SM: Fast forward and compare where you are now. Back then you were filming videos in your bathroom, and now you are using artificial intelligence. What else are you doing? JS: Some people know exactly what they want. We want to provide them with the type of filtering that will let them find what they
SM: If 42% of your business is referrals, what percentage is driven by search strategies? JS: I am not sure how you want to consider it, but we have a lot of direct-type in traffic due to the name, blinds.com.
SM: How much revenue did you do in 1996? JS: I started it in the last week of June 1996. I probably did $500 a week. That is rough, but I am sure I did not do more than that. I was hoping for a sale a day back then.
SM: What did you do after Meineke? JS: The company was sold, and I got fired. They pushed me out of the company and forced me to deal with what I wanted to do. Right before I was fired we were looking at other businesses to franchise.
Jay is the CEO of Blinds.com, a company he founded in 1996. It has since achieved revenues surpassing $50 million and is ranked #192 of all US e-commerce companies. It is also the world’s top retailer for blinds, shades, and other window coverings. SM: Tell me first about your personal background leading up to this
SM: How is Latin America going from a broadband adoption point of view? MM: It is skyrocketing. We opened in Bogotá, Colombia, a year and a half ago and that is going extremely well. We are happy with growth there. We are looking at taking the cloud to Latin America. I think there is tremendous
SM: What part of cloud computing do you think will be transformed by virtualization? MM: Could computing is just providing raw computing capacity through the Internet. Instead of buying servers, space and storage you can buy gigahertz of computing capacity along with storage and memory through a friendly Web interface. You will not ever have
SM: Let’s talk about how your business has changed. What is it like today? MM: We are now a global company spanning three continents. We have 800 employees, guided to more than $290 million in revenues, and $82 million in EBITA. It is a completely different company.