Morgan Hertzan and Joseph Varet, co-founders of LX.TV

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Morgan Hertzan and Joseph Varet are the founders of LX.TV, a New York-based start-up that produces videos for the Web about high-end entertainment and culture centered around New York and Los Angeles. The company was recently aquired by NBC Universal. LX.TV began distributing its local entertainment content exclusively online and has seen considerable growth since its New York real estate show OpenHouseNYC began airing on NBC's owned-and-operated New York station WNBC in January 2007. Since then, WNBC has also added the New York lifestyle show LX.TV 1st Look to its programming lineup.

Prior to founding LXTV Joseph was responsible for all aspects of business development and strategic planning for new television and broadband networks at MTV and Morgan served as Executive Producer for new television and broadband networks at MTV, where he oversaw all aspects of creative development and production for MHD, MTV World, MTV Puerto Rico, and MTV's permanent video billboard in Time Square. Morgan previously created, launched, and supervised production of mtvU, which reaches over 7 million students at 700 US colleges and universities.

Enjoy the podcast!

- Tristan

Matt Sanchez, CEO of VideoEgg

Matt Sanchez is CEO of one of Silicon Valley’s hottest new media start-ups, VideoEgg.


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In 2005, Matt Sanchez and his Yale buddies, David Lerman and Kevin Slack, founded VideoEgg. The company’s original goal was to create a new way to upload video to the web. However, the trio soon went in a new direction when the founders saw the potential to leverage their technology in the advertising world.

Today, VideoEgg gives brands a new way to reach audiences hooked on viewing online video. The company was the first to develop video overlay ads and has seen interest in the medium skyrocket as more users view content on YouTube and other video sharing sites. VideoEgg has also expanded its product offerings by serving video ads on social networks like Facebook.

VideoEgg’s clients include more than 200 brands including Ford, NBC, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s. Collectively, these advertisers pay VideoEgg to broadcast over 500 million video messages per month. Sanchez has led the company through $35 million of VC fundraising and in this podcast discusses the venture process as well as the company’s future goals.

Enjoy the podcast!

- Nir

David Hornik, Partner at August Capital

David Hornik is a venture capitalist, professor, blogger and the founder of The Lobby Conference.

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David Hornik's blog was the first to be written by a venture capitalist and has been well-read and discussed since its inception. Recently, his long standing interest in media led him to found the ultra-secretive Lobby Conference, which he discusses in this podcast.

David also discusses two of his other passions: music and law. As a student at Stanford, he studied and taught the impact of technology on music, earning a degree in Computer Music. At Harvard Law School, David focused upon the convergence of technology and the law. Prior to becoming a VC, David was an intellectual property and corporate attorney where he represented high-tech startups in all aspects of their formation, financing and operations. Today, Hornick teaches the topics of law class at the Stanford GSB.

David has been a successful venture investor at August Capital since 2000. He currently sits on the board of directors of DoneRight, Nomis Solutions, PayCycle, Six Apart, Splunk Technology and VideoEgg. He directed previous investments in Evite (acquired by Ticketmaster) and was a board observer with Tickle Inc. (acquired by Monster) and Actional (aquired by Progress Software).

- Owen and Nir

Barry McCarthy, Chief Financial Officer of Netflix

Barry McCarthy joined Netflix as CFO when few were believed the company could rival the industry leader, Blockbuster. Today, Netflix is the biggest player in the video rental market and just finished its first billion-dollar sales year.


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Our guest in this podcast is Barry McCarthy, Chief Financial Officer of Netflix. For the past eight years, Barry has been responsible for all of Netflix’s legal and financial affairs. During his tenure at Netflix, Barry has helped the company grow from a few million dollars in sales to Netflix’s first billion dollar year in 2007. He played an integral role in the company’s initial public offering in 2002 and has helped the company become the most highly valued player in the video rental market.

Barry discusses with Nir the future of content delivery over the Internet and what technologies he sees as opportunities and threats. He also discusses how Netflix stayed nimble and aggressive in the face of powerful competitors. Barry also frankly talks about how he decided to bet on the Netflix business model even when few thought it would work.

Enjoy the podcast and let us know what you think!

-Nir

Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google

Marissa Mayer is a key figure at Google and has much influence in the design, development, and usability of Google products we use every day, such as search and Gmail.



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When we asked what she thinks about each morning, Marissa said, "I think about the people here [at Google] and how great they are... The people here inspire me to such a level."

Marissa plays a pivotal role in the development and launch of key Google products and serves as a key advisor to many of Google's new talents. As the 20th hire (and the first female hire), she has and continues to set deep footprints in products such as Gmail and Google Desktop. Her demonstrated passion for consumer products and her engagement with the people she works with have made her one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley. She has been written about in multiple publications, including Newsweek, Fortune, and Fast Company.

In this interview, Marissa talks about Google's vision for search, ads, and apps, and personal experiences and lessons. Also find out how she identifies a great product during her "office hours", which Google application spawned AdSense (a core multi-billion dollar business), and which San Francisco bakery she co-owns.

Many thanks to the Googlers who contributed to this interview.


- Min Liu and Julio

Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch

Arrington started TechCrunch in 2005 to profile the latest and greatest in internet technology and startup companies.


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Nir and Owen talked to Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, when he visited the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Today his blog is the place on the web where you’re you’ll likely get the early news on major company shakeups, product announcements, and emerging ideas.

Since 2005 the TechCrunch network of content sites has expanded dramatically. Arrington’s empire covers 9 different sites, including a podcast called TalkCrunch, a product review site titled CrunchGear as well as several foreign sites.

Arrington was selected as one of the 50 most important people on the web by PC magazine. TechCrunch recently held it’s annual party “TechCrunch 7”, but the TechCrunch 20 is still open for fans. The conference, which is discussed during the podcast will take place during September 17-18 in San Francisco.

Max Levchin, Founder of Slide and Co-Founder of Paypal

Max Levchin was co-founder and CTO of Paypal and is currently founder and CEO of Slide and Chairman of Yelp.

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We caught up with Max Levchin at the Red Herring Spring conference in Monterey, California.

In this interview Max shares some stories from the early days at PayPal, and provides his views on entrepreneurship.

Check out the video of the full interview below. Special thanks to Jeremy for all the work on the videos from the conference!



Thanks for listening!

- Matt

Dispatch from Monterey: Red Herring Spring Conference

Red Herring recently hosted iinnovate at its annual Spring conference in Monterey where the Red Herring 100 are announced. Matt and Julio were on hand to conduct interviews with a few notable winners.

Special thanks to the Red Herring crew for inviting us to the conference and for iinnovate team members Jeremy and Dawn for holding down the fort behind the scenes and in post-production. Here's a picture of Matt and I with Dawn at the iinnovate "studio."

All interviews should be available from Red Herring soon, but in the meantime you can check them out here.

In a preview of this week's episode, here is a short interview with Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal and currently founder and CEO of Slide and Chairman of Yelp:



Two companies doing interesting things in the mobile space are Jangl and Jaxtr. We feature interviews with both of them below:





If you want to see additional interviews, we also have a video from our interview with Revision3, Share Methods, and more on the way shortly.

Send in your feedback, and as always thanks for watching!

- JULIO.

Sam Altman - Founder of Loopt

Sam Altman is the 22-year old co-founder of Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile application that allows users to see where their friends are. Sam gives us a peek into the fascinating and incubative world of a Silicon Valley startup that's gaining a lot of momentum.


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"Oh yea, it's enlightening" said Sam when reflecting on the process of creating Loopt. Loopt arose from a need to find where your friends are over the cellphone. The most common question asked in a conversation is, "Where are you?" Loopt addresses this and seeks to develop a cool mobile and online service that helps you connect with your friends.

In this interview, we talked to Sam in the Loopt Palo Alto office about how he and the Loopt co-founders developed the service, what's ticking in the mobile industry, how to not get a case of vitamin deficiency, and why working for a startup might be one of the most exciting propositions out there. He was recently named one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs in Technology by Businessweek.

Check out this video of Sam giving us a brief demo of Loopt (you can tag and comment right on the video, so play around and write some comments!)



And in this next video, Sam talks about what he wish he knew before getting started as well as gives some book recommendations (a question we threw in there by popular request from those of you writing in!)



- Min and JULIO.

Tim Westergren, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Pandora

Tim Westergren is the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Pandora, a music recommendation service built on the Music Genome Project and a poster child for resilience in the volatile world of Silicon Valley startups.




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Tim shares insightful anecdotes and thoughts from Pandora's colorful and instructive past seven years: innovations around music discovery and a "drop-dead simple" user interface, Pandora's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"-esque struggle for survival, its explosion of viral audience growth, and most recently, the Copyright Royalty Tribunal's contentious decision to hike up the royalties for Internet radio.

Pandora is fighting back against the ruling, as it staves off criticism of the Project's scalability. Tim addresses all these, as well as the slow death of music retail businesses, and the impact of music recommendation services such as Pandora on the livelihood independent musicians.

Special thanks to Sarah Bennett, our videographer extraordinaire, Min Liu, who masterfully navigated through evening rush hour traffic, and iinnovate listener Ethan B who helped with our audio quality--check out the interview in video alongside an inside look at Pandora's headquarters.




- Min Li Chan and Owen Tripp

Update (May 3, 2007): In the fight against the Copyright Tribunal's decision to hike up royalties for Internet radio, Pandora is starting down the bumpy road of international expansion this year. While Tim talks about scalability issues around the Music Genome Project and international expansion in our podcast, Techcrunch today reveals that Pandora has begun preventing access to Pandora's streaming service for most countries outside of the U.S., due to international licensing constraints. Mike Arrington of Techcrunch notes:

"Pandora operates under Section 114 of the DMCA, which gives them a clear process for paying rights holders in the U.S. There is no international equivalent of the DMCA, and so to operate legally in other countries, Pandora must sign deals with rights holders directly. That means separate deals with labels and publishers for each song, an extremely difficult and time consuming task."

We're keeping our fingers crossed for resilient Pandora, as they navigate through new murky waters. -MLC

Mark Jung, former COO of MySpace & Fox Interactive

Mark Jung talks about running MySpace in his role as COO of Fox Interactive and the future of user-generated content.


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Mark Jung has spent the last 17 years as a successful internet CEO and entrepreneur. Most recently, at Fox Mark was responsible for the day-to-day operations of all of its properties including MySpace, IGN Entertainment, FoxSports.com, Scout Media, and AmericanIdol.com.

Prior to Fox, Mark was the co-founder and CEO of IGN Entertainment, a leading Internet media and services company for videogaming and other forms of digital entertainment (sold to NewsCorp for $650 million).

In this interview Mark discusses user-generated content, career advice, and skin care products (his sister is CEO of Avon!)

- Nir.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, talks about Google’s industry and competitors, about leading innovation, and career advice.


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We caught up with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google last week and had an interesting conversation about Google’s business and Eric’s views on innovation, entrepreneurship, and careers.

Eric joined Google as Chairman and CEO in 2001 and runs the company in a unique triumvirate along with co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The three of them were recently ranked the #1 most important person on the web by PC World.

Prior to joining Google, Eric was the CEO of Novell and CTO of Sun Microsystems.

Check out this video of Andy Grove asking Eric Schmidt a question:


The videos of the interview are up! Check out this video of the interview:


For the rest of the interview click here.

We received a lot of valuable input and questions for this interview. Special thanks to John Battelle, John Furrier, Om Malik, Philipp Lenssen, Tim O'Reilly, Steve Rubel, and Robert Scoble.

Tune in next week for an interview with Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s List!

- the iinnovate team

Dr. Ed Catmull, Co-founder and President of Pixar Animation

Dr. Ed Catmull, co-founder and President of Pixar talks about managing creative talent and on maintaining an innovative edge.



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Ed Catmull is the co-founder and President of Pixar Animation Studio. He has made several patented advances in animation technology and is the driver behind many of Pixar’s 15 amazing Academy Awards. Among other technologies, Catmull is credited with being the father of “texture mapping” – the process by which a flat (two dimensional) image is mapped onto a moving 3D image.

Dr. Catmull (he claims only his mother calls him that) is also the master behind many of animation's recent heroes. Woody, Nemo, and Mr. Incredible are just a few of the lovable characters that Catmull’s technology and direction have enabled.



Pixar was incorporated in 1985, went public in 1996, and merged with the Walt Disney Company in 2006. During that time Catmull has served in various roles spanning from code developer to chief technical officer to president of the studio.

The iinnovate team would like to offer a special thanks to the Stanford Graduate School of Business Entrepreneurship Conference for making our conversation with Ed Catmull possible.

We’d also like to thank our expert video guy Jeremy for his hard work on this footage and the other clips you see up on our website. He turns our shoddy footage into beauty and we’re very appreciative!

- OWEN

Philip Rosedale, Founder of Linden Labs and Second Life

Philip's company has created Second Life, a remarkable 3-D virtual world with over a million residents. To listen, click the play button below.


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Philip built his first computer in 4th grade, and started his first computer software company while still in high school. In '95 he developed FreeVue, a low-bitrate video conferencing system for Internet-connected PC's, which was eventually acquired by RealNetworks. He worked at RealNetworks for three years and eventually became the CTO. He decided to leave in 1999 and joined Accel Partners as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. There he founded Linden Labs, a company which had the audacious goal to build an immersive 3-D virtual world for people to live and play in. That world became Second Life.

It's a bit hard to understand what exactly Second Life is without actually seeing it. So we decided to create an elaborate detailed video walk-through of second life. Then we found somebody else already did that, so instead we're just embedding it (Gotta love the internet!)

So here's your Second Life primer. (Is it just me or does it seem to be narrated by a 7 year-old?)



Second Life has become quite the media darling recently. In addition to the Business Week article shown above and numerous other print mentions, interesting posts around the internet focus on topics as diverse as wealth, art, sweat-shop labor labor and, of course, sex (or lack thereof)

OK, now you can listen to the podcast. Let us know what you think in the comments!

- Matt

PS - You can also check out videos of Julio and I doing the podcast with complete, unedited answers. Here is one below with the unedited answer to the Andy Grove question, the rest are on YouTube here.



PPS - Quick thanks to our friend Kareem for all the help with the video! Check out his cool little blog reemer.

Elaine, Sandy and Seth, founders of Meebo

Meebo is one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups. Experiencing explosive growth and backed by Sequoia Capital, Meebo allows users to log onto AOL, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger and Google Talk in their web browser, eliminating the need to install any software.


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Meebo's core service allows users to log onto IM accounts within their browser, eliminating the need to install any software.

Check out these stats:

• 1 million logins per day
  
• 57 million instant messages per day
  
• 120 man-years spent on Meebo by people every day(!)
  

All this is beginning to cause some real buzz, and Meebo routinely gets getting coverage on the big blogs, including Techcrunch, GigaOM and O'Reilly.

Here we have an interview with the founding team of Meebo: Seth, Elaine, and Sandy. We caught up with them as they moved out of their old offices into bigger digs. The interview was a blast, as they are really nice people and a ton of fun. (To get better acquainted with them, check out the Meebo blog.)


- Matt

P.S. Shameless plug: Check out Matt's new personal blog wync ;)

Andy Fan, Founder of Mofile (Chinese Youtube)

Andy Fan, CEO of Mofile (the 'Chinese YouTube'), talks about the Chinese internet user, video sharing sites, and entrepreneurship and venture capital in China.


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In this interview Matt interviews Andy Fan in Shanghai. Andy is the CEO of Mofile, the Chinese online storage site that is the equivalent of YouTube in China.

Andy shares his unique insights on the Chinese audience and his views on digital media. A can't-miss interview for anyone interested on an international perspective on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Chinese video sites are leveraging pre-roll ads to monetize audience (check out Calvin Wuchin's post) and Andy provides his views on the business.

For more information on Mofile, check out TechCrunch's analysis of online storage companies.

- Julio

PS - Curious what MoFile looks like? Check out Andy's favorite MoFile video.

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Mike Ramsay, Co-founder of TiVO

You can thank Mike for the fact that you haven't seen a TV commercial in six months. Mike left a cushy job at SGI to form TiVO, which revolutionized the way people watched TV by creating the first ever Digital Video Recorder.


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| Transcript
We spoke to Mike Ramsay who founded TiVo along with former Silicon Graphics veteran Jim Barton. TiVo pioneered the digital video recorder when it shipped its first unit in March of 1999 and went on to establish one of the most rapid adoption rates in the history of consumer electronics on its way to an IPO only 6 months later.

In this interview Mike shares with us unique insights into the history of TiVo and the essence of what it’s like to introduce and market a disruptive technology. He also talks about what he sees in the future for TiVo and adds some more color around issues such as TiVo search that John Battelle has written about and on partnership deals in the past and future as Thomas Hawk and Om Malik have commented on.

The revolutionary nature of TiVo won it an Emmy award and made the product into a verb. So join us as we learn what it takes to launch a product for which 98% of users say they couldn’t live without!

For more, check out this great engadget interview with Mike, and for some laughs check out this ad to learn about how TiVo was invented by aliens.

- JULIO.

Transcript

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