you know say something intelligent and at the end say oh and if you're interested I'm working on a project if anybody wants to contribute so you're not sort of spamming it like check out my project you're adding to the discussion then adding that Tim you have anything to add to that yeah I mean I think I would just view it as a learning experience um you know open source platforms to try to build a closed platform on top of it will be really difficult so I would try to you know view it as a learning for your yourself but also you know like you said Jason to meet other people yeah uh and basically to hook into that Community yeah I me that's this is what open source is about this is why most people do it there's been a many studies and a lot of people misinterpret why people are involved in open source projects you know they say oh my God people are involved in open source project because they want to like help the world and oh my God there's altruism it's not exactly always that case a lot of times people are looking to network to socialize to find a job to participate in something challenging it's not really like they're trying to say of the world in most cases they usually have some combination of self-interest um you know and Community interest they want to get a job and they know the community will help them they want to learn and so they help the community so it's sort of like one hand washes the other and it's great it and it would be the equivalent of contributing to a Blog that was an unpaid blog uh or posting really good comments on Hacker News in an IRC chat room or a question and answer service stack Overflow or whatever uh and uh you get your name known make sure you use a memorable handle so if you were working on Cassandra you could make yourself you know Cassandra guy and it sounds corny but if you were or you know you could be DB guy or something whatever it is you nosql guy or Mrs nosql whatever it is but brand yourself a little bit in there so people can go oh I that guy's got the same Dona name as his handle he's got a logo he sort of personal branding on top of it will um will help does that help yeah cool great okay F have you been listening to the show for a long time fu yeah uh I've listen to like 20 to 25 episodes so far oh wow so you're working backwards through the archive um yeah that's what I'm doing right now right yeah by the way I was at Tech crunch 50 and I saw I saw you guys in San Francisco last year so great uh well make sure you come to the launch conference we'll have information on that hopefully next week Tyler should have a date lock down and uh hopefully you can make it we'll talk to you soon

take care F take care bye that's it it's quick there's two over 200 people listening to this on you stream there'll be 50,000 people who download it some good advice very simple basic stuff but if you're new to the industry how would you know that yeah this is a perfect forum for this yeah it's little nuggets that people don't know about uh but you know what people all know about DNA mail everybody loves DNL they've been a sponsor of the show from the beginning you like the segue I love it you guys don't have like some exchange service sitting in your office do you we don't but we actually are a DNA mail customer what yeah we are not a setup this is not a setup so you have DNL how long have you been using DNL so we have been using it uh for about six months and how's it going it's going great and you know a lot of our customers have exchange servers so it's great for us to be able to instead of having one locally and dealing with all that and us having to have an administrator patches viruses memory hard drives exactly I can have engineer instead of an Ops guy and uh DNL takes care of all that for us for $3 a month you get in there that I could why do I even do a commercial I got a customer here who's totally satisfied you know what you need to do just get over there and uh get that 99% 99. 9% uptime guarantee thank you DNL for sponsoring this weekend startups and being one of our most loyal sponsors uh from the beginning which is a big deal because now the ads you know Tyler have doubled in price and so we're basically like somewhat freezing the rates for the existing sponsors is actually holding the show back on a financial basis but we got to be loyal this a important lesson for people if you have advertisers I can't double the rates or triple the rates basically the advertising rate has tripled since g& web spy and all these guys got involved and we're just charging them like 10% extra now uh and everybody else is in line we got like 10 people in line waiting to sponsor the show so uh thank you to DNA and we really appreciate it so uh the next part of the show somebody's going to pitch us an idea you get pitched ideas sometimes yep you've done a couple companies couple yeah this is your second I think or third yeah this is essentially the third company uh you've pitched people before so you understand what a good pitch is uh I you've had bad pitch days maybe probably a couple ever have a VC pull out a Blackberry while you're in the middle of talking about the product and your company maybe one time yeah I mean it's definitely infuriating uh typically not necessarily shocking I kind of come accustomed to that behavior but uh typically when there's more than one in the room one guy deor better to do deplorable I had and I did this at the open Angel conference Tyler you remember the open Angel Forum I had to tell people like please do not take your blackberry out when somebody's pitching their idea for only five or six minutes give them your attention because this is their whole life and you're VC is be supporting these guys just put the black bra down and turn off the if you have to five minutes give them your goddamn attention exactly and that's what we're going to do right now on Shark Tank do we have our Shark Tank picture Mone what I want that's what I want I want all right now we're g to get on the pitch train who do I have on the call hello who's there hi my name is Scott Anon from Network hippo Scott uh Have you listened to the program before of course yep uh you got a favorite show uh probably the one with Brad Feld uh the whole discussion around contacts and how you manage your contacts is uh especially interesting to me yeah he's uh quite good at that and so uh you know the rules of Shark Tank then since you've been a long time listener uh you have 60 seconds and we can see you there right on your Skype you're looking good got the shapo you've got the non-ironic beard looks good uh and you have 60 seconds to pitch your idea uh after which point I will ask everybody in the chat room to score both your ability to pitch and the uh Merit of your idea so everybody in the chat room is ready and we give me a verbal I captain uh yes uh Captain something to that effect and I would like everybody to put um Pitch colon the number and then idea colon the number Tyler are you ready I'm ready okay Tim you ready you understand the instructions we're good two numbers okay uh and uh here we go Scott in three two go all right now I'm guessing that's not your desk because I know how many conferences you go to and when you go to conferences the one thing you get are dozens and dozens of business cards and what do you get when you get back a desk full of business cards it's a lot of work to put them into some kind of an address book or do something with them and so the solution may people say is LinkedIn but

the reality is LinkedIn is where relationships go to die you go and you connect with somebody there but you don't really follow up with them afterwards it's just kind of a connection that you use for the next time you're looking for a job or something else um so right now though with unemployment rates as high as they are and people are starting their own gigs they're looking for new jobs our networks are becoming increasingly important and social networks have helped us connect with more people all over the world but not necessarily have uh Stronger relationships with them so Network hippo is a layer a social layer that goes on top of all your social connections and your email it consolidates all of your contacts helps you understand your relationships tells you who you should be in contact when with them and then helps you engage with people in your network much better than you can on individual social relationships wow okay well done uh I'll ask everybody in the chat room give me uh one to 10 on the pitch and idea I see uh six and six I see three and two I see seven and four uh I see six and seven 6 and four 8 and three uh Tyler what did you think of the pitch um I'm going to go 6 five leaning towards seven on the pitch yes felt it was concise clear what yeah I did in some ways I really liked the tone and the delivery and he stru me as a smart guy I but when you're talking about this kind of a solution you're going to have to really get into quickly how you're differentiating and uh so now you're going to getting towards the IDE idea right and so the idea um I don't I would like to know more right uh so that's a successful pitch in some ways Tim so I would give it maybe a 65 in that range and uh on the pitch I think what I would do differently is start with what it is because there's a lot of buildup of the problem explaining the problem and you know lead in with exactly what it is so it kind of frames in my mind what I'm thinking about and then give me one or two quick use cases on how it could help my life right so if you have a minute you're saying maybe 40 seconds of setting the stage is a little too much to leave 20 seconds to what the product is uh and on the product score layer on top of all of your uh networks I mean if it could actually do that um you know I would use it probably give it a seven or an eight on the idea right okay so I thought the pitch uh is going to be quite repetitive here uh took about 40 seconds to get into what exactly as you're building I did like though your pace was good yeah so if this was a two-minute pitch and you the second minute was here's all your product things this could be a 10 and a 10 we don't know so you left us wanting more which is good actually in some ways uh you had a great line in there LinkedIn is where relationships go to die when you said that everybody just sort of nodded in agreement that's a good thing to put into your pitch I think when you can when you have a universal truth that people can agree on I agree with that I go on LinkedIn I say yes to everybody who's asked for a relationship and then I don't go back until I need to hire somebody for a job but it's basically like there's no vibrancy to those relationships for whatever reason um you said that networks are very important especially in a down economy people starting their own gigs again more truisms uh and so we're all nodding and then you say hey this is going to be a layer on top of all of your networks and I immediately I thought plaxo maybe something like that so tell us now that we oh and I'll give you my squares I think the pitch yeah six seven pitch is good I mean I would say if I got 15 seconds about more specifically what the product was this could be an eight or nine pitch uh so that's good news and the idea uh I love this idea we had a company called reportive uh pitch at the open Angel form which is doing sort of CRM on top of your Gmail account so you can sort of find out I think they use rap Leaf to go f query and find out oh Tyler mahalo. com emailed you here's his page on you know here's information from his other Pages his crunch Bas profile this profile that profile uh Facebook if it's public um so what exactly is the product is it software is it a toolbar is it a web service how does it work yeah it's a website and so when you connect on the website then you uh connect your account to all of your social networks uh as well as your email and then we consolidate all of those contacts we understand the different relationships we find out more information about their profile and then we look at your communication Trends how often you commun communicate with different people look at their profiles and then uh give them essentially a rating and then send you uh weekly reports on who you should be in contact with more often people you may be come to in your extended Network that you weren't aware of so really help you uh manage your your larger network uh I think I understand what you're doing uh and I guess the proof would be in the pudding uh so we'll have to go check it out but I see that we uh that you actually have the site up and running uh how long is site been around so we launched uh we actually launched

at demo uh I guess two months ago and so we're still in early stages um you know we uh we've got all the scaffoldings in place we've got several thousand users that are on there giving us great feedback right now and uh you know now we're just trying to get kind of the usability and the overall uh you know the overall system uh complete but the intelligence engine we've been working on now for a couple of years got it and uh this is a venture back startup it's not no it's uh it's bootstrapped so uh we've built this just the small team and uh you know we're now at a stage where we're actually looking for uh Angel investment uh we're not looking for any large investment but uh you know we think we we've got the the opportunity we see where this needs to go but we just need some uh some funding right now so you uh say that you uh um uh launched a demo did you do like the one minute launch thing or like the full five six minute launch thing uh no we did the full uh the whole thing so you paid 18 Grand 18,500 to present there um they gave you a discount they usually did well yeah we we presented there they made it affordable for a bootstrap company ah so how would you get half off uh I'm not really allowed to say any more than that just say that it was worthwhile for us and uh it was a great opportunity to meet a lot of good people next time don't pay to pitch you I got an issue with that you come to the launch conference or deck run just rubbed or something you don't have to pay a pitch uh any other thoughts on the idea I'm going to try it you sld me I'm definitely I like these kind of ideas now if you go log into Facebook and take all my contacts out of there doesn't that um make Facebook shut down my account uh no not at all so we don't actually uh take all your contacts we just connect with Facebook um so we use the API just to be able to understand your kind of social graph um and then when you log back in then you connect with the same information so we don't store the information in our system so you can't go in there and take my contact the contact information of my network out of there on Facebook because they don't allow that with their API correct exactly yeah I mean we're not plao right so this is your private address book so this is Jason's address book that is on speed right so we take all of your different contacts uh we do similar things of report of we find out more information about those people um but this is a private for you only this is all your address book and then from there we en able you to do a lot of things like CRM you know all the things you get from adaptive or a Salesforce um we connect with things like MailChimp zenes so it's perfect for the entrepreneur small business or somebody who really cares about their Network awesome uh well I'm definitely going to check it out and I see Tim nodding he's probably going to check it out we'll be checking it out he's goingon to uh well done you did a good job thank you very much cheers uh he did a good job everything but paying for pitching I never get when people do that but this is I mean this one infuriates me it's like I go make all these shows where people don't have to pay the pitch and they still go do it it's the Trap you know what the problem is I can't there not I don't I have to do like an event the day before demo and the day after demo yep should we do that oh my God I just had the greatest idea we should wherever they do their event we should do one day before and the one day after a free event to pitch yeah and then just that would be like total annihilation of their business if we said day before and day after demo oh my God that is that's pretty genius isn't it where's the event at the same Hotel no that's what I'm saying B across the hall yeah oh my God you're saying do it concurrently not necessarily concurrent day before but literally as close as possible yeah same Hotel what's the chance the hotel is booked the next two days it's not going to be booked then I can just say to people with a straight face if you're going to demo I have a Dem demo the day after it's going to be cheaper Better Stronger Faster that would be hysterical should we do that and just totally destroy their business this the kind of gorilla aggressive you know like thinking that goes through my mind with competitors and it's not that I wish anybody any harm and I tried to explain this to somebody because Comm score I don't know if you saw made their service free and so I'm in the second row and they make this announcement and last week the CMO came to me and said hey I want to talk to you about this thing so she was here I shook hands with her we had a nice conversation she said you were right when you said com score kills babies or whatever I said um no I didn't say kills babies I say I think they kill puppies and serve them in the cafeteria I say com score is a racket charging you $5,000 to correct your numbers you felt that way too right when you saw that nonsense no reason to pay for that yeah I mean you got quanz for free and also it's sort of like just the the nefarious like we have the power to fix these

wrong numbers and when you give us the check they magically become fixed and they're just like oh no but it's not because of the check just happens to come the moment before they're fixed that's you reading into that correlation uh anyway you know what that she said to me she said you know what Jason you were right and it created massive discussion inside of our company and we're going to change it and so she they went out they changed it so somebody of course asked why did you change this why now you know what he asking for us nobody gives me credit he says it' be so easy for him to say on stage the guy should have just said listen the marketplace guys like Jason other people gave really they made a convincing argument and we listened you know which is what happened right or I pushed them to the edge where they had no choice but to which is what actually any anybody who was paying attention know death would happened course yeah so the whole audience is realizing this cuz the you know whoever shell mentions I was there uh and he says well we wanted to make sure the system was robust enough to handle the people and we're going to be rolling it out slowly it's total non-answer and just like it's like Zuckerberg's apology you know like such a non-apology and I never get any credit all I want is some credit uh but you know who doesn't need any credit is webpy they monitor all kinds of server activity from employee internet access to email service to web host analyze for traffic levels patterns errors and more it's a total L analysis solution and these logs uh pick up all activity and it's not about blocking stuff they're not there to block stuff they so you understand what's going on your network you got a network with a lot of activity on it you need to know what's going on you have a big Network you want to know what's going on somebody might be loaning a bunch of bit Tor somebody might be doing stupid stuff at work we had a thing here where uh we had everybody was watching the show at their desks and we're trying to figure out why are we having problems with Ustream well when 25 people are downloading directly from stream the show at one megabit or 800 kilobits and then we're trying to upload the show at a megabit well that could be a problem right uh and so this is the kind of thing that webpy will solve for you uh go check them out Jack is going to I think he's going to run the startup meetup on June 8 that' be uh in Melbourne and he was on the show back on episode 31 was it uh it was a great guest uh so thank you to um webpy my next guest uh Tim young is the founder and CEO of socialcast I found out about your product uh because some people here at Mahalo uh invited me and I'm pulling it up on my screen right here to um mahalo's socialcast Network and it basically we have a thing called vertical managers these are the people who there's like 15 of them they work from home but they manage the other writers yeah so they need to have a conversation with each other but emails they have an email list but it's a little bit messy uh and they don't want everybody else involved in the thing so they just want to have like their own little area to socialize and network and sure enough they create uh your uh a site what do you call it a community yeah a community inside of your product and holy cow uh as you can see here they sort of live in it now and I looked at and I said this is like a private wh labeled version of Facebook is that what it is that what you what you've built here what have you built yeah I mean I think that's a great question to so what we've built is really kind of a you know a realtime collaboration platform for employees of companies um so it's private um but it's very lightweight and the focus is around that Newsfeed concept or that activity stream concept so you know if you look at kind of the web today you start to see that a lot of people's experiences are beginning on a Twitter stream a Facebook news feed and so we thought hey these streams are essentially digitizing all of human culture right where I am on Four Square what I'm doing let's do that for corporations archaeologist you look at 100 years from now they're going to look at our stream and figure out like where you were what you were eating everything right imagine if we had this about like I don't know who's a famous person Teddy Roosevelt or you know Jesus if we had Jesus's goala checkins that be plippy purchases somebody's got to do a fake profile like next Easter and like do the whole process through exactly checking yeah Jesus could be checking at the pilot yeah exactly uh just got you got to watch out where what's his name is checking in Judas has some interesting check-ins over at the temple um so you were saying yeah so I mean what we wanted to do is take this activity stream concept and essentially bring it into corporations uh and help them kind of digitize you know all the culture and all the events that go on so um although I don't think you guys hook it up a lot of our customers will actually hook up the activity streams to

Business Systems in their company so their sap their CRM and as events and activities take place in those they come into the real-time feeds so that would be if we sign a client right it says Mahalo has signed you know Acme Corporation as a client exactly for this amount click here to see the insertion order exactly and so then you can actually have employees kind of do session based collaboration uh with context of events and activities uh in real time so there's a press mention of Mahalo answers or calican or whatever it shoots it into there and people can just automatically start talking about it they can start discussing it what should we do how should we respond all within there so the obvious um comparable would be Yammer uh similar to Yammer through of the Twitter white label Twitter and your white label Facebook is that a way to I mean I think for the way we look at the kind of the problem today is we think it's a lot bigger than just kind of Twitter for the Enterprise right so if you look at like the last hundred years we've kind of had this Industrial Age we're now moving to information age uh kind of atoms to bits right and so the Big Challenge right now is human intelligence right I think it's something that you figured out quickly at Mahalo yeah you know instead of doing algorithmic based stuff you can do Mahalo answers human intelligence right so the real trick is how you know if that's the most challenging resource a company has how do we bu build these you know different tools and it's not just conversation but it's collaborating within context of data that's going on so it makes sense because in the past you would have these conversations occurring in meetings you'd by the coffee machine on the way to the Starbucks and it's lost and gone forever now somebody new comes into the company and they click on the client Acme yeah and they go see every single discussion around Acme and they find out oh my God this client is really unique in the way they like their reporting done and my God this person over there is a very unique individual who's a pain in the ass right I'm not going to say her name but everybody knows the pain in the ass over at AC Adventures whatever Acme whoever uh somebody's like right now oh my God I can't believe he said that about the Acme Ventures you know there's G to be some company called Acme Ventures my luck sure um and so it's actually a way to sort of catch it's like it's like this like catching all these you know things that are in The Ether you just you would lose them otherwise totally you're trying to capture all these insights and so if you've ever been a in a job and you know you're new to the job you come in and you're supposed to just immediately kind of get up to speed go to meetings get all these processes but they don't give you your predecessor's email account usually with all his emails and who did he talk to and his Excel sheets you got to recreate all that from scratch so these systems when we're kind of digitizing all this work culture you can actually go back and look at you know all the conversations that person had in context to the customers and really get up to speed you know in a real quick amount of time has have people figured out how to use these things yet because I know when it was about five years ago with when wik came out right it's 2003 2004 2005 maybe 2004 social text right he's doing wikis it's going to change every business then um PB Wiki well nice guys uh media Wiki obviously is available people start doing hosting of that and every company's got to have a Wiki yeah and then most companies they never actually got them to become produ product actual productivity tools right uh and then was the one that was bought by Google what was the wiki oh that jotspot I think jotspot got bought by them you never heard from that again no so they what did they do with johnspot they just kill it came in it came back out uh as part of Google Apps it's like Google sites I think oh is Google sites jot I think Google sit so I like but it didn't come back out as jpot and all the stuff right so um people actually know how to use these things or are we still like in the sort of early Innings cuz that's what I'm finding with these social tools is like inside the Enterprise there's like a this sort of group of people who are really Geeks and into they know how to use it and everybody else is just like I'm just too confused well I think we're in the first inning yeah um I think that you know these social tools have hit definitely hit mainstream in the consumer space right so outside of work they've hit Mass Appeal and they are quickly changing how we communicate and so more and more people inside work are expecting those same tools and are using them I think there's still a portion of the workforce um that is not as familiar with them but once you introduce some uh they quickly take to it and the idea is you know Wiki is really difficult if you think about it oh yeah I mean you have to curate it you got to monitor the content you don't really know if it's aged you know so the idea here you actually don't even know what's going on I mean you got to go to like a change log to see what new pages were and there's like Wiki syntax and there's like all kinds of weird characters you got to input to like make something bold tell the tell yeah to sign something

you know I type something you type something who knows who typed it exactly you can't build that into the wiki no no too difficult so the idea is to uh you know I mean Wiki is just essentially just an improvement of documents right and I think you know what our point of view is moving forward is that it's really not about documents anymore it's about you know real-time interactions and if you make it really lightweight and simple one box share things there's a little intelligence in there so if you paste the YouTube link it automatically brings in the video If You paste images all that people will take to it and then you also add device Mobility right so you bring it on mobile devices you bring it in their Outlook client you bring it to them rather than force them to go to your place how does it make money so yeah so we basically our main clients are large Enterprises um and you can either deploy it as a premium SAS version so you're paying for per user per month um or you can buy server like licenses and run it in your own data center or even on something like AWS if you want really yeah so you actually are not forcing people to be part of the hosted solution they can buy the software from you what is the ballpark to buy the software is it by the number of users or number servers how do you something like that because that's pretty old school isn't it okay so it's uh it's old school but it's a new take on it so um what we've done is we've built a software Appliance so you know like let's say you're going to do Google search Appliance for your company you actually get a physical rack server you got to put it in a network what we give you is essentially uh we're leveraging all of the virtualization of company's data centers so we give you like a one gigabyte server image you download that then you bring that up in your VMware or your Citrix or your Zen environment um and then it's virtualized so if you look at companies today they have built out their data centers for Peak capacity but only use that all that capacity like 3 to 5% of the time otherwise they just got machines just burning through energy so if you can give them a solution that'll run on that they can use up some of that capacity and those and they want to do that they want to screw around with the software is that like a corporate policy kind of a thing like we don't want this data is so important we can't have it in the cloud yeah absolutely so there are certain industries right Defense government Finance Health Care oh the people who actually have a lot of money yeah and they're super regulated right and they might be Healthcare like one of our clients humanas so they have patient data it's very critical that is not outside their Network um and they're also connecting this to business system so they've spent 10 20 years building Business Systems putting a firewall around it all their accounting their customer records so they want that secure um so I think in the future you know SAS is the trajectory that everyone will go to and so people don't know software as a service correct you don't buy your own Hardware you don't build your own cloud we host it for you never have to worry about upgrading the memory and storage or whatever exactly but for companies who have really sensitive IP or have not warmed up to letting other companies host their data we allow them the same you know product and flexibility but they can manage it internally and that starts at like 50 Grand or something it's around there yeah that's a good ballpark so I mean this is actually you can make money we are making money yeah and so uh largest installation larg or largest installations so uh yeah Phillips you know global company wow about 100 156,000 employees and these are all you know when we go in other kind of social Solutions are very kind of ad hoc bottom up driven um and a lot of our start that way but our big component of the business is where we go in we work with the CIO we work with HR um and it's a full Enterprise deployment so it's a layer across all their systems to all their people so you have a company like AA right a telecom or human uh or Phillips which is doing a global roll out 116,000 employees all over the world how do they break up the networks because I mean if you had one network for 115,000 people it's going to be moving down like it's fast and there's nothing to I mean I really need to see some Department that's making light bulbs when I'm in the department that makes speakers I right so how do you do that so we like to think about it as kind of uh if you use Google Maps right so think about Google Maps interface you can zoom all the way out and see the Earth right and then you can zoom in and see a continent and then countries and then cities and then all the way down to like the hot dog vendor on the street corner right and we have kind of the same approach and that's how these large Enterprises use it so a user can basically zoom out and look at the entire network all the activity which in these large companies is moving very rapidly or they can actually zoom in right so they can go in they can create their own groups they can look at their Department their job function geog you have to put in some sort of hierarchy of groups uh that rolls up probably at some point to geography yeah we also to their active directory right which manages all

of their user accounts and all their email and their location how they handle the security on that stuff because I mean obviously the people who are in finance and HR don't want those departments so you have to put like permissions and do that typically model the active server directory or something or have to no so we just inherit the permissions and the role model that's already in that system and it's mirrored inside social cast so looking at this and saying this is like Facebook for Enterprise is actually not giving you guys enough credit I mean this is much sophisticated it may look like Facebook but what you've done is basically built a very sophisticated layered permission based system for larger Enterprises yeah that just uses a very familiar metaphor yeah and that's intentional I mean the familiar metaphor is very intentional um you know instead of trying I mean we're trying to create a kind of there is this consumerization of it right and so we're trying to provide an interface and keep that interface constant so if you're an employee and you deal with three to four Enterprise systems you no longer have to like get a lot of training on those and education and deal with them you have one familiar uh interface that looks very similar to what you do outside of work so this means World of Warcraft will actually be the next metaphor well you know i' I've said I I think somebody should do a Zinga for the Enterprise uh and I really do think that's a huge opportunity and there may be people working on it I don't know so unpack that a bit you're basically saying use some casual gaming metaphor to accomplish some task inside of the Enterprise absolutely so I think um you know think about a lot of this you know material resource planning or how you manage inventory fulfillment in the warehouse there're these really archaic software it's a bunch of numbers it's blue screens it's green screens it's not exciting you don't feel very productive when you're doing it but imagine if you just like we're doing with a Newsfeed layer right what if you actually took a gaming layer on top of that sure and so you know you're buying plants you're purchasing new cows and that's actually you know moving trucks or you know starting and stopping inventory processes but you know let's you know make it so that it's an enjoyable experience for those employees right um and I think there's a lot of things we can do with game mechanics um to basically improve the experience and improve productivity this game mechanics thing we had uh booya on last week you know uh they do my town yeah is this going a little bit too far I mean they basically Force square is a goala obviously have game mechanics in them but then to layer an entire game on top of it yeah or what you're talking about doing taking real work and putting a game on top it I mean how far is this game thing going to go do you think is it endless or are people going to get burnt out on like okay I get it I have to plant things I get resources and then I can deploy the level up are people going to just realize that they're being gamed at some point you know or are just humans not that sophisticated well I don't know if it's that question I think it's where people find personal enjoyment right and imagine if if you work just kind of an 8 to five job all day it's not super challenging um you come home and you want something fun and guess what you're on Facebook you can do it with your friends right and you can be show that you're more successful because you know you've invested more in your farm and things like that and you it's no different than I think how a lot of people uh spend money on other things that you know they they're just deriving happiness and enjoyment from like drugs well I would go that far that's not the metaphor you're going for the metaphor of like maybe they go play poker exactly or they go play sports right or do something like that it's a socialization thing so there's nothing really there it just feels to me like I'm everything I do like I'm going to go to a restaurant and I'm going to like try to order a sandwich and they're going to be like oh did you plant your lettuce and I'm like okay I'll plant my lettuce you know like okay would you plant your Tomatoes yes okay I want Tomatoes I'm plant tomatoes I'm going to harvest them and then you're going to slice them okay great just feels like the and I've been playing We Rule you ever play We Rule iPad I haven't played don't start that's my it's going to be like consider this as a PSA parents I know you see your children playing Farmville and you got the iPad do not start playing We Rule because then if you do you will be a 40-year-old uh harvesting magic asparagus every day at 8 in the morning in order to level up and build your kingdom into a citadel and that's really not what 40y old people should be doing especially not ones who have a six MTH daughter and of Public Service um these things are wildly addicting I mean people have figured out how to release that like dopamine in people's brains of like it's pretty amazing 71 million people on FarmVille and that's like double how many active users Twitter has yeah I think the uh if you're looking to move to the valley and get started you know in startups uh and you're in college I would become I think a Psychology major I think I a psych major you know I think that's one of the backgrounds that companies are going to look at in the future you it's all

about understanding the user it's what we do at Social cast every day look at different user personas and how do we you know achieve a better experience for all those users what's this pumpkin thing you're involved in I patch the pumpkin patch well no I'm looking at your crunch based profile I was actually looking at Tony Conrad's okay and then I see Tony Conrad's involved in a pumpkin head yeah something and I see it's Angel investment so I immediately email and said you're doing a new company and you didn't ask me to Angel invest we had a whole arrangement I was going to circulate deals with you you're C and then the one deal that you're actually going to be the CEO of he says he's doesn't circulate so then I'm seeing him next week at Wall Street Journal and he says he did this with you what is it well I you know there's a lot of people that want to know about pumpkin head um so I feel like this is a horror film was there a horror film called pumpkin head is just where did you get this name from this came some of the team uh was working on some early Concepts it was last October you know I think you know I don't know they were thinking about pumpkins at the time and it just sounded like a good name for the company um but you know this is uh last summer um a couple of us myself and Tony uh you know would just hang out kind of after hours and we were basically looking at the Social Web right and it's what we do at socialcast we look at the consumer web and see how that's impacting the Enterprise and Tony's done a lot of you know he's done like stock twits and WordPress and sphere um and so you know we were just kind of give you know always talking about the State of the Social Web right um and we started kind of noodling on a concept and it kind of became Mental Floss I think for a lot of us outside of our normal jobs right so and uh it got kind of more and more interesting it kind of snowballed and then uh three of us decided you know maybe we should actually try to build this concept um and so we've kind of assembled kind of a really you know an All-Star team so uh it's myself uh we have Tony Conrad who's a partner at true and he did sphere and he's on the board of Wordpress uh and then Ryan frus who was uh just really early guy adaptive path really genius around you know kind of Social ux and ethnography and then a guy that I'm sorry what was the word you just Ed ethnography yeah explain what that means so just I mean I know what ethnography means I just want to make sure for the audience's benefit yeah I know just kind of uh you know this the building of personas and studying people and yeah um and then a guy that he worked with really closely at adaptive path called Sean Collins as well um and then we've got some just really great kind of tech talent that we pulled in to build this um and so you know we started kind of building the team and then we decided uh to share kind of what the vision was um and then we've pulled in kind of a A-list kind of Who's Who of investors um so the pumpkin head is backed by true Ventures uh Ron Conway uh Katarina fake Chris Dixon I know I saw this list I'm like I feel like I'm left out yeah and uh you know a couple it's somewhere in the social space yeah social thingy wouldn't say Enterprise but um it's uh you know we've also got some interesting advisers Chris Saka uh dick Costello from Twitter yeah and you know basically there's kind of two trajectories and kind of memes that are really interesting to us uh one is personal branding and the other one is personal analytics um and pumpkin head uh is really kind of at the intersection of those two trajectories right so game mechanics around how many followers do I have how many Retreats do I have and all that kind of stuff is going to be my own version of personal Google analytics I like it if that's what it is um question from the audience uh do you think all of these games are ultimately going to hurt the advancement of our society seems like there's a lot of Wast of time as from R Crowley what do you think um I think people waste a lot of time in many ways so I'm not sure you know I'm not sure that the wasting of the time is shifting from one bucket to another I think so yeah I mean I think there's people have wasted lives out there I let's be frank possibly yeah possibly you know oh half the people I meet there like nothing they get nothing accomplished I mean the people I people work at startups obviously accomplishing a lot I'm talking about the other people um how did you started as an entrepreneur it's a good question um so you know in my family there's a number of entrepreneurs and uh just kind of growing up in that entrepreneurial environment seeing you know parents run companies uncles run companies the challenges you just kind of grew up with the notion that uh you know I wouldn't work for somebody else basically I'd be doing my own thing um and uh so it just doesn't even come into your conception that you would it's not even your framework to work somebody else right and you know I think the interesting point when I was younger was just watching uh family you know build

things right so actually build companies build teams of people build products and that kind of building nature more than even kind of entrepreneurial spirit I think really embedded itself in kind of who I am um and so in college you know basically started different kind of little Consulting companies um around Enterprise data actually with Automotive suppliers um and then shortly after a college here just down the road uh started a company called event robot um which was kind of what social cast Grew From uh and event robot was building a social backbone for the entertainment companies so our first customer was a universal music group inter scope records you talk about the chat room days message days back this is um this is like fall of 05 okay so yeah so our first 2. 0 yeah just the beginning right like flicker was hitting the scene Facebook was just on the scene and uh our first customer was inner scope records with the Pussycat Dolls um good get and launched their first site so we had kind of a social backbone backend layer and then the music labels would build uh their artist sites their property sites uh on top of that layer and they would do all the front end and all the user stuff and we did all the backend to build up like a fan database and that kind of stuff yeah kind of CRM but for music entertainment space huh and how' that wind up doing it actually crash burn no I mean we basically transitioned that into social cast you pivoted yeah we pivoted that's like a popular word all it is the popular word yeah way to say it evolved yeah another is you fell on your face and got bloodied up and then got yourself back up and got in the fight so we actually didn't get blooded up we actually did really no so I'll give you the story real quick so um we I started the company it was completely bootstrapped um it was myself and another engineer uh who's still with social cast today and um we basically continue to grow it and just grew it on revenues and then we basically decided that you know being a Service Company essentially uh just really wasn't that exciting we didn't really like working with the music industry that much and we really wanted to Pivot to be a product company um and so in '08 we made a real shift we had taken all the money that we had earned from doing that business invested directly into soci social cast uh and then brought on true Ventures and grew it from there uh I hear a lot of entrepreneurs stting the service based business why is that and what's the difference between running a service-based business on a day-to-day basis versus a product business yeah so I think well early on you're doing a lot of you're on the chase right so in a service business you're out there you're looking for a client it's a great way to get started right you know especially if you're trying to bootstrap something it's a great way to accelerate it especially if you're like a first-time entrepreneur you don't really necessarily have a visible track record it's perfect um but you are working directly for somebody else so a lot of times what you're actually providing may not end up being what you actually want to build as like a product right so it may not totally fit your vision but you got to look at it as a Launchpad um and it's usually a very good Launchpad because you're in control of your Des but it's a it's something you got to hustle a lot you got to be chasing the clients managing the clients colle yeah exactly got you got your people paying on time product business differs how product business I mean I think early on especially if it's funded whether it's by you or you have professional funding you know you can kind of really map out the business I think you know kind of long term and you can really focus you know if you're doing software on product right so you can get you can build a team right away you can go from zero to a small team um and then you can really focus on that product um rather than having to deal with customers right up front living hand to mouth exactly month to month trying to get the money in to pay the next month's rent the next month's payroll uh so how long You' been doing this iteration of the company for a couple years now yeah uh you raised the series B we just closed our series B March 31st conratulations on that $8 million I read or something to that was eight million uh and menow and true Venture stepped up again they did true came back in which is great it was a great sign love to have them involved and so $8 million it's a lot of money uh how many people you have at the company now what are you going to do with 8 million yeah so today uh you know we're hiring people basically on a weekly basis now uh we're getting close to 25 folks today um a lot of the investment will be in staff yeah um both in engineering uh and then in the operation side of the business um so at the you know the goal is at the end of the year we'll basically run trajectory to double the company size um so we'll be

close to around 50 55 people at the end of the year um so we're putting money in there and then a lot in Innovation I mean there's a lot of different things we can do uh a lot of engineering goals that we want to hit so is this the first time you've had this many people working for you and a company um yeah my own company yeah so uh what's it been like and going from 25 to 55 H how do you anticipate things are going to change what are your advisers tell telling you to look out for well I think the biggest thing you know that I'm looking at is company culture yeah um you know myself and a couple of the early Engineers we've been really good at guarding that original culture which is very people focused very team focused um and a very transparent one um and so I think as we expand when we went from kind of zero to 20 employees a lot of those people came from the early employees kind of our own social network so it was people we had work with their prior companies people we knew very known quantities those new people I think as we kind of go from 25 to 55 we're starting to recruit people and we're very passionate excited but are somewhat unknown quantity so it's because of the social contract there is a little different with these newer employees right we will definitely uh have to continue to watch the culture and cultivate it as it grows um so culture means they have the same what as your original team because the original team you're saying these are friends of yours or friends of friends they're known quantities you know they're not total screw-ups or they share some uh common DNA sure what is the common DNA of your company can you describe it in words do have you had like a culture document kind of a meeting and said these are the five traits of our people yeah so we don't you know we don't actually have a document although you know as we grow larger that may be something we put together um I think really it's about having the company be transparent um so we've tried to create and our software creates that right we have a very transparent software it's very open you put in a message it can go out to the entire company um and so the idea is really you know no closed doors sharing of information um hiring the most talented people we can and really cultivating you know all of their individual passion right and applying that to the problem you know we really try to focus on kind of having one Beacon the problem we're focused on and you know aligning people into that so focus on the problem a Mastery of what they do yeah I mean I look at that is the number one thing I look at when we hire someone is Mastery um it's something I got from a couple guys at Pixar actually um you know I think you know there's always somebody who graduates last at Harvard so you know I don't know if you can just take on education or even work experience there's so many unknowns but the one thing I look for in a new employees have they mastered something it could be you know hula hoop yeah it could be chess underwater basket weaving whatever it may be because that shows that they can you know go from a very novice level and move through to that Mastery and you know we hope that you know that is now ingrained in them and they can apply that you know into the company uh a little tough question from the audience I visited the social uh cast H uh during a startup pub crawl seemed a little bit boring compared to other startups uh can we get a pitch on why social cast is a good place to work I guess because you're an Enterprise company versus consumer facing is that an issue in terms of getting employees or not you know I anyone can come by the office you can knock you know we're at 19 South Park in San Francisco come by uh it's uh when I think we did the pub crawl it was not too long after we had moved in so we were still kind of getting the office organized uh it's actually I think a great place to work it's super fun if you go on to our uh site you go to the careers page we got shots at the office um it's in an old 1900 brick uh commercial dishwasher Factory originally um wood floors totally open uh two levels it's just the super fun place yeah so uh is it an issue though do people you find that great developers care about working at consumer versus you know Enterprise B2B versus BTC sure as we used to say in the day is it can you not get certain people who want to do something public facing so their mom can use it I mean I'm sure there are those people right but you know the way in which we've recruited in the past and found people the people are just looking at tough problems right and uh you know when you actually go uh to a customer and you talk to them and you sit down somebody and they say you have really fundamentally changed my work experience and you've changed 10 hours of my day uh and how I'm connected to the company I think that's it's rewarding to anybody um and that's why you know a lot of people love to work on it and at the same time you

know we're not building Excel right we're not building sap yeah we're building something that's fun you know we use all the latest JavaScript we build iPhone clients and iPad client Blackberry so you get to kind of the excitement of the consumer space but you actually get to apply it and make a big transformational shift at these companies and something that actually makes money and we make money which is a great thing uh you know a nice thing when you're considering a job I always tell uh young you know folks who want to go to a job find out how much money is in the bank account good idea how many months of capital do they have that's and then you can just say it that easily I mean somebody comes to you when they're joining your company yeah if that if I was in an interview and I was like you know hey you know I'm a little concerned about being at a startup how many months of capital do you have at your company at the current burn rate would you be offended if I asked that no and what would you tell me couple years something like that yeah I mean you know when we did our a round uh and then we went to do B round we hadn't even touched our a yet yeah so you know I mean we got a long perfectly fine thing to ask oh I and I think you should and you should I definitely think you should I mean you should really know some of the Core Business fundamentals uh you know before you commit your career to it uh another question from the chat room that came up over and over again uh was your academic background is there something we should know about no where'd you go to school so I went to school at uh UC Riverside ah okay yeah uh and you're a teacher now you do a little professorship or something yeah so uh you know I didn't do it this year but uh in the two years past um down at UC Irvine oh wow yeah so I was uh a guest lecture Professor yeah down in Orange County uh at the Paul Mirage business school and I taught with co-taught with John cely Brown who is uh former head of Xerox Park and you know worked on a lot of early things there and uh yeah so I taught there at to business school students for a couple years did you enjoy that it was a lot of fun it was fun you know basically we were looking at the class was called Edge yeah um and we had people like Dana Boyd come in to speak she great yeah we had guys from LinkedIn come down we had and you know the idea was how do we help business students right students who are going out and getting mbas understand these kind of fundamental technology shifts and how can they be aware of them and all this new technology so that when they go in uh as you know candidate right into these jobs they can begin to take those transformational shifts to business you find those NB are good employees or not be honest well we have a number of them right um but do they know comparing your NBAs to the non-mb do you feel like when you go into a meeting and there's three of each that you're looking at one side of the table not the other or do they all create equal you know I think it's something to H it's you know it's uh it's another arrow that you have if you have an NBA right I don't think that and you know I don't have an NBA but you know the people who are my friends that have them I don't think that fully defines them right I think for some people they let it Define them uh I think for other people it is just something else in their utility belt they just happened to be an NBA I got some skills and creating some spreadsheets I can build a model or something hey some of that stuff especially when you look at you know I mean if you look at things that are popular now like Lean Startup right Eric Reese and all that stuff it's all about you know a lot of it is not just qualitative but it's quantitative feedback right so it's looking at metrics and analyzing it uh you know we have a new employee a data scientist who has an MBA that came from Disney and did Revenue optimization and ticket sale optimization for Disney and is incredible at uh you know doing data analysis and adds just an immense amount to the business um so I think there's a lot of value it just depends on how you want to utilize those skills sometimes they do carry it like though it's like a little bit too much then those might not be the right people to work with exactly I may they belong in other Industries entrepreneurs that you look up to and why yeah so there's a number of them you know a lot of my friends uh in San Francisco obviously founders of companies uh I definitely love what Matt mullenweg has done um why because I think one he's a very humble guy and two it is a really interesting story right and it's somewhat like mean you know I didn't go to school in the valley I didn't really live up there um you know I came from La I was very unknown um and I think you know he did in very similar ways too and he was leveraging obviously the open source and really you know was able to spin it into a company and now right we don't need to go through the story but Amazing Story right yeah we had him on the show and amazing at building Community right and understanding community and I think in many times if you look at automatic and WordPress they haven't necessarily immediately reacted because they understood what the longterm effects are uh and that's worked in their favor right so not like

uh movable type launching like exact uh Vox or this or like every 10 minutes they're changing their product they're not reactive right so they are defining their space and driving it and driving their community and not playing a very reactionary game like six aart and others played and we know how those ended up yeah they're just basically evolving the publishing platform making it better and yeah not like uh trying to Zig and zag every two minutes exactly which is generally not a great idea let's bring Lan in uh for the news do we have LAN unbelievable six weeks you since you broke your foot Y and Ankle I broke my foot and my ankle six weeks ago and uh yeah the foot's all healed done uh the ankle there's still a little crack you can see on an X-ray but they say within a week I can take the boot off so even with your horrible lifestyle and all the crazy stuff you do your body can heal in six weeks that is UN very rapidly and I don't know no physical therapy like it healed in alignment it all work I'm happy about that is incredible it really is it's amaz especially when you saw how bad it was versus BR foot he got in a fight with an iPhone trip that slipped I was talking on my phone and I just slipped right off a curb and fell and hit the ground Steve Jobs will be getting a lawsuit any day now uh let's hear what's in the news all right so uh lots to talk about I don't know if you want to talk too much about tech crunch disrupt we have a news article about it uh first ever Tech crunch disrupt conference was in New York City focused on innovators who are disrupting media and Technology uh to quote the website they're turning change into opportunity uh speakers and judges included yourself Tim Armstrong Carol Barts of Yahoo more about her in a moment Square founder Jack dorsy New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg uh don Dodge friend of the show Google advocate reporter David Carr Steve case Ron Conway and on and on uh 20 new startups presented products uh the finalists were betterment which is an online investment tracker that links directly to your checking account movie clips a searchable database of clips from films uh published to a comprehensive customized newswire for print Publications U Jam which is a cloud-based platform allowing musicians to create content online and the winner was saluto uh an application that crowdsources knowledge about PCS to help people who are frustrated and can't figure out how to use their PC uh so what did you think of the event I know you've talked about it a little already and uh what do you think you're going to do differently from Tech crunch disrupt at the launch conference uh great question uh this conference mixed was the majority of the conference was dedicated to existing companies that already were doing stuff and so what I find is when you have those companies and those big names Carol Barts Tim Armstrong and then you put little startups against next to them basically it's just not fair it's like having somebody who's like a new singer or a Pianist come up and then like you know in between you have Billy Joel and Elton John you know the stones come up and then you have like you know the you know Nirvana their first you know year of playing together it's just unfair yeah um and I'm not saying they did it to be unfair they did it because they wanted to have their cake and needed I guess um seemed like just wanted it to be like a huge event dve people the event was went from 9:00 a. m. till like 7:30 so it's too long in that way uh but overall you know you throw a lot of good big names in there it's going to be exciting um movie clips was well executed and they actually paid to get the rights to the clips wow uh and so I was on the judging panel with them and I gave them a really hard time trying to get them to because I wanted them to do well um and I was trying to get them to talk more about what was unique about their service because it really was the same service as any which was a tech crunch 50 company the year before so I told him I said this presentation was great but your presentation is great because you have funny clips for movies so I got to take off the value of that and just look at what you core you what you built and the core of what you built was very similar to any clips and I know Tyler you know this company pretty well and you know any clip pretty well uh but what they did do that was unique was they actually paid money and gave a guarantee to get those clips right so where any clip didn't get that done movie clips did Tyler what did you think of them when I was watching you do the judging from the judging part it sort of reminded me of um uh eating tacos in a tuxedo it brilliant it was nice it but it was something odd about it you know like it not it didn't quite feel right because normally you're uh I see you do that you know behind the stage and in the preparation of the show but to watch you do it on stage people are like holy [ __ ] he's ripping into these people you know like the tweets were like this guy's ruthless but in a very awesome way

right like and all the presenters would come off and be like thank God he was on our panel he just gave us some of the best feedback you know yeah and I had good conversations withone afterwards uh but you're right that usually happened back door uh at the TechCrunch 50 event so I think the general difference will be mine will be more like Tech crunch 50 I'm going to stay true to the format uh so more companies presenting and less probably what I'll do is I'll have just the 50 companies present mhm and then I'll have maybe two max four fireside chats with luminaries right lunch and dinner and call it a day and let the star shine uh and keep the focus on that well one thing that was interesting about techer is that The Luminaries were on the panels they were judging so you'd have very impressive people yeah but they would be there to evaluate other companies not talk about themselves and that's what I liked about it and this is this was a point of contention between Mike and I and Heather to a certain extent which was we have all these great people here and they're just judging you know and they really should be speaking about themselves and I said no that's you get that's the point you know like you get somebody famous like that and you have them judge it shows them off better than talking about yourself it's like you don't see me on this week in startups talking about Mahalo well you still learn about your perspective and youres but in a more authentic way and I think that's the difference and so it's just Nuance I mean listen I'm sure the conference did well financially um these conferences tend to do that the other main difference will be I'm going to take 100% of the profits from the launch conference and I'm going to offer that money with me as the angel investor so you get me and the money right to those companies that launch at the event so my hope is the event will make a couple hundred thousand doll which is what these kind of things can do and then I'll be able to put you know if they want it if 20 of the 51 or 10 or all 50 whatever but let's say I don't know 20 of them seems like a reasonable number would be raising an angel round after that uh and there's a half million dollar in uh profits yeah you know they can each get $25,000 and had me as an angel investor and then for me I won't make the short-term cash but if I do it for 10 years I'll have invested in 20 more startups a year it'll take my Angel Investing from 10 to 30 so that's my way because you know the first way it started was we said how do we Crush demo we don't charge and we give a PRI and then the next Evolution was give a prize now I'm saying don't charge give pay everybody and invest in them so I want it to be the best event to launch at and to get Angel Investors but the open Angel forum is going to come around and dovetail with it so you'll have all of the 150 angels from open Angel forum and growing at the event all right and they I'm have some things I'm not going to announce right now but there will be some involvement of the open inal Forum I'll leave it at that uh you didn't get to go I didn't get did you watch any of it uh I watched some um I you know I my feeling was it was a different conference than Tech runch 50 right um the coverage was obviously little different due to the structure uh it was interesting but it wasn't totally company focused so you just had a different mindset yeah none of the companies um and it's not a dict any of the companies the of the 20 companies that presented half of them would have made it into Tech rrif and the other half wouldn't have to be honest right so I think that maybe the field that applied I don't know if this was because they had a short deadline or the job they did in picking and preparing people but they didn't they didn't push people hard enough and so yeah I know that's a big part of the tech run 50 was the preow would be and also a big part of the tension between Mike and I so there was there were two issues between Mike and I one was there was creative tension the other one was money the money one uh was 100% Mike had nothing to do with me because I told him if you want all the money from the event I'll just take shares of Teck run I'll convert my entire thing and I'll join your board and whatever um and own some of runch I don't care about the money part of it on the creative side we did have tension and the tension was usually around two things one should this person be presenting or not and I think Mike was a lot more forgiving and I extreme on it Tyler was there for these conversations um and so it it's pretty hated at times where I just said no this person can't present Mike said this person's presenting it's my conference and I said no it's half your conference and we have to work this out together and uh the and to more to sort of that point which I think is really interesting is that you were very concerned with a meritocracy that yes nobody gets I don't care who this person is yes it could be Steve job's son it doesn't matter if it's not awesome and we won't both don't like it shouldn't get in and um and that is why I think that led to a lot of the strength of the events I think the creative tension between Mike and I was the reason it was so great and so my only concern with it is that I may not have that counter sort of Lenin McCartney kind of it had a little bit of that Len McCartney kind of a thing I mean obviously I was L more talented um Right Moving On well one more story from TC disrupt we have to talk about probably the biggest story uh it happened early on Yahoo CEO Carol Barts

was being interviewed by Michael Arrington challenged Bart's record at Yahoo compared it unfavorably to Steve Jobs time at Apple Barts responded to Arrington that she had only been at Yahoo 16 months that he's involved in quote a very tiny company and then she added and this is a quote I don't want to hear any crap about something magical that the fine people of yaho were supposed to do in this short time so F off but she didn't say F off she said the f word some praise Barts for her outspokenness and being a rare unfiltered CEO uh what did you think of her response and did you agree that was called for um you know part of what Mike does and this was all conjured up by Mike obviously it didn't have to go this way um you a provocator he's being a provocator and so people know that when Mike gets on stage with somebody this a pretty good potential that's going to happen so they show up yeah uh and so it is good that brings attention to the event and the only downside is if you lose the opportunity to actually have a really good conversation and get some good information share with people and I think that's what happened here was it got so aggressive so quickly and devolved so quickly that you actually didn't get to have her ask the question there's a more deaf way to do it and you've seen it here on the program with you know uh me doing stuff on stage far side chat Mark Cuban or whatever or just not right now I asked him a lot of question questions we got involved in a very good discussion and then I asked him about pumpkin head and he actually gave us a lot more information about pumpkin head than if I just said to him Mike Aron's approaches is you know you're going to tell me what pumpkin is right now right but I actually pulled out a pretty good idea of you know triangulating the sort of space that's in that nobody knows it's a pretty good nugget but you felt a little bit more comfortable okay Jason's not a jerk off he's not going to be a jerk to me whatever and if you come out you know with the guns blazing you basically shut the interv down and uh but anyway you have to um it's a missed opportunity and uh I don't want to say anything bad about Mike but you know he there's a lot of strengths so he there are times when he will get a great nugget out of people he can get good information out of people so he it's just a different technique yeah and the techque is very it can when it spirals out of control it's brutal and that's what happened here but you know what he it becomes the talk of the industry so he knows that he benefited from that overall I mean everybody was talking about him that day everybody watched that video clip so yeah and the only problem with it is I don't know that Carol Bart's ever coming back again you know so then you just basically left you burned that bridge yeah then again I write about Zuckerberg I don't think Zuckerberg's ever going to speak at the launch conference and if he was smart he would he he did invest in the uh open source alternative to Facebook so who knows yeah anyway what did you think of it the uh the Barts interview well I mean I it was a great piece of entertainment yeah and that's that pretty sums it up I think so uh we had a request from the chat room that we actually talk about the new dig so I went and look it is not out there is a video up on YouTube that shows a sort of sneak preview it's our first real look there was a twit pick that Kevin Rose sent out that you got like a half view of the screen a couple weeks ago but this is our first clear look uh the big changes is uh an onboarding process so it's one of those when you join you're like you're 40% done it encourages you to follow friends follow your favorite Publishers follow taste makers uh a suggestion that you import your social graph from Facebook and Twitter a personal section of your homepage called my news that's all the Publishers you favorite it and your friends uh a top news section that's going to be edited with the biggest stories of the moment uh a share feature that's basically like retweet when you dig something it goes to all of your friends uh Publishers can now autopost all content to dig via RSS that's awesome for as a Content uh sort of site and a simplified method for adding a new story you don't have to go through those like eight steps to dig something so it seems like a lot of major updates to deal with some of the major pain points particularly if you're a publisher um what do you think of these kinds of changes is there some major change to dig you would make that doesn't seem to be on that list Uh Kevin explained all this what he was planning like six months ago and I had a conversation with them I think the issue they have was people submitting to dig the human element there was slowing them down to the point at which Twitter and people retweeting stuff was beating them yeah and so that's a big problem if I go to dig and everything I see there is stuff that I saw in my tweet stream already which is happening I mean which is happening and so but if it's all automatically sucked in now you've taken out that you know five minutes or 10 minutes it takes for somebody to post it the chances of the Dig link getting retweeted are greater yeah and if they can personalize it then they might be able to expand the audience because people who go there and see Ron Paul and marijuana and you know whatever it is

the Dig audience likes Xbox you know it's like so I wish him well and you know it might give them a little boost I don't know what do you think you know I use dig for quite a while and I'm you know impressed with what Kevin built but it seems like yeah with the rise of Twitter they've lost kind of that attention you know from a lot of users so I think it's goingon to be tough to get the attention back um but you know I haven't seen a lot of the new stuff I saw the screenshot like in front of a river that was like you know half that was from like two weeks ago where it was like with the glare and the picture it looked interesting but you know I'm looking forward to trying it out and you know I'd love to use it again yeah uh next story yep uh so we should talk about the fake BP public uh relations Twitter account I've enjoying this all week uh it's at BP Global PR that's the fake one uh the real one by the way is uh is it BP Global PR all one word uh twitter. com and Twitter won't take it down Twitter's not taking it down there at bpor Amer is the real one has 7,000 followers the fake one had over 70,000 last night I'm sure it's more now 7,000 oh my God uh so it's gone up almost 10,000 Since I checked it last night um of course the oil rig explosion was almost a month ago it's been an ongoing sort of debacle they're calling it the largest oil spill in US history U so obviously this account is getting a lot of tension except it's offering satirical commentary about the lack of genuine cleanup efforts uh it's being written by a Anonymous person who's calling thems Terry uh here some of my favorites Barack Obama's angry and frustrated so are we this is really cut into our BP Good Times field trip fund uh if we had a dollar for every complaint about this oil spill it wouldn't compare to our current Fortune oil is a lucrative industry so is this that's a good one uh is this good satire or is it too dark considering the catastrophe is on going no this is great and how are they getting away with this why won't Twitter take this down doesn't it seem like Twitter takes down these kinds of s if it's so obviously yes so the fake they don't have a problem with it and it's not the exact you know it's not fake Carol Barts with the word fake at the start right so this is a little bit closer to the somebody could be misled but when you read what a gorgeous day the ocean is filled with the most beautiful rainbows you're welcome you know I think you pretty much understand that that's not legit but some people think that it was hacked yes at first uh eert I think it grew out of eert tweeted one of their I think it was like we can no longer promis that our oil is Dolphin safe or something was the tweet and eert retweeted it and suddenly it got a lot of attention and there were people who were like oh my God somebody hacked British Petroleum until they found out that there was a real BP account that they just haven't been using I think humor is a good way to deal with really bad issues like this and to draw attention to them and really that these people I you know I said on my Twitter stream that I think they should kill themselves and some people got upset at me for saying that but you know there was a time when people would kill themselves if they did something so horrible because they'd be so ashamed of what they did and these guys are Shameless yeah they really don't so clear they don't care seem that shaken up even by all no sense of urgency there was no apology there was no Mula moment I think that's what we we're looking for and not only that just complete incompetence and then if you look at the events that led up to the 60 Minutes piece two weeks ago was incredibly powerful when they guys's talking about you know jumping off a 120t rig and thinking about his daughter on the way down and he said it took forever to land and he lands in the water and he's covered in oil and he sees that the oil's on fire and he's like swimming away for his life and you realize wow people are dying and then you compound that by millions of other species and and life forms in the ocean are dying and I mean it's just it's disgusting it's really when you see the shots and the wildlife and these marshes that are just Brown It's just horrifying there's no sense of urgency their response has just been just the weakest right and I I read a piece I think it was in the times and if you kind of paraphrase what their CEO was saying he basically said why did this have to happen to us yeah you know why did this happen to us like I you know I don't know let's think about that you did the deepest water drilling ever yeah with the least preparation and then when there were problems you ignored them and told people to go faster right cuz they were burning like they think were they losing like a million dollars a day or something and so they're yelling at the guy like we're losing a million dollars a day like you just destroyed the whole Gulf you destroyed the Atlantic we only have the entire Gulf is just filled with a big pool of oil we got bigger problems the oils I mean really a million dollars a day I mean and there was like there was some sort of hatch or something they could have bought that was like half a million dollars or something that would have they could have used when this happened cap it they this is gonna I think that they should result in criminal charges uh and I know that you know like criminally charging

businesses supposed to be Shields and all this kind of stuff I think that these guys should be taken on criminal charges on a global basis every single country that has any type of morality or ethics should take these people to court and bankrupt this company and put them out of business that's what should happen because this is the biggest [ __ ] up 328 59 minutes take the F out this is the biggest [ __ ] up ever in terms of the environment and this might be one of the biggest fuckups in the history of I'm sorry to be cursing about infuriate about it is so unbelievable and they should not be allowed to operate a business these people you know like they ban some people from Ever trading stocks again these people should be banned from ever working at a job again other than like a hot dog stand well cleaning up they should be able they should get you know they should go clean up and work on the beach Dirty Jobs scr these guys qualified to be the co-host of dirty job they could work for the guy on Dirty Jobs they I honestly believe that the from employee number one all the way down to employee number 150 those 150 employees should be banned from ever working in any large corporation again this there's no ramification for doing something so [ __ ] up and getting away with it it's unbelievable it should be criminal charges and Obama is another huge disappointment you know what when did he come out and get upset about this yesterday yeah day definitely was a delay he has that like indignant on day 35 he always tries to like I can sort of wait this out and not get involved thing it seems like it's always like yeah let me see how this is going to play out such a politician you and keep everything yeah he really I mean he really is that's his greatest gift is as a Politico like I know but it's like weren't you the guy who was running against drill baby drill that's true and then he flips right over to drill baby drill and then now he's saying we have to get off now he's like and what this so he's he runs on I'm not the drill baby drill guy then he gets in office and he drill baby drills right then it gets [ __ ] up and then what does he do well now yeah now he's saying the real solution is we have to do clean energy it's a whole big part of his speech yesterday which I watched I mean it's infuriating how many times can one guy flip-flop yeah no I mean it it when he came out after being president said like oh now we're gonna do all this offshore drilling it really was one of those moments of well really League I knew the guy was not as liberal as he was being made out to be but that was surpris like I thought we had known that was a bad idea there's a very simple solution to our energy problems it's called nuclear and nuclear power plants sound scary they are not especially not compared to Drilling in the ocean and destroying the ocean nuclear is a much safer technology go to France where they've never had an incident and 90% of the country is powered by nuclear I arest my case China I don't think they've ever had an incident and China doesn't care about human life I mean they'll build a dam out of toothpicks over there they've never blown up a nuclear thing I mean put nuclear reactors I put one here on Santa Monica Boulevard I don't care free energy I'm sorry I'm just why youing this it's a bad topic to bring up because I call these guys terrorists and I think it's they really are terrorists when you I mean this is you know I don't want to minimize the lives that taken for terrorists but the scale of this is almost Unthinkable even for a terrorist organization like couldn't create destruction Bin Laden right now is so jealous they OS bin lad's going to kill they killed a lot of people so you don't want to minimize I guarantee you right now Osama Bin Laden is trying to figure out how he can uh model al- Qaeda after BP he's looking at their management structure and saying this is the level of debauchery that I need in my organization this is the level of absolutely not giving a [ __ ] about anybody but yourself and your own needs that I need in outside of Alca right well they are very ideological it's just not our ideology BP is not it's just money that's their ideology let me tell you something religion and money I mean these are very powerful drivers that's true Al Qaeda and BP this is like the merger that b this I can see B probably that'll be in the news in two weeks I see a press conference with Osama Bin Laden and the BP CEO M and they can just do a big joint venture of who can terrorize the world more Ian it's like the two of them could be James Bond villains in the same James Bond movie you know like sometimes they have like a secondary villain right well there's you think they're the villain and then you find out there was a villain behind yeah that's what they should do they should like the BP guy is probably the guy behind Osama Bin Laden yeah probably works for him we have to get out of here right we do uh we actually have to wrap up cuz Android starts in a half hour oh okay we got one More Story one more we have time for One More Story uh I'll give you a choice it's one of those where we got P nothing so about we've got a startup called block chalk it's a

geo location kind of one oh a geolocation startup we've got Facebook related photos and we've got the wired iPad app which I have on this very iPad you pick let's talk about block chalk we'll uh it's a startup they've raised a million dollars in seed funding from a variety investors including Lotus founder Mitch kapor battery Ventures founder Collective Tom maer founder Joshua shakor and many of the founders are actually from delicious block chalk Fe produces an iPhone app that allows you to leave notes for other users around your neighborhood so if you're in your neighborhood and you want to let somebody know where to get good gelato or your kitten got lost or you know there's anything like that uh you can leave a message it's known as a chalk and then other people who are using that app in the same area it'll just pop up onto their screen so uh it could be useful you know all kinds of like a good hole in thewall restaurant you want to recommend or that sort of thing uh but it's one of those things that's only really good if a lot of people in the neighborhood are using it so how do you overcome if you're block Chuck that chicken egg the app needs a big community in order to work but you have to build up that Community by giving them something really great yeah um you do you launch it in a small area with a dozen mavens uh post aond the company I was talking about which is doing deals sort of geolocation for deals they're getting 500 to 700 deals inside of New York they're only doing New York and they take all the those people out to dinner once a month if they get a certain number of deals in the system or something like that it's basically curating mavens which this next did we do here at Mahalo it's a sort of classic start small you know reach critical mass don't laun to other stud I mean four square rolled out like that uh right they were just only available in like eight cities yeah well they did it was just at South by Southwest and then they went to like four or five cities and then they brought so you sp slow roll out and Josh Sher is a smart guy told me about this one earlier it was very similar to ton in way it is yeah so it reminds me of Toni dot which was at Tech R 2 years ago I guess right and that was with augmented reality there's no reason this can't right this could be the same way I'm guessing it's going to and if it's even if it's not if it's just like here's a list of all the things close to you only other problem with this is uh getting the spam out of the system and sort of the Knuckleheads because let's face it this is what Twitter has this right the geocoding tweets so if I were to pull up all the tweets within 10 blocks this what's the relevancy yeah a lot of them would be just stuff you don't care about or I'm going to a party but to Josh's credit you know with the tagging system in delicious they were like if you're V if you're using delicious to get you know 30 people to vote for something to get on the delicious popular list we're going to deactivate your accounts from your votes for they basically would neuter your votes he told me it happened to me yeah so they neuter your votes and so I've been neutered and then what they would say is this is not the purpose of delicious is for you to personally bookmark your they're actually very like all the bookking sites say that but delicious is the only one that really follows like if you're using this to promote you're gone right it's not for promotion it's for you to keep your book and if you if 30 people happen to bookmark you know an article on Tech Crunch and it gets to the top list that's just the nature of the beast that's fine that's the part the point so if they if these are the same guys I think they're going to keep it under control uh it sounds like a small win to me MH that you could build on right I mean I think a lot of people and they were saying this in the chat room too it could theoretically be a feature that you add on to something like Yelp or Wala or for square all these other sort of check-in neighborhood based uh sites so I think they're going to have to come up with something to make this more of a go-to kind of destination as opposed to something an add-on I just got word uh breaking news story Jesus has just checked into the Santa Monica Apple Store really yeah right down the street walking distance this is the fake Jesus on at Jesus is that him there's at Jesus on Twitter yes it's pretty awesome um yeah I follow uh I follow at I I'm not they're asking chat we actually have a little monitor so I'm not mentally connected to the chat room um in housekeeping uh thank you to power VPS for providing fully managed virtual private hosting servers uh great customer service at a great price $59 a month uh you got to be put yourself in the cloud you don't want to be managing all these service it's a lot of work it's not worth it and twist viewers get 25% off not for this year not for next year for Life get in there make sure you claim the code because I don't know how long they're going to do it just put the discount code twist in TW uh in other startup news we have the startup Meetup happening on June 8th at 600 p. m. at 6 p. m. Pacific time so wherever you are you should plan your Meetup to coincide with that wait what time is it 600 p. m. our time in Santa Monica so if you're on the East Coast you should have the meet up overlap with 900 P p. m so you can watch the show uh we do have some International like in Shanghai China they're getting one together so those people are it's probably going to be crazy hours if they want to be on the show but we'd love to have everybody um amazing response so

far incredible I have right here there 152 meetups have been scheduled yeah which is 152 locations which is absurd when they got meet meetup. com wrot us an email and said hey here's our new system we'd love you guys to check it out and I thought you know oh this will be fun we'll get you know eight cities we'll get five or six groups together and we'll have a little fun discussion I had no ideaa it was going to be International here's the interesting thing I mean we have at least a cities with over 10 people already right and so these are going to grow and we were going to say if you have over 10 people we will check in with you live during the show so that's going to be the form of the show there's not going to be a guest I'm going to basically go to each City and then I'm going to talk to an entrepreneur in each City about their business right and so we're uh and I'm in touch already I think uh 16 of the cities have already reached out to me and I sent them some here's what we're looking for here's how to set up your Skype so if you are hosting in another city let me know Lon this weekend. com and I will coordinate with you we'll work out get getting you on the show and try to get 10 or more people on there because those are the cities we're going to prioritize during the show uh want to be a guest on S Jason or the Shark Tank just visit tinyurl. com Jason or tinyurl. com Jason sharktank all one word fill out the form and you will be on the air uh this week in Android coming up next at 4 P p. m right after this show and this week in Venture Capital 2 p p. m. Wednesdays we should really have this week venture capital B after my show that's a tighter think it's just you know Mark sister is the host of that one his schedule is sometimes tricky he's a very do Fridays at 12 and they can lead into my show I have suggested to him we are working behind the scenes on that build the power we got to build the power hour I would well because we're working on and this is top secret Insider information we haven't announced yet we're working on making Friday a sort of entrepreneurial tech block and then Sunday an entertainment block so more to come on that but we got Kevin poock show is the anchor on Sunday right and all of our this weekend casting call went well amazing if go to this weekend casting on our site this weekend. com you can actually watch the whole we've got the whole video up and have we followed up with all those people uh I not of them I followed up with eight we picked out eight between you me and Kevin that we decided were the cream of the crop uh I've been in touch with all of those people many of them we're actually workshopping Pilots with right now next week and the week after we've got four Pilots shooting wow moving quickly very quickly all non-tech shows they were great I mean we were overwhelmed by how many great people we had come in with great ideas Tim young founder and CEO of social cast congratulations on all your success keep crushing it uh spend that money wisely and uh please be less boring in your office sure if you could get a scooter or something like that of like a zipline or something zip line or something like that what can't you do in your office be such a crazy question yeah um I had to ask it because it's just so crazy uh and uh keep us apprised as to what happens with pumpkin head do you have a launch date or a time frame is it going be next year you know I think you know everyone in the team's kind of done this before in terms of launching a product and we're kind of taking the Blizzard Entertainment approach which is we'll launch it when we're ready but we'll have an alpha coming you know very soon oh very soon we can launch conference February 2011 might be too far away uh if you want to come to the launch conference you can do that by watching 10 of these shows live so if you watch 10 shows live check in with Roberta who's the uh I think her hand this week is her the this week chat room she'll say hello to you in the chat room uh check in with her and do a tweet that says I want to come to the launchconf decom m pound twist do it yeah the launchconf dcom the launc conference. com I know we had some there was confusion in the CH the launch conference is it somebody has the domain launch conference and it's like crummy spammy don't go there the launch conference. com the launch yeah just somebody's got a placeholder Set uh Tyler thanks for the inside tacos in a tuxedo we're getting the shirts printed up I think that I'm trying to figure out if the taco is like it's we'll talk about it offline metaphorical I'm trying to I think it means The Tuxedo is classy and helpful and good and then Taco is low Ren and messy and going to mess up your tuxedo so he's saying it's a clash you got a good you take the good with the bad right am I right it's not an ideal but at in at the same time it's very complex this one it's like an really this is a way Homer when you're out of context with a food style like that like a taco and a tuxedo it actually makes you focus on the quality of the taco that much more you notice this yeah so I'm thinking about all the times I've eaten tacos and tuxedos before trying to right I I think I understand just Ponder this one over the weekend we'll get back everybody have a great holiday weekend we'll see you next time on this weekend startups tell by my attitude that I most definitely fromy concrete J with tomato you