Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Also, what you have going in your favour is that the market is starting to understand that on the Internet, content is the brand. I think that understanding is going to drive further and further into the industry in general. Yaron Galai: I don’t view Facebook as being in the business of social networks

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 7)

Joe Speiser: We spend a lot of time looking at, “How can we engage the user? What kind of content can we show them to keep them interested?” What does that [time spent] look like? Is it one minute, two minutes, or three minutes? What’s that number? Right now, we’re up to 3 minutes and

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the focus of the content? What is the editorial strategy of Little Things? Joe Speiser: The whole goal for Little Things – and what we’ve stuck with since the beginning – has been uplifting content – the opposite of what the nightly news represents. Our goal was to stop this constant

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I understand what you’re saying. You had a large audience on Facebook and you wanted to do content marketing to that audience and drive the traffic towards a different site, which you would then monetize with Google AdSense. Is that what you’re saying? Joe Speiser: Almost. Before we made

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Not all categories of e-commerce have very slim margins. We’ve got great stories of bootstrapped e-commerce companies. I think in your case, pet foods doesn’t have a lot of margin. Joe Speiser: It doesn’t. When we started, the gross margins on pet food were actually very high. But it’s the shipping that takes

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Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley

NYT has a fun article, Punching Above Its Weight, Upstart Netflix Pokes at HBO. Are we getting ready for a Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley next in Television and Film?

Vision India 2020: Doctor At Hand

Many readers write to me with ideas for Vision 2020 ventures. One, Dr. Vaman Shanbhag, a neurologist in Mumbai, sent me a great idea for a healthcare venture which inspired Doctor At Hand.

Deal Radar 2008: PaidContent

PaidContent—the flagship site of ContentNext Media Inc.— is a blog site that covers news on media related technology worldwide. It was founded by editor and publisher Rafat Ali in 2002 in a bid to raise his personal profile and find a new job. Four years later Ali made PaidContent a business and founded ContentNext Media,

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