The Big Idea Show Will Air Thursday Night, Not Tonight

Update: The episode of “The Big Idea With Donny Deutsch” will air Thursday May 31 (tomorrow) at 10pm ET on CNBC instead of tonight.

A 36 Hour Day of 9 Year Old Dinosaur Experts, 12 Year Old Presidents, Two Venture Meetings, and Donnie Deutsch Interview

I woke up at 1pm on Monday (Memorial Day) and haven’t slept since except for an 80 minute “nap” last night between 3:40am and 5am.

Today was passion-chock-filled day of great experiences. I got on the 6:40am flight from RDU to JFK this morning, grabbed a cab to Pequot Ventures on East 53rd to meet with Amish Jani and their partner team at 10:00. At 11:30am I jumped in a waiting car that took me to the CNBC headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, NJ to the Big Idea with Donny Deutsche show.

They weren’t 100% sure on the time but it looks like our segment will probably air at 10pm ET Wednesday May 30 (tonight) on CNBC.

The show was about ‘whiz kids’–and man I sure met some today. (Donny actually filmed two shows today and changed shirts in between to make it look like a new “day”).

Check out the five people Donny interviewed (the coolest thing was I got to meet all these people):

- 9 year old Paleontologist and Dinosaur Expert Reiss who has been on Oprah and the Jay Leno show. The kid is the cutest thing ever and does a tremendous Velociraptor impersonation during the show. And he shows off a caste of a T-rex tooth. At one point he said to Donny, “And now the next topic will be” and just went into it. Talk about a kid who takes charge. Reiss is now working on getting his 67-page book on Dinosaurs published.

- 11 year old actor and movie producer Dominic Scott Kay, who has played the young Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Tom Cruise’s son in Minority Report, and was the voice of Wilbur the Pig in Charlotte’s Web.

- 12 year old Noah McCullough, who has also been on the Tonight Show and will be running for President in 2032 (I told him I wanted to be his VP). Noah is an ardent Republican in name he says, yet he is sensible centrist nonetheless, and props to him for being able to explain his positions intelligently to Donny who told him he was on the wrong show to be a Republican :-). You’ve gotta hear this kid’s answer to Donny’s hardball question on “What is your view on the war in Iraq and George Bush’s handling of it?.” Noah hands out red white and blue wristbands saying Noah McCullough 2032. He has written a book on Presidential Trivia and is working on his second about the children of President’s. Did you know that John Quincy Adams swam nude in the Potomac every morning?

- 22 year old Tyler Dikman, CEO of Cooltronics. Tyler is an friend of mine from about five years ago in Tampa that I had no idea would be on the show. He’s doing well with 18 employees and over $3 million in annual sales providing computer consulting and web design services in Tampa, D.C., and Silicon Valley.

- And finally, 22 year old Ryan Allis (ok I was feeling sort of old by this point). Donny asked about how I got started, my book, the reason for being an entrepreneur, three tips I have for entrepreneurs, and what we’re doing with iContact. Man, a 7 minute interview goes lighting fast when you’re actually in the moment. Tyler got a picture of Donny and I that I’ll post tomorrow. We also grabbed one with Mad Money’s Jim Cramer when we saw him in the hallway.

So after the taping, still embarrassingly in show makeup, I went over to Larchmont, NY for a 4:30pm meeting with Mitchell Green and Jeremy Levine of Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the nation’s first venture firms founded in 1911 by Andrew Carnegie’s business partner Henry Phipps and backers of Yelp, Wikia, Flock, LinkedIn, and Register.com. Finally, I went to LaGuardia for the 8:45pm flight back home. I’m going to go crash, for at least 8 hours, anyway.

Writing a Book 2.0: Feedback Requested on Social Media Marketing section

I am working on finishing the update to my book this weekend for McGraw-Hill.

Here’s the new content being added to the updated version on Social Media Marketing within the Web Marketing section on my book. I know this topic pretty well, but not as well as some of you… take a look at this new section and let me know if I’m missing anything. Thank you.

Cheers,
Ryan
ryan[at]icontact.com

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media marketing revolves around creating interactive conversations with your visitors, often through new mediums such as blogs, videos, podcasts, and social network communities. It is a relationship building, and not a promotional, form of building your brand.

Blogging can be one of the most effective ways at building quality related content and incoming links to your web site, as well as creating a transparent participatory discussion with your customers. You can blog using tools like Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad, or iContact.

A normal blog has its content in reverse chronological order with datestamps, a commenting system, a method of tagging and categorizing posts, a method of archiving posts, and a method of subscribing to the blog

The Anti-Poverty Campaign Has 21 Team Members in Uganda, Guatemala, and Tanzania This Summer

This summer The Anti-Poverty Campaign (RSS Feed | Mission), an organization I started in 2005, is excited to announce it has 21 team members in Guatemala, Tanzania, and Uganda posting daily.

APC is proud to have partnered with Nourish International, Advocates for Grassroots Development in Uganda, and The Full Belly Project to bring up to date content from developing countries each day from team members on location that care about reducing poverty and expanding access to education, health care, microfinance, and entrepreneurship.

Thank you for your support!

Business Jargon 303 (Beware the Southern Slang)

Before the multi-day radio silence I will leave you with a list of business jargon and acronyms (some southern slang) I’ve picked up through osmosis in the last twelve months, mostly from our Durham-native CFO Tim Oakley and the investors we have spoken to. Yes, the language can be a bit different here in the South. I truly hope you have the bandwidth to be able to leverage this color and create a positive ROI.

ARPU - average revenue per user

Bandwidth - The amount of things a person can get done during a period of time

Calibrate - to explain something to someone with the purpose of bringing them up to speed on a topic

Color - additional information on a topic

Comp Structure - Compensation Structure including salary and bonuses

Comps - Comparables revenue and EBITDA multiples

Flavor - (similar to color, but more specific), additional specific information on a topic

M&A Comps - Comparable revenue and EBITDA multiples of private companies in your industry

Ping - Check in or follow-up with someone

Public Comps - Comparable revenue and EBITDA multiples of public companies in your industry

Radio Silence - A period of time in which someone does not speak to you, either purposely or not.

Sales Coverage Plan - The plan you have for covering the sales you have in your financial projections. Ties in with your sales comp plan and your customer acquisition assumptions.

Sandbagging - submitting financial or sales projections that are lower than what you think is likely to occur

Valuation Distribution Quartile - The expected quartile (bottom 25%, lower middle 25%, top middle 25%, top 25%) you expect your valuation to be in as it relates to the M&A and public comps.

Zip Code - The general area you are looking for (as it relates to company valuation)

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And here are some key terms that I did already know but tend to run into at least weekly these days:

Arbitrage - buying at a low cost in one location, selling for a higher cost in another location

CAC - Customer Acquisition Cost

Down-round: A round of funding which is raised at a lower price than a previous round. Generally triggers anti-dilution protection, which you want to be on a broad-based weighted average.

Due Diligence - The process of reviewing a company or investor prior to executing a transaction.

EBITDA - earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization

GAAP - Generally Acceptable Accounting Principles

Leverage - Utilize

LTV - Lifetime Value (of a customer)

Osmosis - The process of information seeping in through exposure to it

ROAS - Return on Ad Spend

ROI - Return on Investment

TLA - Three-letter acronym

VAR - Value-added reseller

Verticals - Different industry niches that can be targeted.

And this is without getting into names of term sheet provisions. Feel free to submit others strange/unique business terms or acronyms in the comments.

Focus: Finishing the Book

I will be focused at least through Thursday on finishing the update of my book, Zero to One Million, for McGraw-Hill. The revised draft is due May 31. We are also making progress on our funding round and hope to have an announcement within 6 weeks. So advance apologies for any radio silence the next five days. Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend!

Favorite Company Photos from the Last Month

Here are some of my favorite photos from work in the last month:

Popping the champagne at the 10,000 customer celebration April 20

Jeffrey’s cube get’s alumnum foilized.

The Internet and Democracy: The Era of Megaphonic Communication is Over

I was reading this week’s Time Magazine on the plane back to Durham this afternoon. The cover story, “The Last Temptation of Al Gore” by Eric Pooley discussed whether Al was likely to enter late as a Democratic contender for President around the October timeframe (when the party will be looking for a clear front-runner and the results of the Nobel Peace Prize Gore has been nominated for are announced as Time pointed out). After the article was an excerpt from Gore’s forthcoming book The Assault on Reason, going to the stores on May 22.

The excerpt made some exceptionally timely points that tie in exactly with what the Personal Democracy Forum on Friday was all about. Some excerpts from the book:

“The world of television…makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take park in what passes for a national conversation.”

“The Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework… It’s a platform… for reason.”

“So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the reestablishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way–a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in face, evoke a meaningful response. Fortunately the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry-barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services.”

So back the question the Personal Democracy Forum asked–how is technology changing politics? And what are the technological tools (read: web apps) that politicians will use in 2008 to have a genuine participatory conversation. (YouTube, iContact, Meetup, and Eventful?) The era of megaphonic one-way communication is over.

Tom Friedman Interviewing Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

Thank you to my friend Jason Dalrymple from Teasy for allowing me to use his computer to blog during this session.

The conversation has begun.

Eric is speaking about Google’s new expanded mission and their new personal homepage iGoogle. According to Eric, Google now = Search, Ads, & Apps. Tom made the point that people in the room were authoring content and searching Google while they spoke, of course true. Eric mentioned that at his weekly hourly staff meeting he gave up trying to keep his key staffmembers off their laptops. They tried that for a week but they ended up on their Blackberries instead.

According to Eric, Google co-founder Larry Page had Eric’s bio projected on the wall of his office when Larry walked into Larry’s office for the first interview. Eric originally thought ‘who is this arrogant guy’ but he mentioned now many people do that.

They just discussed everyone having an online bio compilation on the web that is permanent and the oversharing of what young people put online that hurts them later. Eric proposed all people when they turn 21 can change their name. Tom commented, George Bush would not have been elected president had their been cell phone vloggers at Yale in the 70s. People will be more careful not that they’re living with a online historical record.

“You and I knew each other when the world was round.” - Tom

In response to a question on what is it like to be a public figure Eric responded:

“Well, we could apopt the lifestyle of Paris Hilton and be in the media all the time.”

“People that are public figures have reputations to maintain. Information about their behavior can be used to create a meme, that may in fact be a false one.” - Eric

Eric mentioned: One of the problems with storytelling online is that you can tend to create stories with small data points to create a false story reinforced by confirmation biases.

Paraphrasing Eric: It is possible using Google to truly create false memes to reinforce biases.

Tom has asked a question about Google Earth causing a security issue. Eric is replying that governments, even dictators, do at some level need some political support to continue their leadership and/or domination. They will respond to political pressue. When they shut down Google Earth, the backlash in Bahrain forced the goverment to restore access. The citizens were emailing pictures of the amount of land the ruling family had taken from the people. Sometimes the cover up is worse than the crime. The Bahranian government eventually had to break down.

Now Eric is talking about China’s great Firewall. There is no web site that describes the operation of the Great Firewall. There are techniques to go around the firewall, techniques he won’t go over because “everyone here is blogging.” 140 million internet users in China.

Eric to Tom “please don’t use the word dominant (in reference to Google)” They are afraid of being called dominant.

Eric is referencing the 20% time in which technical people can spend 1 day per week working on anything they think that might change the world.

Google made a decision 18 months ago to be more transparent. To be open about what they are doing and why they are doing it. He is saying that criticism can be healthy and that the criticism of Google has made them stronger.

Eric shared that they made the decision to buy YouTube quickly. Afterwards they learned of the incredible complexity of the media world and rights management companies that ends up slowing down decision making. He is hoping that technology will make rights clearing. People care more about video than they do words. He mentioned the Edwards so pretty video and the loss of the election by George Allen due to using the Makaka made up ’slur’ which ended up tipping the balance of the Senate and thus having an impact on the world. Video is exploding. It is one of the keystone technologies for the world. The explosion of content is valuable to people who care about building communities. We think Google has the best answer for managing information. He is talking about the long tail of content and the the reference from a book from the 16th century. Highly important information that is important to a small community can be delivered quickly with YouTube and Google. Eventually cell phones will have an upload to YouTube button.

According to Eric, in recruiting, the most important decision you can make: find people that are passionate and creative and have a broad range of interests.

Eric has announced that one of the democratic debates will be on YouTube.

Tom made the point that innovation happens when two people in different fields can get together to connect the dots. Does your mind have an API?

Eric is mentioning that technology may topple dictatorships and create democracy. In a dictatorship, step one close the borders, step two take over the television and radio station. The Internet makes it impossible to do that. The Internet is the single best expression of personal freedom that has ever been built.

The next generation of political leaders will behaving differently. More authentically. However, the Internet is the best way of delivering sound bits ever created. Politicians need more humor. People don’t want to see a long monotone.

Lawrence Lessig on Open-Sourced Political Debates & Copyrighting Political Content in a Democracy

Founder Andrew Rasiej opened it up and now Lawrence Lessig, Stanford professor and founder of the Creative Commons is giving an amusing/stimulating presentation on Free Culture and Free Politics. He is crticizing the distortion of the political process due to the constraint of copyright in political content. spliced with remixed political videos, making the point that political video should be able to be democratized, open-sourced, creative commonized. He has discussed profiting off of the war in Iraq, proprietary networks, debates outside of proprietary networks. He suggested putting the debates on PBS rather than NBC or Fox since proprietary networks cannot live by the principles of democratic free speech. He is making the point that if proprietary networks cannot allow debtate content to be remixed, reused, shared than it should not be on ” proprietary networks.”

Lawrence proposed using the “Credible” tag on political campaigns that believed the following:
1. Torture is Wrong
2. The war was a mistake
3. Global warming is real
4. Copyright should be used at times and with some limits

He is asking Hillary to share her views on Copyright like Barack, Edwards, and Dodd have. For the record Lawrence says, “I do not want to abolish copyright, I believe it just has a place.”

Comment #1 - Guy from NPR says they will be putting their debates in the public domain.

Tom Friedman will be interviewing Eric Schmidt at 9. More to come soon.

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