Interview Archive

Article first published as Len Short (Red)ily Discusses Google, Bono and Steve Jobs on Technorati Len Short is truly an online marketing pioneer, heading up marketing at Charles Schwab, AOL and then (PRODUCT)RED. He is now leading Chug, a car buying search engine, as its Founder and CEO. Before his career moved online, Len worked on major marketing campaigns for credit card companies and rolled out MCI's highly successful "Friends and Family" marketing campaign.   I recently caught up with Len outside of George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. He was kind enough to conduct a video interview from his car. Fortunately, he spoke with me while he was parked and not careening down the highway. Unfortunately, his iPhone flipped his image to landscape mode. Despite this technical glitch, I opted to publish our discussion, given the high-quality content of his comments. If watching the video is too distracting, simply minimize the screen and listen to Len's insights as you would a podcast. You can watch my interview with Len below or on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/ivJhv6g7bA0  

Nearly one year ago, I published my first infoChachkie interview, with Kevin O’Connor, Co-Founder of FindTheBest.  At that time, I was not utilizing video. Thus, I was very excited when Kevin graciously agreed to make an encore appearance via Skype. If you care to review my prior discussion with Kevin, you can do so HERE. Before starting FindTheBest, Kevin was the Co-Founder and CEO DoubleClick (sold to Google, $3.1B and a seed investor ISS (sold to IBM, $1.3B). He is truly an Internet pioneer, having also been a seed investor in 1-800 Flowers and HotJobs. He jokes that in the photo below, he was the only guy who could get up on the file cabinet. You may recognize a few other folks in this photo, including: Jeff Bezos, Jerry Yang and Steve Jobs. You can watch my video interview with Kevin below or on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/is3NrWti6aI

Note: This is the fourth installment of an ongoing Guerilla Marketing series. The other installments address: 1)  FUEL’s use of faux Monks dominates the social consciousness of a major media tradeshow 2) TestFlight’s clever distribution of free meals garners Steve Jobs’ attention 3) Social Stay’s failed attempt to utilize parcours to liven up a hospitality tradeshow nearly lands them in jail Before it became a monolithic, multi-billion dollar organization, DoubleClick was a wily, nimble startup. In those early days, the DoubleClick team used a variety of guerilla marketing tactics to rise above the chaos endemic in the online ad world during the Internet’s nascent evolution.

I recently spoke with Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL and current CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, the leader in private cloud platforms. Eucalyptus’ underlying technology was developed at UC Santa Barbara. Since its origin as an academic research project in 2007, Eucalyptus has become the dominant open source cloud solution, boasting over 25,000 clouds formed. According to Marten, “We enable companies to run, within their own firewall, a cloud that behaves exactly like the public clouds, exactly like Amazon. So there is benefit of a running a cloud in-house, you have your own servers but you get full elasticity and you can shift workloads between your various applications.” You can watch my interview with Marten below or on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/B7CIUFSbQwU

Article first published as An Enchanting Conversation With Guy Kawasaki on Technorati. Guy’s latest book, Enchantment, was released in March of 2011, to overwhelmingly upbeat reviews. Of the 225 customer reviews currently posted on Amazon, over 90% are highly positive. I enjoyed the book as well, as evidenced by the review I wrote at the time of its release, which you can read HERE. I even plan to use it in my upcoming UC Santa Barbara Entrepreneurial Selling class. As Guy notes in the accompanying video interview, his primary goal with Enchantment is to reach a broader audience, beyond the high-tech, startup world. According to Guy, “It has been very satisfying to hear from people who never heard of me before. It wasn’t the Guy fan base. I’d like to expand beyond that. I want this book to be the equal to How To Win Friends And Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.” To this end, Guy has written a book that can be used by anyone seeking to further their cause; from startups, to non-profits, to public policy issues to getting a job. You can watch the video interview with Guy below or on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/E-44eylGb2I

Nithin Jilla was 14-yrs old when he became involved in Kenya Dream. Over the past four years, Nithin has generated national coverage for his from several leading cable news networks, as well as a number of local and regional newspapers. He has also combined his passion for dance to further expand Kenya Dream’s audience by establishing a series of Ken-Ya Dance showcase events festivals. You can watch my interview with Nithin below or on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/sUex9TwXSjI

Messenger: Scott Dinsmore, Co-Founder Cumbre Capital and author of the inspirational blog, LiveYourLegend. You can watch my interview with Scott below or on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/-H6QuivgHqo What follows is a summary which paraphrases Scott’s responses. For his exact quotes, watch the video.

Messenger: Mark Douglas, President & CEO, SteelHouse Media. Former Vice President of Technology at eHarmony and Vice President of Engineering at the Rubicon Project. In this interview, Mark discusses how his experiences at Oracle, eHarmony and the Rubicon Project contributed to the creation of his latest venture, SteelHouse Media. You can watch the video below or on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_NWWtIAM68 What follows is a summary which paraphrases Mark’s responses. For his exact quotes, watch the video. Value Prop Twitter Style:  SteelHouse's Behavioral Commerce platform increases online conversions via targeted incentives based on shopper personality and behavior