“Protect Your Dilution” – Justin Floyd

The phone rang this morning, just as I put the last piece of peach in my mouth. It was a scheduled call with Justin Floyd, Founder of SmartFundit. Rene Bonvanie mentioned the company during our recent interview. What followed was a hilarious conversation that started with a very “British” guy, introducing himself, and my saying,

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Cracking the Online Video Monetization Nut: Adap.tv CEO Amir Ashkenazi (Part 2)

There are several very interesting aspects to keep in mind when considering Shopping.com. First, the comparative shopping marketplace was a low-barrier-to-entry marketplace to enter, leading to significant competition. Second, revenue generating strategies were difficult to figure out in the 1997-1999 timeframe. Online advertising as a revenue model had barely started to take off. Finally, once

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Cracking the Online Video Monetization Nut: Adap.tv CEO Amir Ashkenazi (Part 1)

Amir Ashkenazi is the founder of Adap.tv, as well as the former founder and CTO of Shopping.com. Adap.tv is in the midst of the Online Video Advertising fray, on which I have recently written quite a bit. In fact, Danny Cohen suggested this conversation after reading one of those pieces about one of Adap.tv’s competitors,

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Portaga’s TripSync: Simplifying Business Travel (Part 2)

Robert Kost is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Portaga. In the early 1980s, he worked as an analyst with the Office of Technology Assessment of the US Congress. He later joined Prodigy (IBM/Sears/CBS) in the mid-80s, securing patents that are today at the heart of Internet innovation, and writing the first online banking,

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Role Model Interviews

Over the last few months, I have done a series of interviews with leaders – CEOs, Entrepreneurs, Innovators, Technologists, Academics, and Social Entrepreneurs – which offer insights to young and old alike about key choices – in business, in career, in life. * Jerry Rawls, CoFounder & CEO of Finisar * Philippe Courtot, Founder and

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Story of an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Raj Vaswani (Part 7)

Raj accepted an EIR position with Foundation Capital. Such arrangements typically have the EIRs reviewing business plans and providing their own technical expertise to any of the VC’s portfolio companies, while incubating a new startup of their own. Below, he explains some of the general terms for being an EIR, including his role with Foundation.

Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 16)

The discussion below is more specific to my own blog, and since I happen to be an Adify customer, I asked Russ some details about what are some of my options – current and future. I choose to publish it because I am sure there are other bloggers out there who would find this information

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Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 15)

Strategy, market opportunity identification, positioning … all this good stuff apart, a successful ad network would require Adify to be able to execute in conjunction with the large media companies at many more levels of operational excellence. There, as per my own experience, so far, both Adify and Washington Post are only moderately acceptable. By

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