Twist Episode 33 with Shawn Gold

This post is a recap of TWIST #33 with Shawn Gold. This Week in Startups is a weekly podcast, hosted by Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis.

Insights form Jason Calacanis

When things are going poorly, cancel a board meeting! Find an excuse to postpone it.

Bing has the potential to be a great porn search engine. About the Bing video feature. On mouse hover a video, it begins to play automatically.

eHarmony should put their ads in porn sites.

Redtube and Pornotube are to the porn industry what Craigslist was to classifieds

Ask Jason with Travis Fischer

Travis Fischer has already founded two Startups Key Minor and ECStageArt. He has the next question:

Q: I am coming out of school. Should I go to work for a great entrepreneur and learn as much as I can or should I go and do it myself, make mistakes, get my ass kicked and learn?

A: Both ways are great. Important is to get your ass kicked and learn. It can be difficult to get hired by a great CEO. Jason advices to convince the CEO that:

• You bring something to the party. For example: HTML, Search Engine Optimization or Affiliate Marketing.
• You do not care about the income.
• You are willing to work as hard as needed, weekends etc.

Shawn Gold gives a common tip in TWIST. Get out of Wisconsin quickly!. Move to a place with more startup activity!

Ask Jason with Stephen Cross

Q: How to get a grasp of what the value of an online community is to advertisers?

A: Shawn Gold, the man responsible of bringing the money in the door of WeblogsInc, points that the liquid of the community is in what they are doing and what the community topic is. He recommends to use the currently available tools. Use search engines, Adsense and pay attention to keyword clusters around the community topic.

Stephen Cross idea spins around marketing to people who is going to have a baby. Business around a mayor life event such birth, wedding or similar are always a good place to be. However, competition is tough. Jason praises Baby Center email newsletter.

Shark Tank with Nicky Hajal

Insights from Taylor

Make your pitch dynamic and engaging. Force the other person to respond back but being sure what the answer is gonna be.

Taylor's Porche story.

Pitch One year ago, Nicky Hajal and his partner founded NiceTranslator. A Real Time translator based in Google API. Because of machine translation lack of quality, there is a niche for a quality translation service. Transissimo is a new project which allows people to share high-quality human translations. It evolves around four parts: an interface, an API, a ranking based on performance and a distribution system. The revenue ideas are to charge for longer translations and split the money with the translator and a model focused around dynamic hosting and management of translation.

Feedback Shawn Gold recommends to avoid Jargon. Jason does not clearly gets the uniqueness about the service and the way to make money. Taylor tips Nicky to engage the person receiving the pitch.

It is important to explain a business specific value proposition. After talking further, Jason advices Nicky to give a real example of the service and comes with an understandable sentence. We are the Mechanical Turk of translation. The prescription is to upload screenshots of the service in Flickr and to create an explanatory video. Jason is concerned about Nicky's background. As expressed in previous episodes, Jason doubts about entrepreneurs coming from a wealthy family.

Guest Interview with Shawn Gold

Insights from Shawn Gold

How to get advertising? You have to be extremely resilient, you must have a compelling and extremely short email because nobody has time, you call at 8:45 when they are in the office and the assistant isn't.

Anyone giving a pitch should avoid jargon. A twelve year old should understand your pitch.

The secret to success is to find the right people and empower them to execute.

The secret of a sales person is empathy and ego drive.

JC: If you are not fired up with enthusiasms you will be fired with enthusiasms.

Shawn Gold got in the Web in 1995. We began convincing big companies that they needed to build a Website. Later, in WeblogsInc, he convinced big companies that they needed to have a blog. Before landing in WeblogsInc, he launched his own publishing company. He defines himself as a consumer guy. Indeed he was responsible to bring the advertising money into WeblogsInc. After the AOL acquisition, he left WeblogsInc and went to MySpace. He left it and got recruited by his wife to be the CEO of her consumer start-up company Cocodot.com. Jason and Shawn discuss Cocodot business model, partnerships and the current state of the product. The service is in the early stages but its getting already positive reviews and usage. Shawn has already done some important performance deals which will be published soon.

The News with Lon Harris

Rackspace Goes Down. Again. Takes The Internet With It. Again.

Jason and Shawn agree that a down happens to everybody, important thing is how you respond to it. Jason thinks that Rackspace will respond properly. A public company, as once Microsoft was, is again in the hands of Robert Scoble.

Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More

Jason considers it the biggest Deal of the year. It will suppose a mayor seat change for Google because it will mean to buy a content company. A large number of content companies will suddenly become target for Google Acquisitions. However, Taylor doubts about the deal while Jason gives credits to Mike Arrington and believes the deal could become true. The 20th of December TechCrunch published that Yelp Walked Away From Google Deal, And Half A Billion Dollars. It seems Taylor was right.

Insights form Jason Calacanis

If you go social media, when things go bad things count 10x.

Mark Zuckerberg could kill Facebook because of arrogance

This could be a PointCast level disaster

If you are a Facebook employee, sell your stock!

Facebook is greedy and thinks that users do not have rights!

If you build something on top of Twitter's API, its not a business but a hobby!

Twitter Hacked, Defaced By "Iranian Cyber Army"

Jason does not believe that it was a terrorist attach. Who could be behind the attack? Iranian opposition, a fired System Admin or even Mark Zuckerberg. Nonetheless, Twitter being down is not a matter of national security.

Groupon Valued At $250 million

The crew do not understand why is the valuation so high. Shawn Gold points to added value of their popular Email Newsletter and their big percentage in each sale. The coupons categories is on fire but the number is impressive.

Facebook privacy controversy

In his newsletter Jason asked if Facebook was unethical, clueless or unlucky. Currently he believes facebook is none of them but delusional. Moreover, he believes this privacy blunder could be Facebook's Achilles' heel.

Netflix has been sued by a woman who claims that it ostensibly revealed her sexual orientation

This brought the controversial Eric Schmidt's sentence into the table If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. The crew agrees that Netflix should be more careful about privacy or they are gonna be sued more often.

Google and Facebook launched their own URL Shortners

Link data stored by URL Shorteners is really valuable. Jason predicts that the biggest problem for Bit.ly, the current market leader, is not Facebook or Google but Twitter itself. He thinks Twitter will release its own version of the best third party applications as Microsoft did with Windows. Taking out Lotus with Office.