Can You Do It All? BlackLine CEO Therese Tucker (Part 1)

Therese Tucker is the CEO and founder of BlackLine Systems, an account reconciliation and financial close software provider. Prior to that she served as CTO at SunGard Treasury Systems. Therese was comfortably retired from SunGard – and had two school-age children at home – when she decided to merge her two talents, technology and finance,

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A Real-Time, Multimedia Social Network You Might Not Know: Paltalk CEO Jason Katz (Part 7)

SM: Why did you buy your shares back from Softbank, and why did Softbank allow you to do that? JK: When VCs invest in a business, the have an expectation of a profitable exit. By 2009, Softbank had been invested for five years and we were profitable, but they had not received a return on

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A Real-Time, Multimedia Social Network You Might Not Know: Paltalk CEO Jason Katz (Part 6)

SM: In the ten years you have been in business, how has the business progressed? Where have you made money and gained traction? JK: We have had good traction. In the early years we were viral, explosive, and unique. That lasted for three years and allowed us to launch with no marketing money. When the

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A Real-Time, Multimedia Social Network You Might Not Know: Paltalk CEO Jason Katz (Part 5)

SM: Who do you consider your competitors based on where your business is today? JK: Skype certainly is when it comes to video conferencing. They did a great job with the PC to phone service, although we had that offering before they did. I personally think Skype did a great job recognizing that international calling

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A Real-Time, Multimedia Social Network You Might Not Know: Paltalk CEO Jason Katz (Part 4)

SM: How does your revenue break down between subscription and ads? JK: About 85% of our revenue comes directly from consumers paying. The other 15% is from advertising.

A Real-Time, Multimedia Social Network You Might Not Know: Paltalk CEO Jason Katz (Part 3)

SM: When you first started were there any other companies competing in the social IM space? JK: There were some companies that came out focusing on voice conferencing via the Internet. LibStream, FireTalk, and HearMe were the most significant, and all were well funded. HearMe was a public company and had $270 million in public

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A Real-Time, Multimedia Social Network You Might Not Know: Paltalk CEO Jason Katz (Part 2)

SM: When you had your first IM client, who were your competitors? JK: At that time AOL and ICQ were had the primary instant messaging clients. MSN, Yahoo and Skype had not yet entered the field. Of course, those IM clients were text only and did not involve a voice component like ours.

A Real-Time, Multimedia Social Network You Might Not Know: Paltalk CEO Jason Katz (Part 1)

Jason Katz is the founder and CEO of Paltalk.com. Jason oversees the strategic direction of Paltalk and also manages the company’s system architecture. Jason is an authority on instant messaging as well as web based voice and video. Jason previously co-founded MJ Capital, a money management firm. Earlier in his career, he was a corporate

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