Ze Frank: There’s a body of work that’s in that other room. That body of work is not really mine at all. It’s people that watch the shows that I do. What I do is I work with them to create community-based or participatory projects. It’s a little unfair that I get to have my name on the placard because I actually didn’t do any of that. All I did was facilitate it. You’re going to be able to look at that stuff. I think it’s probably better for me because I think most of you are not familiar with the stuff that I do. I think you might be, a little tiny bit, and welcome. I think it’s going to be more helpful for me to talk about why I do this stuff to begin this because I imagine that’s going to be one of the major questions that’s on your mind, “Why I’m involved in virtual spaces. Why I’m taking a lot of time to work with all these different audiences.” The first is when Nina says “virtual community” how many people are starting to fall asleep, or at least have a certain sense that there is, pardon the word, a little bit of bull@#$% in that term? Would you just raise your hands to humor me? Now the people that were lying just now, you raise your hands.

It is interesting, right, because there is this notion of virtual communities. People are on the network. They’re spending more and more time in virtual spaces. That just means in front of a screen imagining a lot of the characteristics, really imagining a lot of the characteristics and the interactions that they’re having. They’re typing words, they’re seeing words get typed back, and they’re imagining faces behind those words. They’re imagining emotions and they’re helped out by smiley faces and all these different things. It is a different kind of landscape. It is a virtual landscape that is manifested in the interactions that you have with these objects. They’re very different from the real kind of interactions that we are having right now. Right? This kind of interaction is mediated by smells, and textures, and sounds, and all sorts of different characteristics. Quite frankly, it’s a little overwhelming. There is, at least on a graded scale, a difference between the kinds of interactions that happen in virtual spaces between the ones that we have, just in the amount of input that we get. Let’s just agree on that. There’s very little input that you get from screens, and you actually have to conjure up all of the meaning that’s coming from these kinds of interactions.

The question is, for me, when you have this massive transformation where more and more of life is being lived . . . When some of you, you probably get pissed off at people when you see them in the street, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk looking at their cell phones and smiling. You’re sort of like, “What are you doing?” The answer to that is they’re living. They are living life in that moment. They just happen to be living a portion of life that is not accessible to you. That is what the virtual experience is. The question, I guess that comes up, is when you have more than half of the population not participating at an aggressive level in that world, and then a new kind of group of people that are overly participating in that world, what kinds of knowledge is not coming across that chasm? I’ll give you one example. One example has to do with death. Handling death in the physical space has been mediated by literally thousands of years of incredible culture and tradition around the physical manifestation of saying goodbye to someone. We have processionals. We have ritualized ceremonies. We have prayers. We have mourning periods. We have all kinds of things that are all designed, and pass through generations and generations of undertakers. Right? These are incredible wealth. They’re just beings, objects. It’s just an amazing amount of knowledge. When you get into online spaces, we have lost an amazing amount of knowledge. When someone dies . . . I guess it’s funny. If you have a teenage boy who dies, and his mother then realizes that most of his friends were in online game spaces, there is very little resource for her to understand how you’re supposed to approach those people. There’s very little tradition about this whole process. Facebook has whole protocols about memorializing pages and not allowing new posts to come in, and things like that.

Everybody’s scrambling to fill this massive void. That’s a little bit of background on why this is so fascinating to me, and why I’m very particularly interested in why people come together to do things online. Then, as a secondary feature to that, what makes people feel online? Why do people feel? What do they feel about? Is there some sort of a craft, or emerging discipline, in shepherding emotion? Right? That’s what a lot of these kinds of disciplines are. That’s what an undertaker does. They shepherd emotion in physical spaces around very difficult things. I’m going to just sort of talk to you about how I got to this place. Trust me, I’m not going to talk about death the entire time. Here’s where the story starts.

In 2001, I filmed myself dancing to Madonna’s “Justify My Love.” This is prior to the video days, so these are actually kind of the homemade, crafted, animated .gifs that look a little video like. I put them together and I put them online as part of the invitation to my 29th birthday party. I put them online and I sent them to 17 of my closest friends. Within three days, over three million people had come to it. This was absolutely freaky, right? It was what we now call a “viral” event. That word had not been around very long at that point. There wasn’t much for me to compare it to, but I was getting emails from around the world. My dad found out about this from a colleague in Argentina before I was able to tell him about it. I was getting emails faster than my client could download them. It was coming in. They all kind of looked the same in a way, like, “Hi. You must have a lot of time on your hands. What is this crap, jackass?” I must have had four or five major responses, but we’re talking about hundreds, and hundreds, and thousands of emails. I didn’t sleep at night. I didn’t even know what was going on. It was so crazy. Then, all of the sudden my free website, supposedly, got a bill for $30,000 because even my service provider, in the small print somewhere along the line was sort of like, “In the event that 10 million people come and look at my thing, there’s going to be an overage charge based on usage.” It was kind of scary and kind of wondrous at the same time because what I was witnessing was this kind of network behavior, and it’s the kind of network behavior that we only talk about in terms of gods of war and things like genocide where just all of the sudden large groups of people act spontaneously all together.

It was transformational for me. I quit my job and spend the next three years just trying to figure out what had happened. I had gone to school for neuroscience. I had a little bit of programming background. I started to teach myself more about online programming and I did more of these kinds of things. I even did “How to Dance Properly Two.” I just had no idea what was going on here. I did a project every day for three years, including a bunch of weird little things like games. This was a game called “Atheist.” It’s a fully-functional game, but in the middle of it I realized that I wasn’t a good enough programmer to make a really great game, so this is just called “Atheist.” You can jump around and do things like that. I had discovered conceptual art at that moment. I’d also discovered the power of repetition, so this was “Buddhist.” This came very shortly after that. Exactly the same as “Atheist,” except in this one you come back as a duck. You can just play this game forever. It’s amazing. Then, the third manifestation, everything good comes in threes. Audience Member: Excellent. Ze: Yes. You guys are such optimists. It’s so cute. I love it. Nope, no, no. Game over. So that’s it. That’s the game. After a while I was doing these projects. I was doing a lot of videos and all these different things.

Photo Credit - Olivia Tierk

I had a message board on the side which was growing in size, 250,000, 300,000, 750,000. It was a large group of people, and I started running out of ideas. I started asking the community there on the message board to start doing things with me. This was around 2002, 2003. It was pretty wonderful. They got really, really good at responding to things I asked, and also just sort of playing by themselves. By the time that this image came in from a user, this cute picture of a dog that had just gotten neutered, they wrote over 3,000 haikus for that dog. Let’s pause a second. Enough. At this point, that initial thing, “How To Dance Properly,” has over 120 million views at this point, unique users. The website itself started to pick up traffic. I actually lost all of that, right. It went way down after that and I was sort of swimming in the world of being freelance which means unemployed. It slowly started because I was aggressively making all this content. I started to pick up traffic. But, no one knew anything about me at all because they were all coming to these individual things. I had decided that I was going to try to take all this stuff and put it into a show. I’d never really done a show before. I didn’t really know much about performance. I just kind of turned the camera on one day and said, “I’m going to do a show. It’s going to be two to three minutes long. The show is going to be determined by the interaction with the audience.”

The very first show I kind of just bumbled around. It’s quite embarrassing and awful, but I did it every day for a year. In the process of that, I started asking my audience to do things. For example, at one point, I said, “I’m sorry, but everyone has to dress up their vacuum cleaners, and we have one day to do it.” A thousand people dressed up their vacuum cleaners, which turns out to be a remarkably wonderful thing to do, right? I have to just pause for a second. If you start thinking about what this is, I’m asking a lot of people to do something. You can’t just ask people to do anything. That doesn’t work. I found that out very resolutely by asking them to do a lot of very stupid things. But, you ask them to do things. There’s one or two different kinds of goals that are part of this. One is you want them to have a good experience while they’re doing that thing. If you design a wonderful project, they have an amazing time doing the actual work. At that stage, your work is kind of done. The next phase of it is that you want people who aren’t participating to enjoy looking at all the results. You have to factor in all this different stuff in the course of these projects. That kind of sensibility is imbued in those projects out there.

I did hundreds of these kinds of projects and the thing was that people kept on responding, and responding beautifully so the task became how do we make these projects bigger, and bigger, and bigger. On the way back from Spain, I had this idea of creating an Earth sandwich. Which basically the idea was the Earth has probably never been an actual sandwich, meaning that two pieces of bread have not been perfectly opposite each other exactly at the same time on the globe thus making an Earth sandwich. You cannot refute my logic here. I created this project where a Mac would find you your antithesis, your antipathy. These, for example, right here correspond to, unfortunately, the Indian Ocean. It turns out that the United States is across from water, with the exception of two very, very tiny, tiny parts of the United States. We are all across from water. I thought that the majority of my audience, 60, 70 percent, was in the U.S. I was like, “Oh, this is never going to get done.” What people started doing, they started laying pieces of bread on the ground in tribute to the project with their different locations, and that started growing and growing. Then, within a week and a half I got this email from a guy. He was like, “Hey, I’m on the island of Fiji, and I realized that the antipathy for me is two miles away from the consulate in Mali, in the African nation of Mali. I called them and surprisingly they seemed totally fine. But, they said that it would cost me.” That was a non-starter, unfortunately. Then, within the two weeks, the very first Earth sandwich was made between New Zealand and Spain. I, unfortunately, won’t show you the video associated with that, but it was pretty incredible. Since then, hundreds and hundreds of Earth sandwiches have been made. This was all done with geo- positioning. There’s a video of these two guys running through a field in Spain. They’re being chased by God.

Photo Credit - Olivia Tierk

I’m going to leave you with this, and that is that there are certain kinds of projects. There are hundreds and hundreds of projects. You’re going to see, if you just look around, some of the different things that we’ve done with this newest show that I launched in April. There’s hundreds of projects that I’ve done with folks, but there’s some that resonate perfectly with me in terms of why I’m doing this kind of thing. I’m going to just show you one. I found this piece of audio. This was in 2006. Somebody sent me this piece of audio. I Googled it, I could not find a source for it, no mention of it, nothing. This was the piece of audio: “Hi, my name is Ray and yesterday my daughter called me because she was stressed out because of things that were going on with her job that she felt were quite unfair. Being quite disturbed, she called for comfort. I didn’t really know what to tell here because we have to deal with so much mess in our society. I was led to write this song just for her, to just give her some encouragement while dealing with stress and pressures on her job. I figured I’d put it on the Internet for all employees under stress to help you better deal with what you’re going through on your job. Here’s how the song goes. [sings] “I’m about to whip somebody’s ass. I’m about to whip somebody’s ass. If you don’t leave me alone, you’re going to have to send me home, because I’m about to whip somebody’s ass”. Now you might not be able to sing that out loud, but you can hum it to yourself, you know what I’m saying. Let it give you some strength and get through the next few moments on your job, alright. Peace. I will tell you, here’s the thing, right. I heard this piece of audio and I was like, “Oh my gosh. This is a perfect encapsulation of what I love doing, and why I’m doing the stuff that I’m doing.” He understands that there’s an emotional reaction happening at a distance from him from somebody that he cares about. He has the instinct to make media to address it in some sort of a way, and then he uses the virtual world to transmit that, and has the instinct that there are many other people that will probably also have use for this thing.

This is like a crystallization of the strength of the network. We are in a fractal-like way just blast across the network. Things that you think are isolated in in your experience, you are not. In fact, the things that make us feel the most alone are the things that have the greatest potential to connect us to other people. That is absolutely true. Listening to this, I was like, “We have to do something for this guy. This is an amazing thing. I have to say thank you.” I asked my audience to make re-mixes of this because he has a great voice. I was like, “use the track, do something with it.” Hundreds and hundreds of remixes came in. Everything from big band style stuff, to metal, and all this kind of stuff. One kind of stood out. One was remarkable. It rose from the top download in all these music sharing services. I’ll play you a little bit of that track right now. [music playing] Wait for it. Wait for it. [music continues playing] It was awesome. This thing goes out there and all of the sudden I’m getting emails like, “The minor league baseball team that plays in my town just came out to this song.” It was like, “The used car dealership in my town uses this as the backing track to their ad.” This thing is like going out there, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing.” They’re putting together an album. They’re making an album cover out of it. I said, “If you guys do this and put this together, put all the remixes onto a CD, I will hand deliver it to this person.” The problem is, I don’t know anything about him. There was no information, nothing. We knew his name was Ray, and his daughter had a problem. That was it.

I figured that there was not very likely chance we were going to find, based on that criteria. I said, “If you find him, I’ll deliver it to him.” It took them a week and a half to find Ray. They did it by just blasting message boards all across the web. Finally somebody said, “Hey, I work in a bank and a friend of mine at another bank told me a story about one of her friends there who got a song from her dad.” Then he contacted her. In a week and a half I got a note. It was like, “Hi, Ze, this is Ray. I hear you’re trying to contact me.” Which is awesome. You know, you write back. That’s one of those emails that you write like 50 times, and you keep throwing out because you’re like, “Yes. Funny thing . . .” It was wild. I kept in communication with him and finally arranged to fly down to Kansas City, where he lived and meet him. I went to just like a little motel for the night. He would only agree to meet me in my hotel room. He brought four people with him, big, big dudes. It was definitely like a very weird scene. I’ve got my little laptop out and everyone’s sort of like standing around. I met him, right, and that’s Ray. He’s a preacher, but he’s all sorts of things. He’s like a very, very dynamic, really interesting guy. It was lovely, you know, he cried a little bit. He was definitely weirded out. If you just put yourself into his shoes, it’s a very, very weird experience. Hundreds and hundreds of people have been spending hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of hours making something for you because you affected them in some sort of way. I think that that’s like a really wonderful little encapsulation of the reason that I do this stuff. The reason this exists is because there are tons and tons of people that resonate with that kind of stuff and are interested in, I think, the craft and the responsibility of taking emotion seriously in virtual spaces. I think it’s going to sort itself out regardless, but I want to be a part of it. I think all of you should be, too, because you have a massive, massive wealth of knowledge inside of you to share. With that, I thank you all for being here tonight.

Interrogated by:
Matthew Swinnerton
Matthew@InterrogationHub.com
Twitter – @Swinnerton

Swinnerton: If I were to ask you “who is Gina Lujan?” (which I am asking) what would you say?

I guess I am a free spirited social entrepreneur. I am a bit feisty, extremely passionate, and I genuinely love people. Oh and I am a goof ball.

Swinnerton: Can you tell us where you are from and where you are living now?
Lujan: I am originally from West Los Angeles but I have lived most of my life in Sacramento, which is where I am now.

I had a three year stay in the Bay Area and that truly changed my life.

Swinnerton: Who inspires you?
Lujan: First, my husband, nana, and children. They are my muses. All that I am is because of them. Outside of that my community and Richard Branson.

I am absolutely in love with my community and all that they do for what they believe in. They fuel me and keep me going.

Richard Branson’s wisdom is astonishing to me and he is my Yoda. I don’t know him but aspire to meet him one day.

Swinnerton: Now tell us a little about Hacker Lab? What is it? How did it start?
Lujan: Hacker Lab is awesome! It’s so many things. We support startups with bootstrapping space and a collaborative community.
It’s a great think tank. It’s a hacker and maker space. We have a hacker space for coders and maker space for makers as well as 12 offices for startups.

We focus on community driven education and mentorship in the technology sector with Meetups, classes, and events. It started one year ago when I posted an ad on Craigslist to find a Co-Founder for a hackerspace. One week later I found my first Co-Founder. It was truly Co-Founder at first site. One year later we are over 640 strong and in a 10,500 SQ FT building and there are three of us now leading Hacker Lab.

Swinnerton: What goals do you have for Hacker Lab?
Lujan: To continue our mission to support our community and eventually expand to other regions that need community innovation. We are still working on building out our maker space and that is our priority right now. Currently we are working on a college curriculum using open source edu and a Hacker Lab TV channel.

We eventually would like a formal accelerator for startups.

Swinnerton: When you hear or read the word “community” what do you think of?
Lujan: I think of people helping people. Community is a powerful and I think community can change the world. Especially with education and mentorship.

Swinnerton: So I read that you have 6 children!!! How do you do all that? How do you balance family life / work life? Having 6 kids is harder than 99% of the jobs out there.
Lujan: I do have 6 children!!!! I had them very young because I left home at a very young age so they are all grown and gone except one. Anita is 14 and a freshman in high school. My children are 25, 23, 21, 20, 19 and 14.  I was really young so I did not break a sweat and I was a kid too so we just hung out. These days I try to keep the better half of my Saturdays open and no work on Sundays. We have movie nights and I make an effort to be with my family as much as I can.

Swinnerton: We talked about the goals you have for Hacker Lab, but what goals do you have personally?
Lujan: OMG, so many! I want to travel the world and help spread the community education bug in hopes of sparking innovation. I speak where ever I can to talk about the power of  community education and workspaces. I currently have a contract with a rural city consulting on the topic of innovation. I want to write a book, speak, and devote my life to helping communities.

Swinnerton: It’s hard to pick sometime but tell me 3 books that you enjoy and briefly why?
Lujan: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

I stole this book from a coffee shop (don’t worry I replaced it with another goodie) and I think it was a universal sign because I was really trying to understand why Hacker Lab took off so fast. It was a phenomena that I didn’t quite understand and the book gave me some “ahhhh” moments.

Startup Communities by Brad Feld
This book has been a bible for me in building our community. I have learned so much and it helped me validate  many of the things we were doing right as well as teaching me leadership skills.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire
This book is painted so vividly you feel like you are there and just takes me away plus I feel very green and awkward sometimes.

I can relate.

Swinnerton: What makes you happy?
Lujan: Helping and inspiring people makes me extremely happy. There are no words to describe the feeling of giving. Great moments with my family. They are my everything and they make me smile. Innovation, reclaimed treasures and repurposed items, vinyl records, art, Santa Cruz, and iced Americanos.

Swinnerton: How can you help change the world?
Lujan: Bringing people together and inspiring them to do great things because they are awesome can change the world.

There is so much power in people and communities. It’s really crazy. I have truly witnessed people moving mountains to make great things happen with just the power of human collateral. Want to change the world, start a cohort. Be innovative!

To follow Gina:
twitter @ginalujan
linkedin.com/in/ginalujan
google+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/115677144454580639074

Interrogated by:
Matthew Swinnerton
Matthew@InterrogationHub.com
Twitter – @Swinnerton

About Peak Hosting: Q&A with Founder and CEO Jeffrey Papen

Q: Where were you working when you got the idea to start your own hosting business?

A: I spent five years at Yahoo and Excite building and running their U.S. and international networking and data center environments. I knew how operations should be run because I was running some of the biggest Web portals at the time. I saw what was being offered in the managed hosting world, and my first thought was, ‘you’ve got to be kidding me!’ I was floored at how much people were paying and how little they were getting. And I thought people can (and should) get so much more for their money. There’s a mountain of opportunity here, and the mountain is only growing.

Q: Where had you worked before Excite and Yahoo?

A: I spent two years building and running the YouBet! national horse racing network. I spent my college years getting a C.S. degree and also running UCLA’s campus network. So I’ve been doing this for 20 years now.

Q: When you started Peak Hosting, how did you begin?

A: It was just me and one other developer that was helping with some of the tools and automation. And then we started hiring more consultants and architects and just kept growing it organically. I deliberately didn’t take any outside investment for the first eight years until I was ready to really uptick the growth trajectory because I did not want our decisions to be influenced by shareholder short-term desire to maximize return. I didn’t want the customer experience to take a back seat to the economics of making quick money. At the end of the day, I would rather do things right than make a fast buck because this is what will bring the longest, and most sustainable, success.

Q: When you first started, was your plan to stand out in the hosting industry? Or was it just to offer better service?

A: If I were to describe the industry, then and now in a nutshell, it’s “Here’s a (crappy) server. Good luck with that.” That’s the easiest way to describe both the quality of the service and the quality of the support. And I knew that there was a massive amount of room for improvement. But also philosophically, I didn’t want to play in the $5 a month, $10 a month, $20 a month space, and then make it up by having 100,000 customers. I’ve always said that nobody wins a race to the bottom, and if you’re offering self-serve, cookie-cutter commodity service, the only thing left to differentiate on is price. I never wanted to deliver that kind of product.

Q: Have you changed your philosophy at all since then?

A: Not one iota. Peak Hosting is only satisfied if we’re answering questions the customer doesn’t even know they have. I like that we’re high-touch and think of ourselves as our customer’s operations department. You’ll never hear me say we want to be the customer’s “partner.” That word has been beaten to death by our industry, devolving to only including “We’ll cash the check.” I like that we don’t have a massive number of customers, because if all a customer is a seven-digit customer ID to their provider, what kind of relationship do they have? Those values haven’t changed at all.

Q: Where in the process did you first feel like you were successful at what you were doing?

A: I named the company Peak Hosting because of my love for the outdoors and especially mountain climbing. The first time that really I felt like I built something successful was when in 2006 when I could take four weeks climbing Mt. McKinley in Alaska, and the company didn’t implode—in fact, it was even bigger when I returned.

Q: Do you have any good war stories from when you were starting out?

A: We constantly had to grow and grow and grow our data centers. And even though we migrated our data centers four times in ten years as we expanded, our customers didn’t have to do much of the work. We did most of the heavy lifting for their move for them. So we were even doing Operations-as-a-Service^SM within a co-lo world, which is unheard of. And we’ve learned the value of joining forces with data centers providing the ability to grow. We learned the value of picking our vendors wisely based on more than price, but also shared philosophy and values.

Q: Considering where you started and the changes in the industry, how do you feel about where Peak Hosting is today?

A: I can’t say that I love the economic headwinds businesses and families are experiencing, but I remain very thankful that those realities encourage more businesses to explore outsourcing. The industry’s thinking has shifted beyond the myopic “No one can run an operations department better than we can” to an open-mindedness toward outsourcing. This has been a windfall for Peak Hosting. Businesses’ need to do more with less money is a fantastic coup for, and validation of, our Operations-as-a-Service model.

What’s frustrating, because it destroys trust unilaterally in outsourcing, is that so many of my competitors don’t follow our philosophy of “what’s the most I can do and not the least I can get away with” and “how do I design a system where component failure doesn’t escalate into service failure.” Their short-term vision of saving every penny through shortcuts in staffing, support, redundancy and architecture has decimated the reputation of uptime and quality in the outsourcing industry. “Cloud” has a stink associated with it, and the stench is the apathy of most managed hosting providers that just want to maximize their profit, even when it threatens their customers’ uptime. Because of that, I think the adoption rate is a hundredth of what it would have been had managed hosting providers adopted Peak Hosting’s practices and philosophy over the last decade vs. a succession of well publicized and embarrassingly avoidable self-inflicted outages.

Q: What were your most difficult years?

A: No question, 2008 and 2009. It was as though all commerce stopped and everyone crawled under a rock, waiting for 2010 to come. Those were far and away the hardest years because we had our first investor in 2008 and positioned ourselves for a lot of growth and then had to do an about-face and retool to move away from commodity services. But the downturn really made us realize that we had to get away from co-lo’s, bandwidth and bullshit commodity stuff, and focus on a level of service that no one else can provide. It really galvanized us to stand out, take it up a level, and only provide services no one else in the industry could touch.

Q: If you could go back and do anything differently, what would it be?

A: I should have realized 12 years ago what the true value of what Peak Total Operations^SM is, and our AlwaysUp Architecture^SM. And I would have been beating that drum louder. I just didn’t realize just how special and unique our product was, and what continued to be missing from other providers’ offerings. Services like co-location are a race to the bottom without any realistic method to differentiate except on price.

Q: Do you have any words of wisdom for other startups?

A: You can only spend a dollar once, so be careful what you spend your money on. And the only thing that you have less of than money is time, so be even more careful what you spend your time on. Concentrate on the things that only you can do and that fundamentally move the needle for your business. Everything else, either delegate or let it sit.

Q: What’s next for Peak Hosting?

A: Global expansion. Why should only America benefit from what we’re doing? It’s not like the challenges of running an operations department are unique to the United States.

LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypapen
website – http://www.peakhosting.com

Interrogated by:
Matthew Swinnerton
Matthew@InterrogationHub.com
Twitter – @Swinnerton

Swinnerton:

Ravenscraft: I am a full-time podcast producer, consultant, coach and public speaker.  I am the founder of the Generally Speaking Production Network (gspn.tv).Together with my wife, Stephanie, and a few close friends, I have produced well over 3,000 podcast episodes, since December 2005, devoted to Entertainment, Family, Faith, Fitness, Career and Technology.

In January 2008, I left a very successful career as an insurance agent, to pursue podcasting full-time. I felt called spend my life serving the community that had formed around the many shows in my network. Being a husband and father of three, I needed to find a way to produce content, serve my community, and also provide for my family. I spent years focused on successfully generating income through coaching/consulting at PodcastAnswerMan.com. I have helped thousands of individuals and organizations launch successful podcasts though one-on-one consulting/coaching and through my online training courses.

Swinnerton: What did you do before you became the Podcast answer man?

Ravenscraft: Prior to my life devoted to podcasting and online community building, I had a very successful career as an insurance agent.  I was a licensed property, casualty, life and health insurance agent for eleven years in our family run insurance agency.

Swinnerton: What was the first podcast you ever heard?

Ravenscraft: This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte.  Actually, back then, it didn’t yet have a name, but this eventually turned into what is now known as This Week in Tech.

Swinnerton: What were some of your early podcast favorites?

Ravenscraft: My favorite podcasts back in 2005/2006 were This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte, The Daily Breakfast with Fr. Roderick Vonhogen, and The Transmission Lost Podcast with Ryan and Jenn Ozawa.

Swinnerton: What are your favorite podcast now?

Ravenscraft: Today, my favorite podcasts are The Break with Fr. Roderick Vonhogen, 48 Days Online Radio Show with Dan Miller, This Is Your Life with Michael Hyatt, The God Journey with Wayne Jacobsen, This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte, and MacBreak Weekly with Leo Laporte.

Swinnerton: So how are you making a living with podcast?

Ravenscraft: I covered this with some detail in a blog post that I wrote at http://PodcastAnswerMan.com/income.  In addition to that blog post, I posted a one hour video of a talk that I gave where I went into even further detail on this subject that can be found at http://podcastanswerman.com/235.

In summary, have found that the best way to generate income from my podcasting efforts is to do so indirectly through promoting my own products and/or services and through affiliate relationships with other products and services, that I trust and believe in, that would also be relevant to my audience.

A majority of my income comes from the exposure that I get through my Podcast Answer Man podcast.  As folks who listen to my Podcast Answer Man show each week come to know, like and trust me, they become eager to take their own online efforts, through podcasting, to the “next level.”

As a result, I make a great deal of income through equipment sales, affiliate commissions for products and services related to podcasting, direct income from my own webinars and digital training products, my one-on-one coaching and consulting, and my four week http://PodcastingAtoZ.com online training course.

I’m also the founder of The Podcast Mastermind (http://PodcastMastermind.com) which is an exclusive mastermind organization for those who are involved in podcasting. These are just a few of the ways that I generate income, indirectly, from my podcasting efforts.

Swinnerton: What would you say to a blogger that is thinking about making a podcast. What is going to be the benefit to them?

Ravenscraft: I would say that there are 97 million people in America that drive to work alone every single day.  The average commute is 26.2 minutes.  Almost every single one of these individuals now have a smart phone capable of subscribing to and playing an audio podcast on demand.

I would also say that there are millions of written blogs out there.  There are only a few hundred thousand podcasts that exist.

Basically, this is an opportunity to expose your message and your brand to an entirely new audience.

Swinnerton: What is your goal for your company this year?

Ravenscraft: I am still working on my 2013 goals.  Things have been rather busy the past six weeks.  However, off the top of my head, here are two goals.

A) To personally be responsible for helping a minimum of 1,000 new SUCCESSFUL podcasts get launched in 2013.

B) To work with top online influencers, help them see the value in podcasting and turn them into podcast evangelists so that podcasting becomes mainstream.  I will not rest until there is a Barbie movie where Barbie is listening to a podcast on her smart phone.  For those that don’t know this, there are already a few Barbie movies where Barbie is referring to Twitter.

Swinnerton: What makes you happy?

Ravenscraft: Knowing that the content I create is having a positive impact on people’s lives.

To learn more about Cliff J. Ravenscraft:

Twitter – https://twitter.com/gspn
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/cliffravenscraft
LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/in/cliffravenscraft

My Podcast Network: http://gspn.tv
Consulting, Tutorials, & Equipment Sales: http://PodcastAnswerMan.com
Please Join My Mailing List: http://PodcastAnswerMan.com/mailinglist

Interrogated by:
Matthew Swinnerton
Matthew@InterrogationHub.com
Twitter – @Swinnerton

Swinnerton: Ted, tell me about your background. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? And where are you now?

Chen: I was born in Bangkok, Thailand, where my mom worked for the United Nations. When I was four, she transferred to the UN headquarters in New York City. To keep introductions short, I tell people that I’m from New York. I completed high school at Northwood School, a prep school in Lake Placid, NY known for athletics. I was on their ski racing team. Then I went to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, for my BS and Masters in electrical engineering.  At Cornell, I lettered with the varsity ski team, partied hard, and studied harder. I met my wife, Eileen, while I was going to graduate school in Boston.  We have been married for 32 years and have two wonderful sons. One is a chief game designer for a hot company making mobile video games. The other is a character animator who has worked at Disney. Eileen and I live in Capitola village, just a few minutes walk from the Esplanade.

Swinnerton: What are some of your career highlights before ProductCentral?  

Chen: My first job title was “Control Systems Engineer/Scientist for the Delta Rocket” at McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) in Huntington Beach, so I can legitimately claim that I was a “rocket scientist.” I designed rocket and missile feedback control systems and developed computer simulation programs. As a side project, I developed the company’s first graphical and interactive application for control system design. I used the application to interactively optimize my designs and to automatically plot charts for my reports to NASA. That beat bringing a stack of punch cards to the mainframe, waiting for hours for a printout, and hand drawing the charts. I was asked to work on the Space Station, since we had just won the contract. But after three truly rewarding years there, I decided to go back to school to earn my MBA. So, I attended Harvard in Boston, where I met and married Eileen.

After getting my business degree, I was itching to get into product management for a computer company, and was recruited by HP to work at their computer division in Fort Collins, Colorado. At first, I was a product manager of a product that nobody wanted, but I treated it like my baby and championed it. That was recognized, and I was quickly promoted to manage a team of product managers. Then I was very fortunate to be promoted to lead multiple managers and a large team that launched the highly successful HP9000 line of engineering workstations. That product line exceeded $1 Billion within a couple of years. After over ten years at HP, I decided it was time to join a smaller company. I became VP marketing for Storage Dimensions, which was based in Milpitas, and I helped take the company public. We decided to merge with another company near San Diego, and I became VP marketing for the combined companies with $300 Million in revenue. But unfortunately, the merger just did not work out.

I was recruited to join a small, twenty-person company, Prisa Networks in San Diego. Their CEO and investors wanted someone to help them transform from being a hardware company to software. I created the strategy and concept for the product, which was software to manage networked storage systems. The founder/CEO, our Board, and investors agreed to use what was left from our Series A funds to develop a prototype. I drove its development and cold-called Compaq, who agreed to invest in a Series B round. We were able to secure additional funding from GE Capital and Intel. With that, the CEO asked me to take on responsibility for engineering, marketing, and operations. We were able to build up our team, focus entirely on software, and develop our version 1. We grew the company to around eighty dedicated and wonderful people. We wanted to have the best environment for Java software developers in San Diego, and I think we achieved that. Another big break happened when we got Dell interested in our product. We collaborated with them to build our version 2. Dell convinced EMC, the largest data storage hardware and software company in the world, to acquire us.

Upon the acquisition, I was given a strong incentive to stay with EMC for a few years. Eileen, I and our younger son moved to the Boston area, to be near EMC’s headquarters. EMC was just starting to get into software in a big way and acquired several smaller software companies including Prisa. They were lumped into the Emerging Business unit, where I was named VP of product management. In a few short years, EMC acquired much larger software companies including Legato, Documentum, Smarts, and VMware. The latter became the gem of all gems. I became CTO for EMC’s virtual storage software division and got involved with the acquisitions strategy and helped integrate the companies into EMC. It was thrilling to be a part of EMC during that software acquisition era. I cannot say enough about EMC, their CEO Joe Tucci, and his team.

We moved back to the Bay Area, because I was recruited to join Adaptec as Senior VP and GM for a $400 Million division that was in trouble. I was one of several new executives brought in to turnaround the company. We had nearly a half billion dollars in cash to acquire companies, and we wanted to transform Adaptec into a software company. But the same cash attracted a hedge fund that became an activist shareholder. They took control of the company and derailed our turnaround. All of the executives left Adaptec, and then the Great Recession hit. I thought long and hard for over a year about starting a business. But I couldn’t figure out a viable business concept that could be bootstrapped in an awful business climate. I decided to look for employment and was fortunate to join Cisco to lead a product management team in their network management software division.

Swinnerton: What did you learn from working for large companies like Cisco and HP?

Chen: At HP, I learned a lot about managing people. They gave me my first management job, and boy did I have some rough edges at first. Nevertheless, I was recognized for my better qualities, and I was promoted rather quickly. Over time with help from my manager mentors, employees, trainers, books, and my wife, I became a more centered manager who is concerned about employees’ feelings, development, and participation.

Being at an excellent company, as HP certainly was back then, enables a person to develop a solid foundation for life. At HP, I experienced excellent organization processes and a renowned value system and culture. I encourage all young people who are interested in eventually starting their own businesses to consider first joining a larger and excellently run organization to lay down the fundamentals. The HP-Way is part of my DNA.

At EMC, I learned more about what makes for great strategy development and corporate execution. As a VP, I was given the opportunity to participate in the upper management processes to manage a large and growing multi-billion dollar organization. I also learned a lot about what it takes to transform a large company from hardware to software. At Cisco, the SVP of my software group came from Oracle and brought in some new software design philosophies. He hired a large team of user interface designers. From them, I learned the product differentiation advantages of tying together customer use-cases with elegant user interface design in order to generate, what we called, the “wow factor,” or a delightful user experience.

Swinnerton: Why and how did you make the change from the corporate world to founding and running your own company?  

Chen: My career plan, ever since graduating from business school, was to first work at a larger organization and then to become a leader at smaller organizations, where I could make a more significant organization impact. Looking back at my career progression, that is generally what I did after leaving HP. I only re-entered a large organization, EMC, after Prisa Networks was acquired by them. Going to Cisco was an exception, and I was fortunate to land there during the depths of the last recession.

At Cisco, I along with many other more “senior” employees received an offer for an early retirement buy-out. For me, that was too good to be true and to turn down. I took the offer without knowing what I would do next. But I did know one thing. I had to take advantage of the opportunity to again start a successful business of some sort. We decided to move from San Jose to Santa Cruz county while I thought through my next move and how to re-position myself. Why not? We wanted to be next to the water and to live in the most beautiful part of California. To help fund my new venture, ProductCentral, I have used my early-retirement package, and I can’t thank Cisco enough to have helped make it possible.

Ever since Prisa Networks, I have always wanted to get back into that type of environment. I’m talking about a smaller company that’s a fun place to work, where each employee can make a huge difference, and that is distinguished and recognized for its innovative contributions, strategy, and outstanding culture and values. The Prisa experience was the most personally rewarding time in my career up until now. I cannot thank Prisa’s founder and CEO, Marc Friedmann, enough for giving me that opportunity. Now, I would love to re-create that type of experience, and with ProductCentral, I have the opportunity to fulfill that vision.

Swinnerton: What have been some of the challenges?

Chen: After having developed successful strategies for larger organizations, one would think that I should be able to easily develop a strategy for myself. Not the case! I had to ask myself what could I do that fit with my financial assets, personal objectives, family objectives, core competencies, and passion and at the same time provide for competitive differentiation and advantage. It took me some time and moving to the beauty of Capitola, to figure that out. A lot of my core competencies, when it comes to technology and marketplace domain expertise, are in the area of IT datacenter infrastructure software and hardware. But to do anything in that domain, I reasoned, would require financial capitalization well beyond my personal assets. And I really wanted to do something that could be self-funded.

Then, once I determined what I should do – which was to make a software-as-a-service product  – the next question was how to go about developing it. I could conceivably outsource it. Or find a founding technology partner who could do most of the development. Or be crazy enough to do it myself. Although I had managed software development directly or indirectly for 15 years, I was not a professional programmer. As I thought about finding a technology partner, I could not identify a person whom I knew and trusted and who would be willing to make the required investment and personal sacrifice. I became convinced that I could probably get to market faster by doing it myself, rather than try to find the right partner, which could take however long. It was a calculated risk.

I was influenced and motivated by a recorded webcast of David Heinemeier Hansson’s talk to the entrepreneur program at Stanford. David, who is the creator of Ruby on Rails and now a Principal at 37signals, makes a strong case for self-funded software companies, as opposed to bringing in venture capital. David is also the creator of BaseCamp, a wildly successful software-as-a-service for project management. I was also encouraged by Eric Sink’s book, “The Business of Software,” which provides a fast lesson for “MicroISV” (small independent software vendor) wannabe’s.

My next challenge was to determine what technology I should become expert enough in and to use. I decided against using Java, even though that was the technology we used at Prisa. I wanted to use a language that was more modern and that could get me to market faster. For a while, I dabbled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I attended several Ruby Meetups and hackathons. But I ultimately settled on the Python programming language and Django. Django is the equivalent to Ruby on Rails, but for Python programmers. Python, I feel, is more aligned with ProductCentral’s data analysis requirements. It has been adopted at Google and Facebook in a big way.

So, the technology challenges that I had to overcome included choosing and learning new software technologies, architecturing the software to be truly multitenant, cloud-based and scalable, designing the software, developing and testing the code, and deploying it. It’s been a wonderful journey in a relatively short period of time. Along the way I have learned a lot about many incredibly robust, productive, and open source software technologies and cloud platforms, like Amazon Web Services. Many technologies that I chose were not available just five years ago. I got a lot of help along the way from books, by googling, and from advice posted on StackOverflow and other developer websites. It is a wonderful time to be a software entrepreneur.

I feel that letting out my inner geek has helped liberate me, broadened my horizons greatly, and enabled me to create something along my own vision. By defining the requirements and doing the development myself, I feel that the code is more integrated, flows more naturally with the user workflow, and has greater quality than if I had parceled it out in chunks. Also, I strongly believe that I have been able to get it out faster or just as fast. I also have a lot of confidence that the product platform provides a solid foundation for the future. Since I developed it, I know what’s in it. I have greater control and greater agility to respond to customers, competitors, and the future.

Now that ProductCentral is nearing its public introduction, I am shifting my attention to marketing and business development. That’s the next big challenge. I expect that ProductCentral will go through the typical growth phases that Geoffrey Moore cited in his famous book, “Crossing the Chasm.” Our first customers will be innovators, or those who are willing to take the chance with a new product or technology in order to propel their productivity and to improve their decision making. They are among the minority within organizations, and I will need to personally reach out to them.

Swinnerton: Now let’s get into ProductCentral. What is ProductCentral?

Chen: ProductCentral’s mission is to help companies understand what is driving demand for their products, to forecast demand, and to help define strategies to shape demand. Our first product, ProductCentral Orders Analytix, facilitates product orders analysis. No organization can develop marketing, operations, or product strategies without first understanding their products’ order trends, what is being sold, how much is being sold, to whom, etc.  So, that is the natural starting point. ProductCentral’s differentiators include ease of use, easy accessibility, affordability, built-in “social network” or collaboration capabilities, and workflows that represent the “best practices” of product managers and business analysts. Our target customers include discrete manufacturers, eCommerce merchants, and software manufacturers. Our target users include product managers, product marketing managers, demand analysts and forecasters, sales analysts, and business development.

ProductCentral is a software-as-a-service, like the immensely popular Salesforce.com CRM application, and it is deployed on Amazon Web Services. Anyone with a laptop or mobile device, such as the iPhone and iPad, can access ProductCentral, perform remote analysis, and share their insights with others from any location in the world so long as there is internet connectivity. Interactive analysis is menu-driven and can be done with a swipe of the finger and press of a button. One can think of ProductCentral’s strategic position as in between marketing analytics tools, like those found in Eloqua and GoodData, and Manufacturing Requirements Planning (MRP) software. ProductCentral bridges a gap, which I call “product management operations,” that exists between marketing and operations. It combines elements of Business Intelligence (BI) software and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software.

Currently, we are in Beta with a few Silicon Valley companies. We would like to add one or two local Santa Cruz county companies to our Beta team.  In return, we will offer them a better understanding of customer and product trends, increased productivity and improved business decision making. Also, they will have a say in our roadmap. I expect that ProductCentral will be open to the public in late February or early March.

Swinnerton: How did the idea of ProductCentral happen?

Chen: One of my many roles at HP was leading a team of analysts within the personal computer group. They worked with the product managers to assess and forecast the demand for HP’s personal computers worldwide. They had to roll up all the regional product orders and order forecasts monthly, and present to our division GM’s and Senior VP of the personal computer group. The forecasts drove our manufacturing plans and provided a future-looking view of how well we were doing relative to our financial plan. That was over fifteen years ago, and the analysts and product managers all used spreadsheets to analyze product orders and to forecast.

What I found after subsequently going to EMC, Adaptec, and Cisco was that not much has changed in most companies when it comes to the analysis tools used by product managers and analysts at their desks. Spreadsheets with their built-in pivot tables are still their most popular tools. At Cisco, we did use Business Objects, a well-known and somewhat pricey product from SAP, for orders reports. But it was too cumbersome to use for interactive analysis, so we imported information from Business Objects into spreadsheets to do the analysis. So, it was back to spreadsheets again.

Anyone who has worked extensively with spreadsheets knows how time-consuming it can be to create them, update and maintain them, to provide nicely formatted reports and charts, and to do analysis across multiple variables, such as doing analysis by product, by channel, by region, by customer, etc. Dealing with non-standard fiscal months and fiscal quarters complicates things further. Moreover, each analyst typically creates custom formulas, macros, and pivot tables, which makes it almost impossible to share the spreadsheet-based analysis tool with team members and with management.

With ProductCentral, all one needs to do is to upload orders transactions from Business Objects or other ERP software. Immediately, one can interactively query and see reports and charts of product orders, order trends, top customers, etc. ProductCentral can save countless hours versus creating and maintaining spreadsheets and spreadsheet-driven reports and charts. Because of its interactive capabilities, users can gain a better understanding of trends that will enable them to make better decisions affecting marketing programs and product strategies. Users can share their insights and reports with others very simply through posts on a “wall,” patterned after the Facebook wall. Any user, including non-analysts such as sales people, can dive into the data remotely and easily themselves.

That’s a simple concept and one of my sons said, “Dad, anyone could have thought of that.” And he’s one hundred percent correct. But it hasn’t been done, or at least not done well enough, believe it or not. So, the idea for the initial ProductCentral module came from my own experience and understanding of a pain point and need that was not being fulfilled well today. I have a greater vision for ProductCentral well beyond its initial module, however, and it has been shaped by my many years in product management, product marketing, and general management working for hardware and software manufacturing companies.

Swinnerton: What goals do you have for ProductCentral this year? 

Chen: First and foremost, ProductCentral needs to nicely ramp up its customers along with revenues. We will achieve our longer term goals only if we can invest back into the company from our revenues. In our first year, I want to have from five to ten very satisfied customers that will also serve as reference sites. Also, I want to start developing an ecosystem of partnerships with a few other software-as-a-service apps that are already very popular, and to work with them on marketing programs. Netsuite, Salesforce.com, and Amazon eCommerce are example potential partners. I want to release our next module, which will likely be in the area of demand forecasting. At the same time, I want to develop the ProductCentral brand. Also, I will be launching professional services that will be aligned with ProductCentral, the product. That will be important to supplement cash flow and to attract larger enterprise customers. In addition, I want to start a rolodex of talent from whom I can draw to help grow the business. As I ramp up this year, my HR strategy is to initially outsource some admin, marketing, and development work.

Swinnerton: What are your long term goals for ProductCentral?

Chen: I personally want to be active with ProductCentral for at least the next ten years. I don’t intend to flip it. As we ramp revenue, I would like to attract and employ passionate people who want to make accessible, affordable, and delightful-to-use analytical software to help companies manage their products. The company must have people who want to be on top of our strategic technologies and to be very close to our customers and markets. The company must stay lean, mean, fun, rewarding, and customer-centric. It needs to be a true team that stays together. It will not be a big team by intention, but ProductCentral will become a well known, highly respected company worldwide that rewards employees well and gives back to the local community and developer community. These are probably not as much my goals as my vision.

Swinnerton: What makes you happy?  

Chen: My wife, two sons and dog Cali make me immensely happy. Also, basking in the beauty of Monterey Bay awakens my spirit and makes me happy. To know that I can still develop myself physically and mentally. To be able to still participate with other surfers off the Point.To have qualified and be able to run in this year’s Boston Marathon, after having qualified and run in it five years ago. To set my sights on qualifying again five years from now. For many years, my personal mission has been to add value to people and society through business and to help and encourage others do the same. If I can continue to do that in a meaningful way through my sixties and beyond, that will make me very happy.
https://www.productcentral.net

Interrogated by:
Matthew Swinnerton
Matthew@InterrogationHub.com
Twitter – @Swinnerton

On January 21st 2013 Chris Guillebeau came to Santa Cruz, CA on his first stop of his 2013 book tour to support his latest book – The $100 Startup. I had a chance to interview Chris before he took the stage. Here is the transcript.

Matthew: This is Matthew Swinnerton. I’m with InterrogationHub.com and Instant Magazine. I am here with Chris Guillebeau, writer of ”The $100 Startup” and “The Art of Non-Conformity”. We’re totally excited to have him here. He’s actually starting a mini book tour starting in Santa Cruz, so we’re going to have an event tonight. I think we have about 300+ people here, so we’re very excited to have you. Thank you very much for being here.

Chris: Thank you. I’m excited to be back.

Matthew: Awesome. Thank you. Before we get really into it, I want to ask you a big question that’s been on my mind: What is the plan for 193?

Chris: 193 is my final country. For the past 10 years, I’ve been trying to visit every country in the world, and I’m coming down to the end. Last month I did Tuvalu, in the South Pacific. Then I did Guinea Bissau, in West Africa, the month before. Now I’m at the final country, which is Norway. 193 will be in April, on my 35th birthday. We’ve invited some of my readers, friends, and community to come and join. We’re going to have some kind of party in Oslo. We’re still trying to figure it out, but I think right now we have maybe 150, 200 people that are making the trek.

Matthew: Wow.

Chris: We’ll have to figure something out.

Matthew: Nice. I want to ask, you’re going to be at 193 countries, what are you going to feel like after you’ve accomplished that goal? That’s a monumental challenge that you took on. How do you feel it’s going to be, “What’s next?”

Chris: Yeah. In some ways, Matt, it kind of stresses me out. In some ways, it’s kind of like, “Yeah, this is awesome. I’ve been working for it for so long.” Then it’s just as you said, like, “OK. Where do we go from here?” Fortunately, the travel is only one thing that I do. I still write books and I do a lot of these kinds of community events; I will continue doing that. I host an event in Portland every year. I’m sure I’ll keep traveling, but it definitely is something that is on my mind, as well. Like, “OK. Then what’s the next quest?” For me, it’s not been just the travel, it’s also doing the quest; the notion of there’s all these places and they’re defined, there’s a list and I’m checking them off, and getting closer and closer. Once I don’t have that, I don’t know.

Matthew: Got to find out what your next quest is.

Chris: Exactly. I’ve got to figure it out, yeah. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Matthew: I think you’re probably good. You probably have enough ideas in your own head. Going back to your traveling; just traveling itself, going to all these different countries, do you actually like the actual aspect of the travel? Getting in planes, going to the airport, your bags; is that tedious after awhile?

Chris: It can be tedious, but I also like it. To answer your direct question, “Do I like it?” I think you have to. I don’t know that I’d be able to do it if I didn’t at least make my peace with that. In some ways, I actually enjoy the process of traveling. I don’t enjoy all those things all the time. Like I flew into San Jose and I had to get a rental car, and it was just kind of a stressful little situation, just like an annoyance, but it’s fine; it’s a part of it. What do I have to complain about? I get to go all over the world and see great places.

Matthew: Can’t complain, yeah. You mentioned it briefly there, can you tell us a little bit about your World Domination Summit? What is that about? I think it’s 163 days until that?

Chris: Yeah, very good. You know better than me how many days it is. The World Domination Summit is a gathering of creative people from all over the world. We have it in Portland, Oregon every summer, right around the Fourth of July. Last year, we brought 1,000 people together, and this year we have 3,000, so we’re definitely scaling up. It’s really fun. It’s just a lot of different people. We do have some programming and content. We have main stage speakers, but there’s also just a lot of gatherings and fun activities, as well.

Matthew: Nice. One of the standouts of last year was the $100 investment. Can you tell us about that?

Chris: Yes. I’m trying to think how to do so concisely, because there’s actually a 19-minute video online; people can watch the whole thing. The short version is, or the cliff notes version is: WDS is a non-profit event; we have no sponsorship, we don’t have any advertisers. It’s not because I think those things are evil, it’s just the DNA of this event is very much about community and connection. The first year we lost maybe $30,000 on it, which we were thrilled to do just because it was such a fun thing. The second year we kind of figured some things out. We had more people come, so we had a profit of close to $100,000, and the team decided to reinvest that money directly in the attendees. We also had an anonymous donor that came forward to kind of make up the difference. Basically, we gave $100 to all 1,000 attendees, along with kind of a charge at the end of the weekend to say, “Use this to do something interesting. I don’t care what it is. You can do something with business. You can do something with charity. You can give it to someone on the street. You can restock your wine cellar. I don’t care, just do something fun and then tell us about it.” We’ve been collecting all these stories.

Matthew: We don’t have time now, but if our viewers can actually go online, go to YouTube and see some of the stories, they’re pretty awesome, what people did with that $100. Definitely check it out online. You can find it really easily. I think you just put in ‘$100 investment’, and you’ll probably find something.

Now let’s get back onto the topic at hand, “The $100 Startup”. You’re starting this mini-tour, like I mentioned, in Santa Cruz. Let me ask you, what was the genesis behind it?  We were just talking about it briefly, but were you just like you had a conversation with somebody that’s like, “I’ve got to write a book about this”? How did that start?

Chris: In a way it was like that, it was very organic. I did a previous book tour for my first book. I went to all 50 states. I went into every province in Canada, just met really interesting people all along the way, including a lot of unconventional or unexpected entrepreneurs; people who started businesses without going to business school, without spending a lot of money, usually by using the skills that they already had. A lot of them didn’t even necessarily think of themselves as entrepreneurs. They were just doing something that they enjoyed but they had found a way to make that profitable, and not just a little bit profitable but provide for themselves and their families to make a good living.

I thought no one’s really telling this story. No one is really telling this story in a systematic way. There’s a lot of information about bigger startups. There’s a lot of information about starting a traditional business, which involves a long business plan and going to beg for money at the bank and all that kind of stuff, but no one’s really looking at this whole micro-entrepreneurship, ‘micro-business revolution’ as I call it. That’s kind of how that came to be, originally.

Matthew: Talking about writing a book, we have a lot of entrepreneurs that read our site or read our magazine and they want to write a book. It’s daunting in some way, like, “How do I get it out there? How do I publish it? Do I need to self-publish it? Do I have to find a distributor? What do I do?” Can you give them some advice? I know that’s a humungous question.

Chris: Sure. That’s a lot of questions all together, because those are different questions. How to publish the book is a very different question than how to write the book. I would say let’s break it down. What really is daunting? If you can start a business, if you can do anything in an ongoing, consistent manner, you can certainly write a book. What I do is I break things down into very specific, deliverables. An average non-fiction book is about 70,000 words, so most of us can write 1,000 words a day if we really kind of focus and get to it. If you can’t do that, then do 500 words a day. Obviously, there’s going to be an editing process, there’s going to be a lot of other stuff, but if you think of it in those chunks, if you think of it in terms of the chapters and what’s the overall message and what goes where, I really think anyone can do it. As to publishing, that’s a totally different thing.

Matthew: OK. I’ll let you go on that one. I have two more questions I want to ask: How do you balance family life and work life, and at the same time have this humungous career of traveling and doing these community things? How do you do that?

Chris: That’s a good question. I guess people will answer that question differently for themselves.

Matthew: How do you do that?

Chris: How do I do that? I can’t speak for my wife because she’s not here; you’d have to ask her as well. I guess I travel a lot, but I’m also at home a lot, as well. We went to India together last month. I did “The $100 Startup” tour there, but she was with me. I guess I also believe it’s OK to have goals and dreams of your own, as well as joint goals that you pursue together. She has her own career; she’s an artist and she does her thing, and I try to support that as much as I can.

Matthew: Nice. Last question. Going along with that, what makes you happy? That’s a big open question too.

Chris: What makes me happy?

Matthew: Yeah. When I asked that question, what came to mind?

Chris: I like making things, I like creating. I think Seth Godin said that creativity is the instinct to produce. It’s like when I get up in the morning I’m like, “OK. What am I working on? What’s next?” Just like you asked that question about what’s next for me, I feel like if I don’t do that for a few days or a week or something, I start feeling bad, so it makes me happy to create and to connect with people as well.

Matthew: Nice. I like Seth Godin’s new book. I can’t remember the title.

Chris: “The Icarus Deception”.

Matthew: Yeah. He mentions about art, and he says about that, “If you do something that touches somebody, that’s art.” It makes us happy. I really enjoyed that. I guess you have to get on stage here so I appreciate you being here. Thank you very much.

Chris: Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it.

Matthew: Thanks a lot.

To lean more about Chris Guillebeau follow him at:
@chrisguillebeau
facebook.com/artofnonconformity 

Interrogated by:
Matthew Swinnerton
Matthew@InterrogationHub.com
Twitter – @Swinnerton

Picture taken October 2012 by Ted Holladay at TechRaising

For this interview we are going to switch it up a bit. This time the interviewer get’s interviewed. Nada Miljkovic interviewed Matthew Swinnerton on her show Artists on Art. In this interview Matthew Swinnerton touches on the similarities between art and entrepreneurism, TechRaising, his hippie parents, Instant Publishing Group, and this very website - InterrogationHub designed by Todd Schafer of Schafer Design.

Watch the Video

Swinnerton:

Grossman: I’m from Visalia, CA, in the Central Valley of California. I grew up there until I left for college.

Swinnerton: Where did you go to school?

Grossman: I went to San Jose State University where I majored in Psychology and minored in Anthropology. I also started, but didn’t finish, a master’s degree in English literature with an emphasis on creative writing.

Swinnerton: What was your first job?

Grossman: A newspaper route where every Saturday was way too early, although the payoff was warm blueberry donuts.

Swinnerton: Can you tell us your career path from that job to what you do now?

Grossman: I was very shy as a child, but the newspaper route when I was 12 gave me the customer service confidence that I just kept building on throughout my teenage years, college, early adulthood and then to my marketing, business development, human resource, recruiting and career management roles I play now.

Swinnerton: Can you tell us about your new book?

Grossman: Tech Job Hunt Handbook: Career Management for Technical Professionals gives practical guidance and recommendations on how to get and keep great tech jobs and other professions throughout your career. It’s a career management book that reflects today’s neweconomic realities. The world of work is constantly changing, and staying professionally relevant while competing for more specialized tech jobs in areas like cloud computing, mobile and social applications, and big data in a highly competitive global economy is critical. The world is churning out hungry programmers and developers in record numbers, making the global labor market highly competitive. It is now essential to plan a campaign to get a better job as well as your overall career. Retooling your skills and re-branding yourself is mandatory whether you’re seeking a new job or intent on retaining current employment. Readers of the Tech Job Hunt Handbook will find tools, practical guidance, and recommendations on how to find the best new tech jobs and other professions, how to get noticed, how to ace interviews and get hired, and how to keep those new jobs—until it’s time for a better one. As you will learn, learning how to assess and then invest in career management skills leads to long-term competitive advantage and a happier working life. It’s for recent graduates, risk-taking innovators, and tech veterans alike—shows how to build a comprehensive online professional profile, identify the companies you’re interested in and who you know at those companies, approach interviews with confidence, uncover opportunities in your current company, and understand the new emerging technology markets that could lead to a career rebirth.

Swinnerton: Why did you want to write this book?

Grossman: I’ve been in the HR and recruiting technology space for over 13 years now and I’ve seen the hiring process from the employer side over and over again. Conversely, as a working professional myself, I’ve seen the world of work from a career management perspective as well — and during this latest economic apocalypse, it’s been challenging to say the least. IT pros and most folks in any profession today have to constantly keep themselves developed, relevant and marketable, even if we’re gainfully employed. I wanted to write a book that gave “reality advice” to professionals, but that gives it to them as if a friend was sitting across the table from them over coffee, a meal or a drink. I’ve been there, done that, and am still doing that.

Swinnerton: Can you tell us about your process for writing – Tech Job Hunt Handbook?

Grossman: I wrote the book over a span of six months, much of which was written in the early mornings, at night and on the weekends. You know the joke — can’t quit my day job. I drew from my own experience, previous industry writings and research.

Swinnerton: How did you balance your time writing this book, your normal day job, and a family life?

Grossman: That was tough to do, as I’m a proud father of two little girls. Also, both my parents passed away in 2012, only four months apart in August and December (when the book was published). It was more difficult that I even acknowledged then. But I finished it and dedicated it to my family.

Swinnerton: What kinds of things do you like to do outside of work?

Grossman: Reading and writing of course. And I love drumming, which I’ve been teaching myself for a few years. I also like to be active and run three times per week and cross-train regularly. I have to stay in shape with two little girls running around! I’m also a domestic violence advocate and have volunteered and written on the subject.

Swinnerton: What are your plans for 2013?

Grossman: More writing, please!

To follow and learn more about Kevin Grossman:
BraveNewTalent
Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook
TalentCulture | GOTG | Google+

The book launch info is here: http://reach-west.com/2013/01/youre-all-invited-to-my-tech-job-hunt-handbook-launch-party/

Interrogated by:
Matthew Swinnerton
Matthew@InterrogationHub.com
Twitter – @Swinnerton

Swinnerton: For starters Brett I want to learn more about you. Where are from? Where did you grow.

Hardin: I grew up in Folsom, part of the urban sprawl that makes up the larger Sacramento area. Folsom is best known for it’s federal.

Swinnerton: When did you start to program and what was the reason behind starting?

Hardin: I started programming when I was 8 years old. I went to a private school until 3rd grade and the school had Apple II computers. If you went to school early or stayed late you could play with the computers. Other “cool” kids were learning how to program in Logo and Basic and I followed suit.

I thought programming was amazing. You could give an instruction set to this thing and it would do what you told it. For an 8-year old this is a lot of power to wield. Since your parents always tell you what to do, you don’t get the power to tell someone else what to do.

Swinnerton: What was your first job?

Hardin: I would convince my mother to pay me for doing her chores, but I don’t think that’s what you mean. I was a coffee barista. The rise of coffee shops was popular when I was 15 years old and I thought it would be cool to work in one, although I wasn’t a coffee drinker at the time. I had to hound the manager to give me a job. I didn’t want to work in a fast food restaurant, like most teenagers, and the manager didn’t like hiring people who had no experience. I was determined to work in the coffee shop so I showed up every Saturday at 10am and asked the manager if there were any positions open that week. After a few weeks of hounding I was given the job.

Swinnerton: Can you tell us your career path from that job to what you do now as CEO at SourceNinja?

Hardin: A long haul. I knew I wanted to work with technology, so upon graduating from High School I got a job at Earthlink doing technical support. It was a 40-hour a week job and on my two days off (Tues and Thurs) I would attend the junior college earning credits towards my computer science degree.

After two years I transferred to California State University at Chico and graduated with a Computer Science degree. The entire time I’d been using computers I had always been fascinated with computer security. My senior project in college was doing a penetration test of the school’s network. I applied for a job at Ernst & Young doing penetration testing for their Advanced Security Center. I worked with a ton of great people there that challenged me to learn and know more about security.

I continued with different jobs becoming a product manager and a security researcher and always noticed an underlying problem with security at organizations. All of these applications are built on top of other technologies. Those technologies are exploited to gain access to the system. But, there is no great system for monitoring and alerting you to changes in your dependency stack. So, along with my co-founder Matt Stump we decided to build out the technology.

Swinnerton: What does SourceNinja do?

Hardin: SourceNinja manages the dependencies in your application and alerts you when their are updates your application can benefit from.

Swinnerton: Can you tell us about why you started to write books and become a speaker on the topic of Security?

Hardin:Nitesh Dhanjani asked me to co-author a book with him. He had written several books and I respect him as an author and a security researcher. I was incredibly flattered that he asked me, with all of the people he knows in the security community.

With speaking, I saw everyone else do it and thought it was interesting. I talked to someone about it and explained I didn’t think I knew much to talk about. Why would anyone listen to me speak? He responded saying, Everyone has something to say. Although you may not think it’s interesting other people will. That has always stuck with me.

Swinnerton: What kind of clients do you most like to work with?

Hardin: I love working with people who actually want to secure their systems. Many people do security because compliance requires them to. They don’t know what they are actually trying to do, but a piece of paper says they need to do it.

Swinnerton: Can you give us a a typical day in the life of Brett?

Hardin: I wake up at 5am and read items that are interesting in my RSS feed. After 30 minutes, I write for about an hour. Some post that I think someone can benefit from. I then get ready for work and have a standup with my co-founder. We explain what we worked on yesterday and what we will work on today and then get things done. I return home at around 6pm to hangout with my wife and daughter, do some reading, and then go to bed at 10pm.

Swinnerton: What are your goals for 2013

Hardin: I have two goals I’m working on currently:
* To do more things that fulfill peoples lives.
* To become a profit center not a cost center.

To learn more about Brett Hardin:
Blog: http://bretthard.in
Twitter: @miscsecurity

Interrogated by:
Matthew Swinnerton
Matthew@InterrogationHub.com
Twitter – @Swinnerton

Oborn: I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles called Diamond Bar.  I grew up in a great town with great friends, church teachers, and public school teachers.

Swinnerton: Where did you go to school?

Oborn: I earned a Bachelors and Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Brigham Young University.

Swinnerton: What was your first job?

Oborn: My first job as with TRW Space and Defense, designing custom analog integrated circuits for use in high-speed communication satellites.

Swinnerton: Can you tell us your career path from that job to what you do now as founder and VP of Business Development at Telarus, Inc?

Oborn: IN 1999 I left TRW to become the webmaster for Cognigen Networks, who had recently gone public and raised money to create the first online network of residential switched long distance sales people.  In 2002, I left Cognigen to create Telarus to focus on internet marketing target towards businesses.  One of the first things we did at Telarus was partner with Cognigen to become their commercial voice and broadband “arm”, which we did in 2003.  Since them I’ve held just about every position possible as my partner, Adam Edwards, and I built up the company.

Swinnerton: What does Telarus, Inc do?

Oborn: Telarus is a distributor of data, voice, and cloud services.  We hold contracts with 41 different suppliers and distribute / make available those services to a network of 1,200 independent consultants who recommend services to their business clients.  We’ve created patented software that allows our partners to search online for pricing and availability, ensuring they’re able to give their clients the best deal, quickly, every time.  These carriers/suppliers then remit Telarus a commission (percentage of the customer’s bill) each month.  Telarus takes 41 commissions and consolidates them into individual payments to each partner.

Swinnerton: What was the genesis behind Telarus, Inc?

Oborn: Telarus came about from my experience as the webmaster of Cognigen Networks.  I learned the power of the internet and the appeal of real-time information, and sought to apply those same principles to commercial broadband and voice sales.  At first we generated our own leads using Telarus.com and ShopforT1.com, and then we expanded with affiliate tools that allowed thousands of webmasters around the world to begin generating leads into our system.  Telarus recruited and managed a group of agents to close those leads and our accounting software splits the commissions and pays each party accordingly.

Over time we’ve found new and creative ways to add value, like our Comcast paperwork generator, GeoScan, and more.

Swinnerton: What do you enjoy most about what you do?

Oborn: I enjoy seeing an industry (or company) that is being held back due to a lack of efficiency, coming up with an idea to solve the problem, and then seeing the project reach the finish line.  It’s almost a God-like feeling, which is why I got into engineering in college.  It teaches you that – whatever you think up – you can make happen with the right tools/knowledge.

Swinnerton: Can you give us a a typical day in the life of Patrick Oborn?

Oborn: Wake up early, go to CrossFit, go jogging (or biking, or swimming), feed the baby, get the 7-yr old twins ready for school, head to work, meet with my Marketing group, meet with suppliers over upcoming events, lunch, work with designers on new web sites, trade shows, etc., talk to partners about their growth strategies, head home, kid’s soccer practice, dinner, catch up on email/review next day’s schedule, time with baby, bed.

Swinnerton: What is the state of broadband in the US today and where do you see it going in the next year, next 5 years?

Oborn: State of broadband?  It’s just going to keep swelling.  You’ll see more and more bandwidth being offered to business customers, but the Cables and Carriers will do their best to hold the MRC to where it is today.  They want $200/month to be the bottom end, regardless of how many megs it will take to keep them there.  Because of this, I think the Cables will have a tremendous advantage since their cost structures (for broadband) are better.

Swinnerton: Now that you are living in Utah, how do you get your time in the water surfing?

Oborn:  I still surf once in a while when I return to So Cal to visit my family/friends who still live there.  I’ve found a whole new set of things to get my mind off of work, like CrossFit, Triathlon, trail running, mountain biking, etc.  I LOVE it up here!

To learn more about Patrick Oborn:
www.facebook.com/patrickkoborn
www.linkedin.com/in/patrickoborn
Twitter – @patrickoborn

Interrogated by:
Matthew Swinnerton
Matthew@InterrogationHub.com
Twitter – @Swinnerton