Education & Technology: Now Is the Time – HotChalk CEO Edward Fields (Part 4)

SM: How do you specifically provide value for schools, teachers, parents and students? EF: Teachers are an extraordinary leverage point in the system because there are on average more than 100 students per secondary school teacher. While we’re focusing on serving all of the different constituencies, out of the gate for HotChalk it’s about teachers.

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Education & Technology: Now Is the Time – HotChalk CEO Edward Fields (Part 3)

SM: What types of strategic partnerships have you been able to create? EF: Strategic alliances are critical to our success and enable us to provide many resources for free to teachers, students and parents. Our partnerships with NBC and McGraw-Hill means HotChalk can provide time-tested, proven digital news video and teacher development resources offerings at

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Education & Technology: Now Is the Time – HotChalk CEO Edward Fields (Part 2)

SM: How was the transition from ProductFactory to HotChalk? EF: My experience at an enterprise software company like ProductFactory coupled with my consumer focused educational software experiences at The Learning Company set me up for HotChalk. Through these experiences I realized the tremendous potential of web-based educational technology resources. I was inspired by my own

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Education & Technology: Now Is the Time – HotChalk CEO Edward Fields (Part 1)

Technology has long been a tool in the classroom but hasn’t always been the most effective one. Edward Fields, founder & CEO of HotChalk, an online learning resource for pre K-12 teachers, is looking to change that.

Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 12)

SM: The TAM is huge. JH: It’s a $150B TAM worldwide, and $50B in the US. SM: I am not worried about the growth opportunity at all. JH: The key for me and the management team is, and I think for any small business in any space, is how do you focus?

Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 11)

SM: Pretty much your customer base of 2.4M customers stick around. Do you see much churn? JH: I have been here three years, so 12 quarters; 75-77% of our revenue in each of those quarters is from repeat customers. That is a really good testament to the loyalty of our customers. I get asked a

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Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 10)

SM: Zazzle and CafePress are not going after personal memories or families. JH: Not in the same sense. It is personal publishing. They use different backend technology, being heat transfer method versus digital print technology. From a ecommerce standpoint, there area lot of similarities. We advertise online, run a ecommerce company, own our manufacturing and

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Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 9)

SM: What do you think of SmugMug? It is very popular. JH: It is popular for us because we are in the valley. When you look at the grand scheme of things, they are still a relatively small company with about $10M in revenue. I think what they have done well is they said in

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