Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 4)

SM: How big do you think the self-publishing, or publish on demand (POD), market is? KW: McMillen, Random House, and HarperCollins have all asked that question. My answer is that it is as big as anything else out there. There could be as many as a million manuscripts sitting around waiting to be published; people

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Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 3)

SM: Your plan is to enable all types of publishers to have an online service? KW: Not the publishers, the small printers. Printers could use this as a front end to what they are doing. Communities like Writers.net or Gather.com could make use of that as well. What we are doing is giving people an

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Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 2)

SM: We should establish some context for iUniverse, Author Solutions, and your portfolio of companies. What is the history between iUniverse and Author Solutions, and how did Bertram Capital get involved in them? KW: Author House is a company that was founded ten years ago in Bloomington, Indiana, and iUniverse is a company founded eight

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Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 1)

Writing a book takes dedication. For many authors it is a culminating, defining feat of their lives. Sadly, the chances of an author’s book actually being read are miniscule at best.

Tackling EDA’s Broken Business Model: Blaze DFM CEO Jacob Jacobsson (Part 7)

SM: Is TSMC making overtures to acquire you? JJ: You have to ask them that. I don’t think either party has an interest in that kind of setup today because we want to see how this plays out. It is not something we are talking about actively.

Tackling EDA’s Broken Business Model: Blaze DFM CEO Jacob Jacobsson (Part 6)

SM: How did you convince TSMC that your process works and that you should get paid for it? JJ: TSMC would not endorse something like this without verifying it was sustainable.

Tackling EDA’s Broken Business Model: Blaze DFM CEO Jacob Jacobsson (Part 5)

SM: How are you charging for your software? Are you competing for EDA dollars? JJ: We recently made an announcement with TSMC, and I think this is the way we will continue to do business.

Tackling EDA’s Broken Business Model: Blaze DFM CEO Jacob Jacobsson (Part 4)

SM: Can you talk about Blaze’s value proposition and business model? JJ: We change the way a process works from an insider’s point of view. You have certain manufacturing processes with certain leakage, power, and performance characteristics. We change those to something more favorable.