Web Masters
Web Masters is an original podcast that explores the history of the Internet through the stories of some of its most important innovators. In each episode, host Aaron Dinin, a serial entrepreneur and digital media scholar, talks with Internet entrepreneurs who created important websites, tools, services, and features. Some are hugely popular, some you’ve never heard of, and all of them have impacted everything you do online. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how the Internet has enabled -- and continues to create -- some of the greatest business opportunities in history from the people who have proven they...
Wed, January 31, 2024
Startup Gold Episode #5: The Purpose of Entrepreneurship With Peter Sunde
In this Startup Gold episode of Web Masters, Aaron returns to the story of Peter Sunde, co-founder of the Pirate Bay, a notorious file sharing website.. The podcast explores how Sunde's journey challenges traditional views of entrepreneurship, focusing on his unique reasons for starting the controversial file-sharing site. Facing legal issues and even imprisonment, Sunde's experience raises questions about the true purpose of entrepreneurship. This episode of Web Masters will ask you to consider what drives entrepreneurs beyond the usual goals of profit and independence, and how do those motives impact outcomes? For a full transcript of the episode, click here .
Wed, December 27, 2023
Startup Gold Episode #4: Seeing the Future with Raj Kapoor
In this Startup Gold episode of Web Masters, host Aaron explores some wisdom shared by Raj Kapoor, founder of Snapfish. The central theme revolves around the importance of skating to where the puck is going in entrepreneurship. Drawing from the advice of successful investor Bill Gurley, Kapoor emphasizes the need for entrepreneurs to predict the future trajectory rather than focusing on the present. The episode delves deeper into the concept, connecting it with the evolving landscape of self-driving cars and highlighting the critical role of foreseeing opportunities in the entrepreneurial journey. For a full transcript of the episode, click here .
Thu, November 30, 2023
Startup Gold Episode #3: The Importance of Timing with John Danner
In the third episode of the "Startup Gold" series from Web Masters, Aaron explores the importance of timing in the ultimate success (or failure) of a business. The discussion about timing centers around his conversation with John Danner, CEO and founder of Net Gravity, the first Web marketing company in history. According to John, he was a "horrible CEO." And yet, his company was hugely successful. How does that happen? Hint: the answer has something to do with having great timing. For a full transcript of the episode, click here .
Tue, October 31, 2023
Startup Gold Episode #2: The Dangers of "First-Mover Advantage" with Jason Olim
In the second episode of the "Startup Gold" series from Web Masters, Aaron revisits a conversation he had with Jason Olim. Jason Olim founded CDNow.com. It's a name most people don't remember these days, but it was the first major e-commerce retailer on the Web. In fact, it was Amazon before Amazon and had the dominant position over Jeff Bezos back when the Web was first taking shape. So why didn't CDNow become the world's most popular e-commerce platform? Why doesn't CDNow still exist? According to Jason's interview, the answer is the very thing that most entrepreneurs tout as one of the most important advantages in achieving entrepreneurial success. For a full transcript of the episode, click here .
Sat, September 30, 2023
Startup Gold Episode #1: How to Build a Truly Great Product with David Cummings
After 100 interviews with 100 incredible entrepreneurs, Aaron and the Web Masters team are diving into the archives to extract some of the best advice about entrepreneurship and building profitable Internet businesses. We're calling it "Startup Gold." In the first episode of Startup Gold, we're catching back up with David Cummings, founder of Pardot, to explore his thoughts on what it takes to build a truly great product. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, July 31, 2023
Taegan Goddard @ Political Wire: The Political Junkie Who Built a Community for Fellow Addicts
In this episode of Web Masters, we delve into the fascinating journey of Taegan Goddard, the visionary behind Political Wire, one of the internet's longest-running political news websites. Host Aaron Dinin interviews Taegan to uncover the early days of blogging and internet media, how Political Wire became a go-to destination for political junkies, and the challenges and successes of building and maintaining a creator business model. Taegan shares insights into the evolution of Political Wire's monetization strategies, from early sponsorships to the current subscription and programmatic advertising model. Discover how Taegan's passion for politics and community-building transformed a side hustle into a full-time career, while also becoming a key part of the Political Wire brand. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Thu, June 01, 2023
Daniel Ha @ Disqus: The Entrepreneur Who Made Commenting Easier
In this episode of the Web Masters podcast, we sit down with Daniel Ha, co-founder of Disqus, the popular online commenting platform. Daniel shares his insights and experiences in building a successful tech company, providing valuable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs and webmasters alike. Join us as we delve into the fascinating world of online engagement and discover the story behind Disqus. Key Points: Introduction to Disqus (02:30 - 07:45): Daniel introduces Disqus, explaining its purpose as a commenting system for websites and blogs. He shares the inspiration behind creating Disqus and how it aimed to solve the challenges of user engagement on the internet. The evolution of Disqus from a simple project to a widely adopted platform. Navigating Challenges and Finding Success (07:45 - 16:15): Daniel discusses the initial challenges of building and scaling Disqus, including user acquisition and monetization strategies. The importance of building a strong community around the product and leveraging user feedback for continuous improvement. How Disqus differentiated itself from competitors and gained traction in the market. The significance of providing value to both publishers and commenters in fostering a thriving ecosystem. Lessons from Building a Tech Company (16:15 - 26:50): Daniel reflects on the lessons learned throughout his journey as an entrepreneur. The importance of staying focused on solving a specific problem and delivering a superior user experience. The value of building a team of talented individuals who share the same vision and passion. Overcoming the challenges of fundraising and securing investment for startup growth. The role of persistence, adaptability, and continuous learning in entrepreneurial success. The Future of Online Engagement (26:50 - 34:40): Daniel shares his insights on the evolving landscape of online engagement and the impact of social media. The challenges of combating spam and maintaining quality discussions in online comment sections. The rise of alternative forms of engagement, such as video and audio comments. The importance of privacy and data security in an era of increasing concerns. Closing Thoughts and Advice (34:40 - 38:15): Daniel offers final words of wisdom for aspiring entrepreneurs and webmasters. The significance of staying true to your vision and persevering through challenges. Embracing continuous improvement and seeking feedback from users. The excitement and opportunities that lie ahead in the tech industry. Conclusion: In this engaging episode, Daniel Ha, the founder of Disqus, takes us on a journey through the challenges and triumphs of building a successful online commenting platform. His insights shed light on the
Mon, April 24, 2023
Jed Carlson @ ReverbNation: The MBA Who Taught Bands How to Share Their Music Online
On this episode of Web Masters, we sit down with Jed Carlson, co-founder of ReverbNation, the premier online platform for independent musicians and bands to showcase their talent and connect with fans. Leveraging his experiences as a serial entrepreneur, Jed shares his insights on building a successful tech startup, the challenges of scaling a platform, and the importance of creating value for both artists and fans. We delve into the origins of ReverbNation and how the company has grown to become a global leader in the music industry, with over 4 million artists, bands, and labels using the platform to share their music with fans around the world. Jed also shares his thoughts on the changing landscape of digital media, the impact of social media on music promotion, and the future of the music industry. Whether you're a music enthusiast, a tech entrepreneur, or simply curious about the intersection of music and technology, this episode offers a fascinating look into the world of ReverbNation and the innovative strategies that have made it a success. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, March 27, 2023
Osman Rashid @ Chegg.com: The Man Who Turned Textbook Rentals Into Big Business
If you've ever had to buy textbooks for school, you know how shockingly expensive they are. You also probably know about Chegg, the company that first made online textbook rentals easy and cheap. At first glance, textbook rentals might not seem like big business, but lots of people need textbooks. Plus, some legal hurdles for Amazon -- the obvious competitor -- left an opening that Osman Rashid, founder of Chegg, was able to squeeze through. The result was a company that's been helping college kids everywhere save money on textbooks and lots of other things. On this episode of Web Masters, Osman shares the story of how he and his cofounders built Chegg into one of the most valuable education service providers on the Web. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, February 27, 2023
Terry Jones @ Travelocity & Kayak: The Travel Agent Who Put Travel Agents Out of Business
If you want to fly across the world tomorrow, you can make your plans within minutes while sitting on your couch. But booking travel used to be much more complicated. It required calling (or visiting) travel agents who would manage all of your reservations for you, and then you'd have to wait from them to send your tickets and itineraries. The process could take hours, and ensuring you'd found the best prices was near impossible. That all changed when American Airlines began making their travel booking software available online. The man who led those efforts was Terry Jones. Terry Jones was a former travel agent turned tech ops manager who oversaw American's initiative to launch the website that ultimately became Travelocity, and it forever changed how people traveled. If that weren't enough, Terry also went on to help found Kayak, the travel comparison engine that made finding the best and cheapest flights as easy as booking online. In this episode of Web Masters, Terry talks about how he helped build both revolutionary pieces of travel software. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, January 23, 2023
Steve Kaufer @ TripAdvisor: The Entrepreneur Who Wanted a Better Vacation
Chances are, before you take a vacation, you do lots of research figuring out where to go and what to do when you get there. Today, that's as easy as a Google search, but that wasn't always the case. In the early days of the Web, vacation research required hours of tedious detective work as you pieced together little bits of information about the places you wanted to visit from questionable sources. That all began to change when Steve Kaufer launched TripAdvisor. His travel review website completely revolutionized the travel industry and changed the way people took vacations. On this episode of Web Masters, Steve shares the story of not just building TripAdvisor, but running it for two decades through both an acquisition and going public. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, December 19, 2022
Ben Huh @ Cheezburger Network: The Guy Who Did Haz Funny Cat Pictures
What would the Internet be without pictures and videos of cats doing ridiculous things? Luckily, we'll never have to find out, and it's thanks, in part, to Ben Huh. In the early 2000s, Ben bought a popular cat meme website called I Can Haz Cheezburger and he turned it into the Cheezburger Network, one of the Internet's most popular user-submitted content websites. In its heyday, the site was so popular it produced everything from coffee table books to reality television shows. As social media matured, user-submitted content websites waned in popularity, and along with it, so did Cheezburger Network, but not before Ben's sites forever flooded the Internet with thousands of memes that we might never escape. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, November 21, 2022
David Gardner @ The Motley Fool: The Brothers Who've Been Giving Online Investing Advice for 30 Years
For almost as long as people have been communicating on the Web they've been using it to talk about stocks. At the heart of those conversations since the very beginning were the Gardner brothers, David and Tom. Together they launched The Motley Fool. The Motley Fool began as a small financial newsletter for friends and family, it evolved into one of the most popular forums on AOL, and it's since become one of the most reputable sites for financial advice anywhere on the Web. During the journey it's survived three enormous market crashes and a host of other problems that would kill most startups. But somehow, those problems have only made The Fool stronger and even more popular. On this episode of Web Masters, join one of the Fool brothers -- David Gardner -- as he shares the story of how he and his sibling have made themselves prominent leaders of financial conversations for three decades. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, October 17, 2022
Craig Newmark @ Craigslist: The "Forest Gump of the Internet" Who Helps People Find Stuff
Is it possible to start a wildly successful company by luck? It is according to Craig Newmark. As you can probably guess by the name, Craig is the founder of Craigslist, the ultra-popular classifieds website that millions of people have been using for decades to help solve just about any kind of need you could possibly imagine. But that wasn't the goal behind launching Craigslist. Instead, Craigslist was started as a simple email list to share what was happening in the Bay Area. How did it become a household name and a site for anyone and everyone to buy/sell/trade whatever they wanted? Find out on this episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, September 12, 2022
Marc Seriff @ AOL: The Network Engineer Who Introduced the Internet to Everyone
For millions of people, their first experience with the World Wide Web was made possible by America Online -- AOL. In fact, most people directly associate AOL with the Web. But did you know AOL predates the World Wide Web by nearly a decade? That's because, when AOL launched, the it was still illegal to use the Internet for commercialize activities. Instead, AOL was one of a handful of companies attempting to create their own global network. And, thanks to a bunch of CD-Roms you probably remember, AOL was the most successful company doing it. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear the story of how AOL got started and how it grew to be one of the biggest companies on the early Web as we hear from AOL co-founder Marc Seriff. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, August 08, 2022
Jason Calacanis @ Silicon Alley Reporter: The Guy Who Threw the Best Parties in New York City
Today, Jason Calacanis is one of the most prominent names in the Silicon Valley tech and entrepreneurship community. But, before he was a well-known West Coast investor, he was at the center of the smaller bust fast-growing East Coast tech scene in New York known as "Silicon Alley." Jason ran Silicon Alley Reporter , a magazine dedicated to the tech innovation happening in New York City. It grew from a 16 page, homemade, photocopied booklet into a 300+ page glossy generating millions in ad revenue. On this episode of Web Masters, Jason shares the story of how he created the magazine as well as what entrepreneurial life was like in the early days of New York tech. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, July 11, 2022
Charles Adler @ Kickstarter: The Music Lover Who Popularized Crowdfunding
The Kickstarter name is synonymous with crowdfunding. It's like the Kleenex of the crowdfunding industry. But, strangely enough, Kickstarter didn't invent crowdfunding. The technique dates back centuries. Heck, Kickstarter wasn't even the first crowdfunding website. So how did it become the world's de facto crowdfunding platform? In this episode of Web Masters, we find out by speaking with one of Kickstarter's co-founders, Charles Adler. He shares the story of building the platform and how he and his co-founders turned a goal of helping artists fund their work into a global brand that's become synonymous with launching innovative new projects. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, June 27, 2022
Amir Ashkenazi @ Shopping.com: The Coder Who Made Online Bargain Hunting Easy
Most of us do a significant chunk of our purchasing at Amazon.com. Or, at the very least, a site like it. Amazon may or may not be the cheapest, but we're pretty sure it'll have what we want, we know delivery will be quick, and the price will be competitive. Even though we don't give online purchasing a second thought these days, it actually took a lot of years for early web users to get comfortable buying stuff from the internet. That's because E-commerce didn't begin as a better option for most retail purchases. In fact, in the beginning, E-commerce was pretty crummy. It was hard to navigate, shipping times were slow, and there was lots of fraud. E-commerce had to evolve over time into becoming something that was clearly a better option than traditional, in-person commerce, and one of the people who had a big impact on that evolution was Amir Ashkenazi. He did it by helping people bargain hunt and comparison shop online, first through his DealTime platform, and then the company it became, which was Shopping.com. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, June 20, 2022
Mark Chasan @ eMusic: The Lawyer Who Loved Music
Most digital music pioneers encountered lots of resistance from the large music record labels. In fact, many of their companies were sued out of existence. But not eMusic. eMusic's founder, Mark Chasan, was one of the few digital music pioneers who actually managed to successfully navigate the early digital music waters, ultimately building an online music business that couldn't be stopped by the music industry and their endless string of lawsuits. On this episode of Web Masters, we'll hear how Mark did it, as well as the pioneering work he's doing now in a different and, arguably, much more important industry. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, June 13, 2022
Alon Carmel @ Jdate: The Real Estate Investor Who Took Niche Dating Mainstream
When Alon Carmel launched JDate in 1997, he wasn't a pioneer in the online dating industry. He wasn't even a pioneer in the online Jewish dating industry. In fact, by the time he had the idea for Jdate, the Web already contained over a hundred Jewish themed dating websites. But rather than seeing all that competition and thinking the market was saturated, Alon saw the competition and figured: "It must be a good business." Recognizing the opportunity, Alon and his friend, Joe Shapira, focused on creating a popular brand. And it worked. From lavish parties to billboards across Times Square, Alon wanted to make sure everyone in the world knew about Jdate, even if not everyone was his customer. The result was the world's most popular dating website for Jewish people and a strategy for online dating focused on niche communities that Alon and his team expanded well beyond Jewish dating. It ultimately led to Spark Networks, one of the largest and most profitable networks of dating websites in the world. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, June 06, 2022
Carl Lipo @ Allrecipes: The Archaeologist Who Taught People to Cook
What do archaeology and cookie recipes have in common? In truth, not much. But that didn't stop a group of archaeology graduate students from the University of Washington from joining together to create CookieRecipe.com. CookieRecipe grew so popular that the grad students started building other similar sites, like PieRecipe.com, CakeRepice.com, ChickenRecipe.com, and ThanksgivingRecipe.com. Eventually, their network of recipe sites got so popular that they decided to combine it into one site for all their recipes. They called that site Allrecipes.com, and it's still still one of the most popular recipe websites in the world. On this episode of Web Masters, one of those archeology grad students shares the story of how he and his friends built Allrecipes. His name is Carl Lipo, and, despite helping build an enormously popular website, he decided to stick with archaeology, and he's now an archeology professor. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, May 23, 2022
James Hong @ HOTorNOT: The "4 or 5" Who Helped People Figure Out Their Attractiveness
Everyone is familiar with the 1 to 10 numeric grading scale used to describe people’s attractiveness. A supermodel might be described as “a perfect 10,” while “a 1” is basically the ugliest person you could ever imagine. In the early 2000s, a couple of college buddies in Silicon Valley decided to turn that concept into a website. It was called HOTorNOT.com. On HOTorNOT, brave people who wanted an honest measure of their attractiveness would upload pictures of themselves, and other users of the website would grade their hotness on a ubiquitous 1 to 10 numeric “hotness” scale. Within days of launching, HOTorNOT became a massive, viral hit. Millions of people from around the world were logging onto HOTorNOT.com to judge the attractiveness of others, and the site soon became one of the most popular and heavily trafficked websites on the Internet. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear the story of how -- and why -- James built it, as well as how people responded to what was perhaps the most superficial site on the Internet. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, May 16, 2022
Jesse Lipson @ ShareFile: The Solo Founder Who Bootstrapped an Enterprise SaaS App
As the ShareFile name implies, it's a software for sharing, storing, and otherwise managing files in the cloud. It's not a particularly unique service. In this episode, you'll hear ShareFile's founder, Jesse Lipson, mention some familiar competitors -- companies like Dropbox and Box and YouSendIt. Though, to be fair, in 2005, when the company launched. these types of services weren't so common. Still, cloud file management isn't exactly an obscure niche, meaning, there are a decent number of companies playing in the space, which makes for a challenging, competitive environment. However, despite that challenging environment, Jesse managed to bootstrap his company to an impressive exit over the course of six years. Bootstrapping enterprise SaaS apps isn't common. And it isn't easy, either. On this episode of Web Masters, we're going to hear how Jesse did it. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, May 09, 2022
Mitch Kapor @ Lotus, the EFF, and Mozilla: The Founder Who Became an Activist
Most founders are lucky if they build one organization that changes the world. Mitch Kapor has done it multiple times. And he's supported dozens more through venture backing and philanthropy. On this episode of Web Masters, Mitch talks about his experiences building Lotus Software, the digital world's first massively scaling software company. He followed that by launching the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help protect innovators and entrepreneurs experimenting in the digital space. And he's gone on to support dozens of other world-changing organizations including the Mozilla Foundation, creators of the Firefox Web browser. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, May 02, 2022
Matt Shobe @ FeedBurner: The Designer Who Helped People Monetize RSS
Before social media websites became our feeds of information from around the Internet, people relied on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to build their own feeds of content from different websites. While this was a great way for consumers to keep updated on what their favorite sites were producing, it wasn't so great for the sites themselves. Lots of their readers were viewing content through RSS feeds, which meant less site visitors and less money from advertisers. The FeedBurner team helped solve that problem. FeedBurner allowed websites with continuously updating content (i.e. blogs, news sites, etc.) to monetize on people who subscribed to their sites using RSS. In this episode of Web Masters, one of FeedBurner's co-founders, Matt Shobe, shares the story of helping build FeedBurner while helping us understand what the Internet was like back when you could "reach the end" of it thanks to your RSS feed. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, April 25, 2022
Scott Heiferman @ Fotolog: The Serial Entrepreneur Who Created Instagram Before Instagram
Scott Heiferman was the featured guest on Web Masters Episode #80. In that episode, we heard about how Scott built Meetup, the pioneering website for helping people find their local communities. But that wasn't the only popular website Scott built. He also built Fotolog. Fotolog was a social media website where people posted and shared their photos online for their friends to view in their feeds. In other words, it was basically Instagram. But it appeared nearly a decade before Instagram. Fotolog never quite achieved the same global status as Instagram, but it was one of the most popular websites in lots of countries around the world. On this episode of Web Masters, Scott talks about what it was like building Fotolog alongside Meetup and how it grew into a popular cultural phenomenon of its own. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, April 18, 2022
Scott Heiferman @ Meetup: The Neighbor Who Helped People Find Their Communities
We all know the Internet is a great place for connecting with people anywhere in the world who share the same interests and passions, but can it also be a great place for getting connected with people in your local comunity? The guest in this episode of Web Masters thought it could be. It's Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup. What began as a project to help Scott better connect with his New York City neighbors in the wake of the September 11th tragedy quickly grew into the world's biggest online community for finding people in your local area interested in the same things. In this episode of Web Masters, Scott explains how (and why) he started Meetup, how he grew it, and, ultimately, where he sees it going as the world continues moving away from IRL communities and toward a metaverse. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, April 11, 2022
Michael Robertson @ MP3.com: The Entrepreneur Who Got Sued for Making Music Streamable
Hard as it may be to remember now, there was a time when every song we wanted to listen to wasn’t available to stream instantly. Instead, we had to own physical copies. First came the record, then the tape, then the CD. However, in the late 90s, a new encoding technology was developed that allowed near-CD-quality music to exist in a relatively small file format. The format was called MP3. You’ve surely heard of it. As MP3s grew in popularity, Michael Robertson decided to buy the domain name “MP3.com.” He wasn’t buying the domain because he was interested in the music industry. He was buying it because he owned a file search engine called Filez.com, and he thought he could use the surging popularity of MP3s to direct traffic to his startup. However, when he launched a website on MP3.com, thousands of people started showing up, and he knew he needed to capitalize on the opportunity. Ultimately, Michael built a service people could use to stream their music collections online. That doesn’t sound unique today, but Michael launched MP3.com in the late 1990s, and, at the time, no other streaming service existed. The uniqueness of MP3.com made it wildly popular with consumers. It also made MP3.com the target of a lot of animosity from the powerful recording industry. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, April 04, 2022
Andrew Conru @ FriendFinder Networks: The PhD Who Made Online Dating More 'Friendly'
Not every online dating website needs to be for everyone. At least, that's what Andrew Conru believed. Rather than creating a single dating website and expecting everyone to join it -- which was the strategy of dating mega-site Match.com -- Andrew took a different approach to online dating. He launched a network of dating websites, each with their own theme designed to serve a specific niche of users. Most well-known among those dating websites was Adult FriendFinder, the Internet's original "hookup" website. But Adult FriendFinder was just one site in a much larger network that Andrew grew into an enormous business. Unfortunately for Andrew, running the company took a huge mental toll, and he eventually had to sell it. But the new owners mismanaged FriendFinder, plunging the company into debt and almost ruining it. On this episode of Web Masters, not only will you hear how Andrew created FriendFinder, you'll learn about the unique way Andrew responded to another company nearly ruining the thing he built. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, March 28, 2022
Steve Madere @ Deja (Google Groups): The Developer Who Could Have Built Google
Most people can’t imagine a form of the Internet that doesn’t involve the World Wide Web. In fact, the World Wide Web and the Internet are so deeply entwined that the majority of users don’t even realize there’s a difference. But that’s only because the World Wide Web was the winning technology. In the early days of the Web – i.e. the early 1990s – it was competing with other, similar technologies. In fact, some of those other technologies were significantly more popular. The most popular of those competitive technologies was called Usenet. And, just like the Web, Usenet users needed a way to search. That's why Steve Madere built Deja. Deja was the search engine for Usenet, and had things gone a little different in Internet history, we might have been talking about "deja-ing" to find what we need instead of "googling." In this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear the story of how Steve built Deja and how it could have been as impactful as Google. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, March 21, 2022
Mike Davidson @ Newsvine: The Designer Who Re-Built Journalism for the Digital Age
You're probably used to getting your news via social media. But there was a time, early in the age of social media, when news and social media weren't so deeply integrated. Instead, Internet users flocked to social news websites. One of those websites was Newsvine. It was a creator platform for citizen journalists, and it paid people anywhere in the world for writing and sharing the news they witnessed. Since the peak of Newsvine's popularity, social media platforms have merged with news platforms, and, for better and for worse, lots of people get their news from social media websites. But, in this episode of Web Masters, you'll learn about Newsvine's different approach to social news alongside Newsvine co-founder Mike Davidson. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, March 14, 2022
Patrick Lee, Stephen Wang, Senh Duong @ Rotten Tomatoes: The College Buddies Who Liked Watching Martial Arts Movies
Rotten Tomatoes began as a hobby project. Senh Duong, the original creator, started posted reviews for movies he enjoyed on a small, personal website. Pretty soon after he began, lots of people started relying on those reviews in order to choose the movies they wanted to watch, and the site's traffic began growing exponentially. Unable to handle the growth by himself, Senh turned to two friends he used to enjoy watching movies with back in college -- Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang -- and, together, the three college buddies decided to turn the little move review website into a business. That business became RottenTomatoes.com, which is still one of the most popular and trusted online resources for movie reviews. You can hear the story of how all three original founders built it on this special, 75th episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, March 07, 2022
Marshall Brain @ HowStuffWorks: The Writer Who Built the 'Coolest Site on the Internet'
The Internet has always been a place to learn about new things. But, in the early days of the Web, one writer took that opportunity for learning to an extreme by creating an entire website devoted to explaining how stuff works. His name is Marshall Brain, and he named his website -- quite appropriately -- HowStuffWorks.com. HowStuffWorks became a popular online destination for people to learn about the inner works behind everything from internal combustion engines to water towers. It eventually expanded from the Web into books, magazines, TV shows, and even podcasts. In fact, even now it remains a popular infotainment websites. On this Web Masters episode, Marshall shares the story of building and growing HowStuffWorks, from writing his first article to leading the company to a successful acquisition. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, February 28, 2022
Nugget McNett @ FlightAware: The Pilot Who Helped Make Flight Tracking More Accessible
Flight tracking might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about how the Internet has changed the world, but, as with so many other industries, the Web changed commercial aviation forever. However, it didn't change it the way you might think. FlightAware made the data for all flights publicly available. By doing that, it gave people access to valuable information they were able to use to make airline travel more efficient and more comfortable. The team at FlightAware took advantage, selling their data for all sorts of purposes they never imagined. In this episode of Web Masters, Nugget McNett, one of FlightAware's founders, shares the story of how he and his co-founders built FlightAware and how it helped revolutionize the commercial aviation industry. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, February 21, 2022
Jon Oringer @ Shutterstock: The Software Engineer Who Created a Marketplace for Photographers
Shutterstock probably isn’t the first company that comes to mind when most people think of successful, billion dollar New York tech companies. Instead, the list includes names like BuzzFeed, Rent the Runway, and WeWork. But that’s only because most people don’t spend much time trying to find stock photography. However, if you’re one of the few people in the world who regularly needs high quality photos, you know how important they are. You also understand and appreciate the challenge of getting good images. Getting good images used to be a lot harder and more expensive until Jon Oringer, founder of Shutterstock, introduced the first subscription marketplace for stock photography. Even if you've never personally needed stock photography, the story of Shutterstock is important because it introduced a new concept of online, creator marketplaces. That concept has permeated dozens of other industries, from web design to music, meaning if you've ever downloaded so much as a song from your favorite band, you're benefitting from the model Shutterstock pioneered. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, February 14, 2022
Jane Metcalfe & Louis Rossetto @ WIRED: The Partners Who Published the Mouthpiece of the Digital Age
In the early 1990s, emerging digital and Internet culture weren't mainstream, but it was clear they were going to change the world. People wanted to understand how these new technologies were going to impact them, so they turned to a technology they were already familiar with: magazines. Leading the charge was the most popular publication about the digital age: WIRED Magazine. Launched just as the World Wide Web was first gaining traction, WIRED Magazine quickly became the mouthpiece of the digital age. It was the resource people relied on when they wanted to understand not just what was happening with digital technology, but also the people behind it. On this episode of Web Masters, we hear the story of how -- and why -- WIRED got started from its co-creators, Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rossetto. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, February 07, 2022
Erik Selberg @ MetaCrawler: The Grad Student Who Searched Other Search Engines
If you need to find something on the Web, it's as simple as going to Google and typing whatever you're looking for. You don't even think twice about whether or not you'll get useful results. Heck, you don't even think twice about whether or not the Google webpage will actually load. But early search engines weren't nearly as reliable. Before Google perfected web search, lots of search engines were trying to figure out the best way to help people find what they needed online, and they weren't always reliable. To help solve that problem, a graduate student at the University of Washington named Erik Selberg developed a different type of search engine. It was a search engine that searched other search engines -- a "metasearch engine" -- aggregating results across the different platforms and pulling them together in one place. For users, this meant if one search engine wasn't working or giving good results, they could still find what they needed. Sure, the idea of a metasearch engine seems strange today, but MetaCrawler solved a critical problem in the early days of the Web. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll learn how -- and why -- Erik built it. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, January 31, 2022
Rand Fishkin @ MOZ: The Writer Who Helped Everyone Become Better at SEO
How do you get your website listed at the top of Google? It's a simple question with an answer so difficult and complex that Rand Fishkin built an enormous company around it. It's called MOZ, and it's the world's premier search engine optimization (SEO) company. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll learn about how Rand built MOZ as he describes his entrepreneurial journey from optimizing client websites for early search engines all the way up through building a venture backed company around a sophisticated software capable of helping improve SEO for thousands of customers. Along the way, Rand shares some of the difficult lessons he learned about being an entrepreneur, building companies, and taking care of yourself and your own mental wellness. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, January 24, 2022
Yvonne Marie Andres @ Global SchoolNet: The Teacher Who Pioneered E-Learning
You might think "Zoom Classrooms" and #EdTech are new things. They're a byproduct of ubiquitous computers and faster Internet connections. But that's not actually the case. Even before the World Wide Web existed, creative teachers were figuring out how to use the Internet to engage students and enhance the types of learning possible in the emerging digital world. Leading the charge was Dr. Yvonne Marie Andres. In the early 1980s, Yvonne found herself with a computer in her classroom and no clue what to do with it. So she decided to figure something out. Her efforts soon grew into a global communications network, video classrooms, and students collaborating around the world. All of this happened before most people even had Internet accounts. She's a pioneering voice in the e-learning industry, founder of Global SchoolNet, an inductee in the Internet Hall of Fame, and you'll hear her story on this episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, January 17, 2022
Dries Buytaert @ Drupal: The Coder Who Helps People Manage Their Websites
You may or may not know what Drupal is. However, when you're using a website, there's a decent chance you're using it. It's one of the Web's most used open source content management platforms, and it's currently being used to operate millions of sites. But Drupal didn't start as a content management system. It began as a way for Drupal's creator to tell his friends the status of their shared, high-speed Internet access. As more and more people suggested ways of expanding the software, Dries decided to open source code, and a huge community grew around it. Today, Drupal is one of the largest and most popular open source software platforms in the world. Find out how that happened on this episode of Web Masters where Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder, tells the story of building Drupal. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, January 10, 2022
Phil Fernandez @ Marketo: The Marketer Who Helped Jumpstart the SaaS Industry
In the early days of computers, software was sold as a one-off license. But why let someone pay you once when you can get that person to pay you for the same product multiple times? At least, that's the mantra of the Software As A Service industry, otherwise known as SaaS. Helping lead the charge on a new business model of recurring, subscription software was Phil Fernandez and his marketing automation company, Marketo. Phil and Marketo wanted to democratize the marketing software industry by selling six and seven-figure pieces of software for a low, monthly subscription. And it worked! In this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear about how Marketo would help revolutionize the way businesses -- both large and small -- managed (and paid for) their online marketing. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, January 03, 2022
Jacob Lodwick @ Vimeo: The Filmmaker Who Pioneered Online Video Sharing
Video streaming is a relatively recent addition to the Web. That shouldn’t surprise anyone with even a cursory knowledge of how the Internet works. Compared with things like text and images, the storage and bandwidth required for online video is obviously significantly higher, and it took a while for the Internet’s infrastructure to be able to handle the larger data loads. But storage and bandwidth limitations weren’t the only issues. Digital video recording devices are also relatively new. Sure, just about everyone reading this article can easily pull out a phone and start filming high definition video within seconds, but, less than 20 years ago, that wasn’t the case for all but a relatively few video enthusiasts. One of those enthusiasts was Jacob Lodwick, founder of Vimeo. He’d just graduated college on the East Coast and was heading to San Diego to work on a different startup, and one of his close friends asked him to share updates about life on the West Coast. He decided to share those updates using video, inadvertently helping create the online video sharing industry. In this Web Masters episode, you'll learn about the origins of online video sharing, the relationship between Vimeo and YouTube, as well as how the platforms grew into having different audiences and purposes. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Bonus · Mon, December 27, 2021
Who Invented the "Like" Button?
Every major social media platform has a "like" button. It's a core part of Internet culture and a simple measuring stick to determine how popular a piece of content is. But even though it seems obvious today, it wasn't such an obvious way of judging content in the early days of social media. In this special holiday mini-episode of Web Masters, Aaron shares the story he learned from Jakob Lodwick, founder of Vimeo, about where the "like" button came from and why it worked so well.
Mon, December 20, 2021
Milo Medin - @Home: The Farm Boy Who Gave the World Faster Internet
If you're reading this, chances are you'e connected to the Internet all the time. But that wasn't always the case. In the early days of the Web, people would dial into the Internet using their phone lines, do what they needed to online, and then turn off their connections. That began to change when internet service providers began offering faster, always-on broadband connections separate from people's phone lines. But those faster connections wouldn't have been able to go much faster until one man figured out how to bring the Internet closer to end users. His name is Milo Medin, and he helped found a company called @Home, which introduced cable Internet to the consumer market. @Home didn't last long, but the infrastructure Milo developed is still the infrastructure we all rely on today for high speed Internet. Find out how -- and why -- he did it on this episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, December 13, 2021
Peter Rojas @ Gizmodo & Engadget: The English Major Who Built Two Popular Gadget Blogs
Publishing about niche topics used to be too expensive. But then the Web happened, and the costs for publishing and distribution dropped to almost nothing. That change opened the door to an entirely new generation of publications targeting small, focused audiences. Peter Rojas took advantage of this shift by launching Gizmodo, the Internet's first popular gadget blog. And, it turns out, gadget lovers weren't as small of an audience as he thought. In fact, there was so much demand for gadget-related content that, a couple years later, Peter left Gizmodo to launch Engadget, which became an even bigger gadget blog. He may have ruffled some feathers along the way, but, it's hard to argue with his results: Peter forever changed the journalism landscape. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll find out how he did it. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, December 06, 2021
Joey Anuff @ Suck.com: The Guy Who Thought the Early Web Sucked
There was a lot of hype and excitement surrounding the early Web. Problem was, it wasn't nearly as refined as it is now. In fact, the early Web was pretty terrible. While most publications -- publications like Wired Magazine -- were evangelizing and praising the tech revolution, Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman were sharing a different and more realistic perspective on their website, Suck.com. Other people noticed, and Suck became one of the most popular content sites on the early Internet. In this episode of Web Masters, Joey tells the story of building Suck.com and gives his thoughts on whether the Web still sucks. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, November 29, 2021
Dennis Crowley @ Foursquare: The 'Location Guy' Who Wants to Curate Experiences
When you think of Foursquare, the popular, location-based social media app, you surely think of things like check-ins and badges and becoming "mayor." That was fine with Dennis Crowley, Foursquare's founder, so long as it meant you were using Foursquare. But it's not what he cared about. Dennis wasn't building an app for people to show their friends where they were going. Dennis just needed to know where you were going so he could tell other people the best places to go, too. The game layer was just the strategy that convinced people to tell him, but the data was what he really wanted and, ultimately, what he got. In fact, all that data Foursquare collected is what allowed Dennis to build what he likes to call the Internet's "location layer." And while you may have thought you stopped using Foursquare a while ago, or you might have thought you never used it, chances are you're using it more than ever. Heck... you're probably using it right now. You'll find out why on this episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, November 22, 2021
Sabeer Bhatia @ Hotmail: The Engineer Who Made Email Free
If you used the Web in the late 90s or early 2000s, there’s a good chance you had a Hotmail email account. At the very least, you knew plenty of people with one. After all, at its peak, 25% of Internet users had Hotmail accounts. As a result, lots of people associate the creation of email with Hotmail. But Hotmail didn’t invent email. Not even close. The first digital messaging systems current users would recognize as “electronic mail” were being used all the way back in the 1960s, and Hotmail didn’t launch until 1996. For what it’s worth, Hotmail didn’t even invent Web-based email (a.k.a. “webmail”). Webmail first appeared in 1994. Instead, Hotmail’s innovation was to make email broadly accessible to anyone -- for free -- via a browser. Of course most people today do -- or at least can -- access their email through browsers. But, in the mid-1990s, that wasn’t the case. Instead, reading emails required an email client. That was fine if you were on your own computer. But what if you weren’t near your computer? Or what if you didn’t even own your own computer? How were you going to read your emails? That's the problem Sabeer Bhatia, Hotmail's founding CEO, helped solve. You'll learn how in this episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, November 15, 2021
David Cummings @ Pardot: The Founder Who Productized B2B Marketing Automation
The process for selling a product to consumers used to be very different than the process for selling products to other businesses. However, like so many things, the Internet changed that. A big reason was Pardot. Pardot helped introduce B2B companies to a different type of sales process. It was a systematized and operationalized sales process that helped make B2B sales more scalable. That scalability, in turn, made it possible to sell less expensive products to more companies, which opened enormous amounts of new markets that previously weren't profitable because the costs were too high. In this episode of Web Masters, Pardot's founder, David Cummings, explains how he came up with the idea for Pardot and bootstrapped it to a nearly $100 million exit, first to ExactTarget before it ultimately became an integral part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, November 08, 2021
Steve Kirsch @ Infoseek: The Entrepreneur Who Wanted to Charge for Web Search
Considering one of the most valuable companies in the world -- Google --- makes a majority of its money from web search, it’s hard to imagine a world in which startups struggled to make money from search engines. But that’s actually how the world was in the early days of the Web. Back in the mid-1990s, most search engines were being run as experiments out of either universities (e.g. Lycos at Carnegie Mellon) or companies (e.g. AltaVista at Digital Equipment Corporation). As a result, search engines didn’t need to be profitable, and that was a good thing because they were expensive to operate and nobody could figure out a viable business model. The biggest exception to this was Steve Kirsch’s Infoseek. Infoseek wasn’t an experiment. Instead, Infoseek was the search engine that was launched as a business from Day 1. And, like any business, someone needed to pay. In the minds of Steve and his co-founders, the most obvious people to charge were the people they were directly giving value to: the ones using Infoseek to perform searches. As a result, in the earliest days of Infoseek, the company charged users for each search they performed. Can you imagine that? How different would the world be if every search we performed online cost us money? We'll explore that, and more, on this episode of Web Masters in a conversation with Infoseek founder and well-known serial entrepreneur Steve Kirsch. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, November 01, 2021
Caterina Fake @ Flickr: The Digital Archivist Who Invented Photo Sharing
Flickr, the Internet's original photo sharing website, actually began as a feature in a game. But the feature quickly got more popular than the game itself. Soon, it became a massive company leading the Web 2.0 revolution and changing how people shared content online. But, as interesting as the story of Flickr is, it can't match the story and opinions of its founder, Caterina Fake. On this episode of Web Masters, Caterina joins Aaron to talk a little about Flickr and a lot about her thoughts on the Internet, digital culture, and how the Web has impacted the way people interact with each other. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, October 25, 2021
Josh Abramson @ College Humor: The Freshman Who Helped the Internet Laugh
When you see something funny and snap a great pic or grab an awesome video, you’ve got tons of options for where to post it. Instagram. YouTube. TikTok. Twitter. Reddit. Facebook. Maybe LinkedIn if it’s not too NSFW. At the very least, posting your entertaining content might make your friends chuckle. If you’re lucky, it could even go viral and give you a solid 15 minutes of fame. But what would you have done with that content before social media? Where would you have shared it? Josh Abramson helped solve that problem. When he was a freshman, he and his best friend from high school, Ricky Van Veen, launched a website called CollegeHumor.com. People would send College Humor their funny stories, pictures, and videos, and they would post them. Sure, we’ve moved well beyond that way of sharing user-generated content, but the 1990s were a different time on the Internet, and, as you'll hear in this episode of Web Masters, promoting new websites relied on different types of strategies. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, October 18, 2021
Bob Metcalfe @ Metcalfe's Law & 3Com: The Man Who Invented Ethernet
You might not know exactly what it is off the top of your head, but you've surely heard of Metcalfe's Law. Where did it come from? What does it mean? And why does it matter? That's what you'll learn on this episode of Web Masters when Aaron talks with Bob Metcalfe, the law's namesake. Bob explain's the law's critical insight on how multimedia networks operate and scale and offers some unique perspective on the implications of network growth. In addition to his insights about Metcalfe's law, Bob also talks about his work inventing ethernet, the backbone of local area networks, and how he founded the multi-billion-dollar 3Com corporation. In other words, a lot of what all of us do on the Internet every day is thanks to the work of Bob Metcalfe. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, October 11, 2021
Chris Maguire @ Etsy: The Ice Cream Maker Who Built a Marketplace for Crafters
Even if you’ve never personally bought anything from Etsy, you surely know it’s a marketplace for crafters and homemade goods. The company is so large, it’s basically become synonymous with the industry it supports. If you want something homemade, custom, and unique, you don’t go to Amazon or Walmart. You go to Etsy.com. Considering the enormous success of Etsy as a marketplace for crafters, you might assume it was built by people who were passionate about crafting. At the very least, you’d expect them to have a passing interest. But that’s actually not the case. As Chris Maguire, one of the co-founders of Etsy explains in this episode of Web Masters, he and his team weren't passionate about crafting. However, they were passionate about helping people solve problems using software, and that's exactly what they did. The result was a multi-billion-dollar, publicly traded company that's changed the way people around the world shop for homemade goods. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, October 04, 2021
Genevieve Field @ Nerve.com: The Editor Who Pushed the Boundaries of Online Content
The current Internet is known as a place where anyone can publish anything... for better or for worse. However, in the earliest days of the Web, there were lots of questions about what kind of content would be acceptable, who was responsible for what got posted, and who could regulate speech online. Those questions were answered thanks to publications like Nerve.com Launched in parallel with the signing of the Communications Decency Act in 1996, Nerve.com was one of the earliest websites to put the new law to the test by publishing thoughtful but explicit content that pushed the boundaries of what could and couldn't be written about on the Web. At its helm and directing the content was Genevieve Field, one of the pioneers of digital editing. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear how Genevieve helped grow Nerve from a quirky online publication into a website with a global audience that was changing the tone of Internet content. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, September 27, 2021
Fuzzy Mauldin @ Lycos: The Robot Warrior Who Made Searching the Web Easy
Web search existed before Lycos, but it wasn't very good. Michael Mauldin -- better known as Fuzzy -- helped change that when he released Lycos. Lycos wasn't like any search engine that had come before it. Rather than passively waiting for pages to be submitted, Lycos actively crawled the Web -- like its namesake lycosa spider -- searching for new content it could share with users. Within months of its release, Lycos became one of the most popular search engines on the Internet, and it stayed that way for a few years. During that time, it pioneered many of the things about web search that most of us take for granted today. So what happened? How did Google overtake Lycos to become the dominant search engine? Find out in this episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, September 20, 2021
Mark Organ @ Eloqua: The Neuroscientist Who Automated Emails
You may or may not be someone who understands all the specific intricacies of marketing automation, but, no matter who you are, you’re surely someone who’s impacted by it. As the Internet has grown into the foundation of modern society, the marketing automation industry has become one of the biggest and most successful beneficiaries. And one of the companies leading the marketing automation revolution was Eloqua. Eloqua, along with its founder, Mark Organ, helped usher in the age of SaaS business models while supercharging the marketing processes for thousands of companies around the world. It was so successful, in fact, that Oracle acquired it for more than $800 million, and it’s now the backbone of their marketing platform. But Eloqua's success wasn't quick or easy. Mark shares the unique story in this episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, September 13, 2021
Gary Kremen @ Match.com: The Elected Official Who Pioneered Online Dating
Yes, you’ve heard of Match.com. And you’re probably vaguely aware that Match.com was the first dating website. You might even know that Match.com is part of Match Group, Inc., which is a publicly traded, NASDAQ-100 company that also owns dating sites like Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, and PlentyOfFish. But the Match.com you know about isn’t particularly similar to the Match.com Gary Kremen founded in 1993. In fact, the site that became Match.com was actually founded before the World Wide Web even existed. When Gary launched it, he wasn't focused on dating. Instead, Gary recognized that the Web was great for anyone interested in connecting with other people in order to exchange goods and services. That led Gary to start a company called Electric Classifieds, Inc. It was a technology company that built online classifieds software to compete with the classified advertising sections in newspapers. Online dating was, of course, an obvious use case. But Gary took it much farther than most people realize. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, August 30, 2021
Jason Olim @ CDNow: The Miles Davis Fan Who Revolutionized Commerce
Despite Amazon’s immense success, it wasn’t the company that pioneered e-commerce. That honor belongs to an entrepreneur named Jason Olim and his online music store, CDNow.com. CDNow was one of the first -- if not the first -- large, consumer-focused e-commerce companies, eventually reaching a public valuation of over a billion dollars. To give you an idea of just how early CDNow was in the e-commerce space, Jason and his team invented the online shopping cart. It literally didn’t exist before they created the first one. Of course, today, you’ve probably never even heard of CDNow, while you’ve probably ordered a half dozen things from Amazon in the past week. So what happened? Why did the pioneer of e-commerce shutdown, while a company that came later managed to become one of the largest and most successful companies in history? Find out in this episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, August 23, 2021
John Battelle @ The Industry Standard: The Journalist Who Created a Magazine About the Internet
The Internet killed magazines. Or, if it didn't kill them, it at least made magazines significantly less culturally relevant. But before it did all that, it managed to inspire the largest magazine ever published: The Industry Standard . Back when the Internet seemed as likely to be a temporary phenomenon as it did an integral part of life, John Battelle launched The Industry Standard to explore the story of the emerging technology and examine how it was going to change the world. It quickly became the most popular publication for people in the Internet industry. If you cared about the Internet, you read it. And, if you wanted to "be someone" on the Internet, you advertised in it. Soon, The Industry Standard would be so full of articles and advertisements that John's team literally didn't have the manpower to include anymore. Then the bubble burst, and... well... you'll have to listen to this episode of Web Masters to find out what happened. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, August 16, 2021
Eli Shapira @ Webtrends: The Security Entrepreneur Who Pioneered Web Analytics
If you run a website, it probably has Google Analytics installed on it. Why not? After all, it's free. But what if your website is generating millions of dollars worth of sales a day? Would you still be using Google analytics? Probably not. You'd probably want something more robust because even a tiny optimization could generate huge increases in revenue. Those kinds of companies turn to Webtrends, one of the oldest and most established names in website analytics software. In fact, when Webtrends was originally founded by Eli Shapira in the mid 1990s, the concept of website analytics didn't even exist. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear the story of how Eli launched Webtrends, grew it, and took it public in the span of a few short years. Even more impressive, he did it without taking a penny of venture capital funding, an accomplishment for a tech company that's almost unheard of. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, August 09, 2021
Chris Jaeb @ Broadcast.com: The 'Idea Guy' Behind Mark Cuban's Billion Dollar Success
You’ve surely heard of Mark Cuban. You know he’s the outspoken owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. You also know he’s on Shark Tank . And you know he’s a billionaire. But do you know how he became a billionaire? The easy answer is, of course, “Internet stuff.” In 1999, he sold his tech startup, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion. But do you know the story behind why that company got started and how it achieved its first major successes? That's what you'll learn about on this episode of Web Masters thanks to a conversation with Chris Jaeb. Chris shares the little known story of how he came up with the initial idea and started the company that would eventually be bought out by Mark Cuban and become Broadcast.com. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, August 02, 2021
Rob Malda @ Slashdot: The CmdrTaco Who Popularized Social News
Before platforms like Facebook and Twitter, learning about current events online across a range of topics, subjects, and industries required visiting lots of different websites. That began to change thanks to platforms like Slashdot. Slashdot was one of the first -- if not the first -- popular social news aggregators. Readers would submit stories they thought were interesting, and then Slashdot’s moderation team -- headed by Slashdot founder Rob Malda -- would select the best ones and display them on the homepage, which was a constantly updating feed of the aggregated stories. Users could then comment on the stories, discuss them, flag them, etc., and that would impact their popularity and how long they’d be featured. Of course, none of that sounds revolutionary. It was basically just a description of Reddit. But, again, there was a time when that concept didn’t exist, and Rob Malda and Slashdot pioneered it. So why are platforms like Reddit and Twitter worth billions of dollars today and Slashdot isn't? That's what you're going to learn about in this episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, July 26, 2021
Barry Appelman @ AOL Instant Messenger: The CTO Who Secretly Created Buddy Lists
When you instant message someone -- using text, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp, Slack, or any other instant messaging service -- you assume the person you're contacting will see your message soon because most people keeps their phones nearby and have quick access to the Internet. But that wasn't always the case. In the early days of the Web, users weren't expected to be connected 24/7 like they are now. If you wanted to reach someone quickly, an instant message might not be the best choice if the person wasn't online. But how would you know? That's the problem Barry Appelman solved when he created Buddy Lists inside of AOL. It was a way for users to know who among their connections was online and, if they were, message them instantly. The result became AOL Instant Messenger -- otherwise known as AIM -- the service that ushered in the age of instant messaging. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, July 19, 2021
Robbie Allen @ Automated Insights: The Sports Fan Who Automated Writing
Who wrote the words you're reading right now? Someone, right? Some faceless human. But are you sure? What if these words were actually written by a computer? Would you know? Would you care? Those are the questions we explore in this episode of Web Masters while talking with Robbie Allen, founding CEO of Automated Insights. Automated Insights began as a company called StatsSheet, Inc. that created automated game summaries and analysis for sporting events. But it evolved over time to become a technology company that automates online content creation for companies around the world. In fact, there's a good chances you've encountered some of their computer generated content while surfing the Web, and you didn't even realize it. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, July 12, 2021
Bruce Judson @ Time/Pathfinder: The Executive Who Invented the Banner Ad
Despite the fact that magazine industry was one of the industries most likely to be hurt by the growth of the Internet and World Wide Web, the company that led the charge for moving content online was, strangely enough, one of the biggest magazine publishers in the world: Time, Inc. This episode of Web Masters features one of the people who helped drive that transition: Bruce Judson. Bruce ran the operational side of Time Warner's new media division in the early 1990s, and he and his team launched pathfinder.com. Pathfinder was a one of the early Web's most popular portals sites that allowed people to access part of the companies vast collection of magazine content. Pathfinder didn't last long online, but, in its few short years, it made a huge contribution to the Web. Chief among those was in advertising, where Bruce and his team established many of the conventions for online advertising that are still followed today. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, June 28, 2021
Lane Merrifield @ Club Penguin: The 'Dragon' Who Reimagined Social Networking for Kids
Club Penguin was a virtual world that its founder, Lane Merrifield, also describes as a social network. However, depending on your age, you might have never heard of it. That's because Club Penguin was for children. And it was enormously popular, having over 200 million registered users around the world at its peak. So why did Lane and his team build Club Penguin? And what distinguishes a social network for children from other social networking websites? That's what we explore on this episode of Web Masters. Lane shares the story of building Club Penguin, starting with where the idea came from, through the company's eventual purchase by Disney for $350 million, and the experience of running the virtual world after the Disney acquisition. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, June 21, 2021
Stefanie Syman @ FEED Magazine: The Writer Who Merged Tech and Culture
The early Web was primarily a place for tech enthusiasts. However, as the Web expanded, tech culture increasingly began intersecting with pop culture. At the center of that intersection was FEED Magazine. FEED was one of the Web's first daily publications to put media, pop culture, and art in conversation with science and technology. It developed a devoted following and was a leading voice in the Internet community while both promoting and critiquing the emerging digital age. On this episode of Web Masters, we'll hear from tech entrepreneur and author Stefanie Syman, one of the founders of FEED. Stefanie shares the story of what it was like to launch and run a digital publication in the early days of the Web before publishing online was as simple as using a word processor, and before generating money from advertising was as simple as copy/pasting a line of code. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, June 14, 2021
Andrew Weinreich @ SixDegrees: The Lawyer Who Patented Social Networking
Some people stumble onto their startup ideas and become accidental entrepreneurs. That definitely wasn’t the case for Andrew. Andrew knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur, he just didn’t know what kind of company to build. Andrew understood that the Internet was going to create lots of new entrepreneurial opportunities, but finding one that wasn't going to run into a lot of competition from existing offline businesses was a challenge. Eventually, Andrew recognized the Internet was going to create new opportunities for networking that hadn't previously existed. It was, in his words, an "inevitability." Beating everyone else to the opportunity, in 1997, Andrew launched the Internet's first social networking website. He called it SixDegrees.com, and it was a place where people could connect with their networks and make new connections based on mutual friends. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, June 07, 2021
Paul Mockapetris @ DNS: The Computer Scientist Who Created the Internet's Phone Book
The Domain Name System -- DNS -- is like the Internet's phone book. It's how computers match URLs to IP addresses in order to help you do things like look at web pages or send emails. Sure, the system seems like an obvious way of structuring the Internet now. After all, can you imagine the Web without Google.com and Amazon.com and Facebook.com? But the current structure of Internet domain names wasn't always an obvious solution to the problem. In this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear how the Domain Name System came into being from the man who invented DNS, Paul Mockapetris. Paul's vision for Internet routing was critical for making the Internet infinitely scalable. But, when he proposed it, he wasn't actually in a position to implement his vision. So, before his system could be adopted, he had to make sure nobody else's proposals were ever considered. Luckily, he was given a perfect opportunity to intervene. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, May 24, 2021
John Danner @ NetGravity: The "Horrible" CEO Who Invented Internet Advertising
Unless you’re an Internet history buff, you’ve probably never heard of NetGravity. However, NetGravity is, in some ways, one of the most important startups in Internet history. It was the first Internet advertising company. Considering much of the Internet these days relies on advertising, being the company that started the online advertising industry is… well… kind of a big deal. The advantage of being first in an important market like Internet advertising is that, in the early days, all the biggest and best customers don't have any other options. That was true for NetGravity. Launched in 1995, NetGravity quickly gobbled up most of the world's most popular Internet companies as their customers, including companies like Yahoo!, Netscape, and Time Warner. NetGravity's explosive growth led to an early entry into the public markets and a rapid rise in valuation. At the same time, John and the NetGravity team soon found themselves battling competitors who were taking a different -- and more lucrative -- approach to online advertising. In this episode of Web Masters, hear the full story of how NetGravity defended its position as the market leader, pivoted to stay relevant, and ultimately achieved a successful exit. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, May 17, 2021
Jeff Tarr @ Operation Match: The Harvard Student Who Connected People from His Dorm
Computers looked very different in the 1960s. Most obviously, people weren’t able to slip them into their pockets. Instead, computers were room-sized machines. And even those enormous machines had only a fraction of the computing power you use when you’re scrolling through Instagram on your phone. Still, computers in the 1960s were great at processing large datasets. And a young Harvard undergraduate named Jeff Tarr saw a unique way to use that processing power. While most researchers were turning to computers to compile things like economic data, engineering data, medical data, and aeronautical data, Jeff decided to use computers to process personal relationship data. Jeff sent surveys filled with relationship questions to students at college campuses around the country. Anyone who filled out his survey and sent it back along with $3 was guaranteed at least six “matches” -- contact info for someone nearby to invite on a date. After his first mailing, Jeff received 7,800 completed surveys with over $23,000 in 1960s money -- roughly equivalent to $200,000 today -- and he knew he was onto something big. And while he might not have known it at the time, he was laying the foundation for what would become the online dating industry. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, May 10, 2021
Sam Yagan @ OkCupid: The College Buddies Who Pioneered Freemium Dating
Online dating was an early part of the Web. But, to Sam Yagan and his friends, it was broken. The industry leaders were all thinking about it the wrong way because they were trying to create matches for users. The OkCupid team didn't think people needed help finding matches. They thought people just needed help finding more potential mates to choose from, so that's what they focused on. Growth was slow at first, but, once they found the right formula -- by developing a series of strategies that have now become standard growth "best practices" across countless industries -- OkCupid took off. It eventually became one of the most popular dating websites in the world and has helped millions of people find their own soulmates. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, May 03, 2021
Greg Newby @ Project Gutenberg: The Professor Who Gives Away Books
Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart created the first ebook by digitizing a copy of the US Declaration of Independence and sharing it on ARPANET, precursor to the Internet. He'd go on to launch an ambitious project to digitize as many (public domain) books as possible. Unfortunately, Michael passed away in 2011, but his legacy lives on through Greg Newby. Greg is the CEO of the not-profit Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, Inc., which oversees Project Gutenberg and has helped grow it into a collection of over 62,000 ebooks that have been digitized and curated by volunteers. Every ebook is freely downloadable on the Project Gutenberg website, making it the oldest digital resource library in the world. While Greg didn't start Project Gutenberg, he's been instrumental in its growth and global success. In this episode of Web Masters, he shares the story of how he got involved, how it's grown, and how it impacts and will continue impacting the world for generations to come. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, April 26, 2021
Ron Burr @ NetZero: The Coder Who Found a Way to Make the Internet Free
In the earliest days of the public Internet, if you wanted personal, at-home access, you were going to have to pay… a lot. That’s because early Internet service providers (ISPs) would charge people based on how long they were online. For Ron Burr, these costs were more than just a money issue. Sure, Internet access was expensive, but, to him, there was another problem. He didn’t understand how people could charge so much money for something they didn’t actually own. Recognizing this strange relationship between Internet access and Internet ownership, Ron and his co-founders started wondering if they could find some way of subsidizing the cost. Could they figure out a way to give free Internet access to everyone? They didn’t have to look far for their business model. Radio and broadcast TV had been doing the same thing for years, and they were doing it by leveraging advertising. That led them to the idea for NetZero, the revolutionary ISP that gave free Internet access in exchange for showing you ads while you browsed. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, April 19, 2021
Ira Fuchs @ BITNET: The Administrator Who Connected the Scholars of the World
The Internet is so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget the network didn't spring into being, fully formed, as a global connectivity paradigm. But, of course, that's not the case. Our collective journey toward having the Internet (almost) everywhere was a slow process that took decades. Part of the reason the Internet took so long to spread was cultural. While, today, people take things like email and instant messaging for granted, that wasn’t always the case. Even though most of us couldn’t effectively operate in our day-to-day lives without email, that type of digital dependency is a learned behavior. For thousands of years, humans survived perfectly well without it, and convincing us we needed our email accounts attached to our hips at all times took a while. That began to change thanks to Ira Fuchs and BITNET. BITNET played a critical role in convincing people they needed networked computers. And, like most computer innovation at the time, it began at universities. When Ira started BITNET, his goal was to “connect the scholars of the world.” He launched it in 1981 with a connection between the City University of New York -- CUNY -- and Yale University. Within months, Ira had connected major institutions up and down the eastern United States. Soon thereafter he’d expanded to the West Coast. Within two years of launching, BITNET was in Europe, then the Middle East, Japan, and, eventually, even into Soviet Russia, making BITNET the global computer network that preceded the Internet. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, April 12, 2021
Justin Hall @ Links.net: The Virtual Tour Guide Who Pioneered Personal Blogging
These days, kids grow up sharing everything about their personal lives in an effort to become Instagram influencers and TikTok famous. They don't know it, but their dreams of social media stardom were pioneered in the mid 1990s by a teenager who wasn't looking for celebrity status. His name was Justin Hall, and sharing his personal story online was, for him, less about notoriety and more a way to connect with people. Justin ran a popular website called Links From The Underground -- Links.net -- with a huge collection of interesting links from around the Web. As Links.net got more popular, Justin decided he also wanted to tell his visitors a bit more about himself and his own life. Soon, he'd built a massive collection of stories and posts about his daily activities, and people were visiting his site as much to read about him as they were to discover his link collection. This turned Justin into one of the world's first and most popular personal bloggers as he became a pioneer of the online influencer industry. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, April 05, 2021
Sky Dayton @ EarthLink: The Coffee Shop Owner Who Gave People Internet Access
Since you’ve found this podcast, it’s safe to assume you have Internet access. Prior to using whatever device you're going to listen, did you spend any time thinking about how to connect to the Internet? You probably didn’t, and a big reason you didn’t is because the Internet has mostly become a basic utility thanks to entrepreneurs like Sky Dayton. Sky created EarthLink, one of the most popular early Internet Service Providers. It helped to get an estimated 10% of the US population online. Even though accessing the Internet has largely become equivalent to accessing water from a tap, it wasn’t always like that. In fact, this was exactly the problem that led Sky to Earthlink. In the early 90s, when the Internet was first opening to the general public, Sky wanted to explore it himself. He found an early internet service provider -- ISP -- in southern California, but getting his computer connected took him nearly a week. Frustrated by the challenge, Sky spent the first part of his career helping others solve the same problem. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, March 29, 2021
Tom Truscott @ Usenet: The Grad Student Who Accidentally Invented Social Media
For most people, social media is part of the fabric of modern day life. But do you know where digital social media started? It wasn’t Facebook. Facebook launched in 2004, which was decades after computer networking began. MySpace, it’s well-known predecessor, only launched a few months earlier in 2003. Some people might point to Friendster, which began in 2002. And, before that, back in 1997, there was a website called Six Degrees. Its creator actually filed the first patents for social networking. However, even Six Degrees wasn’t the first digital social network. In 1979, more than a decade before Tim Berners Lee launched the World Wide Web, and even before the modern Internet existed, two graduate students at Duke University released a piece of software that would connect people and communities around the world via computers and their modems. That software was called Usenet, and it was the world’s first globally popular, digital social network. Learn how Usenet got started and how it changed the world on this episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, March 22, 2021
Kevin O'Connor @ DoubleClick: The Advertiser Who Introduced Retargeting
Even if you haven’t heard of DoubleClick, you’ve certainly been impacted by it. DoubleClick basically invented Internet advertising as we know it. Their ad servers powered much of the early days of Web advertising. Eventually Google bought DoubleClick, and its core technologies were deeply integrated into Google’s ad network, meaning there’s a good chance DoubleClick’s ad serving platform is impacting you in some way literally this second. Considering DoubleClick’s revolutionary impact on advertising, most people would expect that DoubleClick's founder, Kevin O'Connor, came up with the idea for DoubleClick based on years of experience in the advertising industry. But that’s actually not the case. Kevin was a coder. How does someone who knows nothing about advertising come up with the idea for a revolutionary ad tech platform? That's what you'll learn about in this episode of Web Masters. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, March 15, 2021
Raj Kapoor @ Snapfish: The MBA Who Predicted the Future of Photography
Raj Kapoor is the Chief Strategy Officer at Lyft. But before joining Lyft, Raj was the founder and CEO of another well known consumer tech company called Snapfish. In fact, the startup strategy he’s deploying at Lyft is a strategy he began developing at Snapfish over two decades earlier. Snapfish is a digital photo management service that lets users print digital photos either as traditional photos or on things like coffee mugs, face masks, calendars, shirts, and lots of other things you've probably never even thought of. While those are common services now, they weren’t common back when Raj launched Snapfish in 1999 and built it into a company he’d ultimately sell to Hewlett Packard for $300 million. Instead, when Raj launched Snapfish, few people were using digital cameras. Sure, it might seem strange to target a market that doesn’t exist, but, as you'll hear in this episode, the lack of digital camera users was actually a huge part of how Snapfish became so successful. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, March 08, 2021
Jean Armour Polly @ Net-mom: The Librarian Who Taught People to Surf the Internet
Jean Armour Polly was a librarian who saw the internet and had what was, at the time, a crazy idea. Since libraries are critical repositories of information and knowledge in most communities, she believed that libraries should offer public internet access. Most of her peers disagreed. In fact, most librarians thought of the Internet as a competitor. And a poor one at that with unreliable information. But Jean wouldn't be deterred. She became one of the biggest advocates in the world for public Internet access via libraries. Thanks to her pioneering work championing public Internet access, Jean paved the way for millions of people around the world to discover the Web. In this episode of Web Masters, Jean shares the story of how she discovered the Internet, fell in love with it, and then taught people all over the world to love it just as much as her. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, March 01, 2021
David Mikkelson @ Snopes: The Disney Lover Who Fact-Checks the Internet
In recent years, the term “fake news” has become a common phrase. It’s a shorthand way of describing informational content related to current events that’s intentionally misleading. While the term itself is relatively new, the concept is much older than most people realize. The earliest recorded example of fake news goes all the way back to the 13th Century BC when Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II convinced his population that his army clobbered the neighboring Hittites despite signing a peace treaty with them that essentially declared a draw. Fast forward a few dozen centuries all the way to the 1980s. The World Wide Web hadn’t even been invented yet, but misinformation was already spreading on the Internet. However, it wasn’t misinformation about things as important as wars and government. It was actually just misinformation about the Walt Disney Company. And a man named David Mikkelson wanted to debunk it. Over the ensuing decades, David kept debunking more and more rumors and online myths until his website, Snopes.com, became one of the most trusted fact-checking resources in the world. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear the full story of how David went from researching urban legends for a few die-hard Disney fans to debunking fake new. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, February 22, 2021
Joe Colopy @ Bronto Software: The Peace Corps Volunteer Who Pioneered Commerce Marketing Automation
In 2002, Joe Colopy launched a simple email newsletter tool, naming it Bronto Mail in reference to his favorite dinosaur. But Joe wasn't the only person trying to help companies with their email marketing. Pretty soon, Joe and Bronto found themselves facing a crowded market and better-resourced competitors. So Joe did a textbook MBA strategy shift. He identified an underserved niche market in need of better marketing tools, and he focused his company on it. That niche market consisted of commerce and ecommerce companies who, at the time, didn't have any email marketing tools built specifically for their needs. By focusing on that niche, Joe and Bronto pioneered the commerce marketing automation space, becoming the market leader in the process and riding their growth to a successful exit. In this episode of Web Masters, hear the story of how Joe built Bronto and managed the pivot. It's a perfect entrepreneurial lesson in how to best attack a large market when you're a small startup competing against bigger and better-resourced companies. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, February 15, 2021
Michael Merhej @ Audiogalaxy: The Music Lover Who Pissed Off the Recording Industry
Unless you’ve only just gotten onto the Internet in the last few years, you’ve surely heard of Napster. In the late 90s, Napster launched an online file sharing service where anyone could download mp3 files from other people for free, and it was wildly popular before getting sued out of existence by the major record labels who obviously weren’t happy about the idea of people downloading their content for free. But Napster wasn’t the first music sharing service. Years before Napster, a student at the University of Texas named Michael Merhej launched an FTP search engine — called the Borg Search Engine — on a physics department server. At the time, posting music files online was already common, but finding them was difficult. Lots of hardcore music afficionados hated having their options restricted by whatever Top 40 the recording industry was promoting. Those music lovers flocked to Michael’s FTP search engine. Within a couple years, it had become so popular that Michael moved he search engine onto its own commercial servers and began monetizing with advertisements, changing the name to Audiogalaxy in the process. Yes, a little later, Napster would come along and popularize file sharing to the masses. By that point, Audiogalaxy already had a bigger catalog, and, while people looking for popular music tracks stuck to Napster, anyone who wanted more options chose Audiogalaxy, turning it into the second most popular file sharing service in the world. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, February 08, 2021
Peter Zaitsev @ Percona: The Specialist Who Keeps Your Database Running
You've probably never heard of Peter Zaitsev or Percona. And he’s perfectly fine with it. The fact that you haven’t heard of Peter or Percona means you’re probably not his target customer. More importantly, if you have heard of them, there’s a good chance you A) are his target customer; and B) don’t have a lot of other options. That’s because Percona is a database performance optimization company. They specialize in helping companies using open source databases — MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, etc. — scale their database architecture to support millions of simultaneous users. As you can probably imagine, there aren’t lots of companies in the world who need their databases to be able to handle that kind of volume, so, in relative terms, Peter’s target audience isn’t very big. Compare it with the market size of, say, Apple, and Percona’s market size would probably seem like a rounding error. But that doesn’t matter for Peter. What matters is that the people who do need database optimization need it urgently, they have the money to pay, and they don’t have many other options. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, February 01, 2021
Alan Emtage @ Archie: The Pack Rat Who Invented Internet Search
In the 1980s, pre-World Wide Web, the Internet was filled with software files hosted on remote machines. However, unlike today, where you can easily find and download pretty much any software you want, that infrastructure didn’t exist in the 1980s. Instead, if you wanted to download a piece of software from the Internet, you had to know it existed and know where and how to access it. To solve this problem for himself, a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal named Alan Emtage built a script to crawl the Internet at night and compile a database of software. He could then search his database to find what he was looking for. When other people saw Alan's database, they wanted access, too. So Alan built a public interface, and that became the first Internet search engine. However, rather than patenting his technology and licensing it -- something that could have made billions of dollars -- Alan made a different choice, and the Internet is a very different place than what it might have been. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, January 25, 2021
Drew Curtis @ Fark.com: The Farker Who Monetized Doom Scrolling
In 1999, a Kentucky entrepreneur named Drew Curtis started feeling guilty about constantly spamming his friends with emails linking to funny news stories. Rather than sending emails, he decided he’d build a website and let people come check it out if they wanted to. He called it Fark.com, a humorous play on the F-bomb pulled from old text-based video games on the early Internet that would censor curse words. The website quickly became one of the most popular communities on the Internet for sharing funny articles about what was going on in the world. However, unlike other humor sites of its day, Fark still exists and has a thriving community. On this episode of Web Masters, you'll find out how Drew has managed to keep Fark running for over two decades and through a half-dozen of what he describes as "extinction-level" events on the Internet. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, January 18, 2021
Lex Sisney @ Commission Junction: The Llama Farmer Who Popularized Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing, in case you don’t already know, is a core part of how “free” websites make money on the Internet. Websites with lots of visitors post ads. When visitors click those ads and buy something from the advertiser, that advertiser pays what’s called an “affiliate bounty” to the website owner. That might not seem revolutionary, but it was a huge innovation in the way companies could market and sell their products. Prior to affiliate marketing, startups needed large advertising budgets just to get launched. However, thanks to affiliate marketing, startups had a way to sell products without paying any money up front, and that opened the door to tons more entrepreneurs. Since the concept of affiliate marketing was first invented in the mid-90s, plenty of affiliate marketing networks have been launched. But the biggest and most successful one has been Commission Junction. And, on this episode of Web Masters, we get to hear from Commission Junction founder, Lex Sisney, the man who went from shoveling llama poop on his mother's farm to launching the world's preeminent affiliate network. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, January 11, 2021
Jonathan Abrams @ Friendster: The Programmer Who Invented Social Networking
Before Facebook became synonymous with “social media,” and even before MySpace was the coolest website on the planet, there was another startup that most people credit with inventing social networking as we know it. That website was called Friendster. Even if you never personally used Friendster, you've probably heard of it. It was the site that paved the way for all the social networks billions of people use and love every day. It was the first place where people uploaded photos of themselves and connected with their real-life friends. Yes, that type of website doesn't sound unique today, but, in 2002, it was revolutionary, and people loved it. But it wasn't immediately obvious that would be the case. In fact, when the founder of Friendster, Jonathan Abrams, first had the idea, he thought it sounded wacky. And when he told people about his idea, they thought it sounded dumb. But Jonathan launched it anyway, and, as they say, the rest is history. Friendster ushered in a completely new paradigm for how people thought about and used the Internet that remains the core of the Web today. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, January 04, 2021
Bill Martin @ RagingBull.com: The Teenager Who Fueled the Dot-Com Bubble
If you experienced the “Dot-Com Bubble” you surely remember all the hype and excitement surrounding the Web as well as all the money that flowed into tech startups in the late 90s. You also remember when things came tumbling down in May and April of 2000, wiping out countless companies and turning Silicon Valley into a corporate wasteland. While plenty of factors contributed to the Dot-Com boom, one of the biggest contributors was investor hype. And, interestingly, the places where lots of that investor hype happened was on the Internet itself. In particular, community websites like RagingBull.com played a huge part in allowing retail investors to continuously promote the wild market. But RagingBull wasn't some corporate tool built in the heart of Wall Street. Instead, it was launched by a college kid named Bill Martin who was simply interested in talking with other people online about stocks. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, December 28, 2020
Jon von Tetzchner @ Opera: The Researcher Who Built His Own Web Browser... Twice!
Opera was one of the earliest commercial Web browsers, having been launched in 1995. That’s the same year Microsoft launched Internet Explorer, and less than 12 months after Netscape launched Navigator, which is widely regarded as the browser that popularized the Web. From the very beginning, Opera was a different type of Web browser. Specifically, even though it helped users access the same World Wide Web as every other browser, the Opera browser was built entirely on its own codebase. That might not sound like a big deal if you don't know much about browser architecture, but, for Jon von Tetzchner and the Opera team, it was a huge competitive advantage that allowed Opera to exist on devices that couldn't support any other browsers. This made Opera, for a time, the most popular web browser in the world. Unfortunately for Jon, some bad investors pushed the company in the wrong direction, and he was powerless to stop it. The only thing he could do was build another browser. So, 20 years after launching Opera, he launched Vivaldi to compete with his old company and win back the trust of the loyal users Opera had lost. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, December 21, 2020
Scott Crosby @ Google Analytics: The English Major Who Helped Google Conquer 70% of the Web
Google Analytics has been such an important and well-integrated part of the Google suite of services for so long that most people assume it was developed inside Google. But that’s not the case. Google Analytics actually began as part of a San Diego web consulting firm from the mid-90s called Quantified Systems Inc. Quantified Systems was really just a group of guys building one-off websites for clients around Southern California and hosting those sites on their internal servers. At the time, bandwidth was incredibly expensive, and some of their more prominent customers were running up bills worth thousands of dollars a month. To help manage these costs and charge their customers appropriately, the Quantified Systems team built a custom web stats platform to show how much traffic a site was getting and where it was coming from based on server logs. They soon realized that their Web stats program had the potential to be a more interesting business than their Web consultancy. So they gave away their clients and changed their name to Urchin Software Corporation. Their website stats tracking tool was so successful that Google bought them and used them as the foundation to launch Google Analytics. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, December 14, 2020
Chris Evans @ Accipiter: The Founder Who Gave the Web Targeted Advertising
Advertising is a fixture of the current Web. After all, two of the most prominent online companies -- Google and Facebook -- are really just advertising platforms disguised as a search engine and social network, respectively. Despite the ubiquity of advertising on the Web today, it might surprise you to discover that sophisticated advertising technologies were developed relatively late. In fact, many of the biggest websites in the world -- with millions of active users -- were struggling to monetize on their traffic because they didn't have good ad serving platforms. That began to change in 1996 thanks, in part, to a company named Accipiter and its founder, Chris Evans. Chris was one of the first people to identify the lacking ad software ecosystem for websites and launched Accipiter, which, for better or for worse, made online advertising easier, faster, cheaper, and more profitable. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, December 07, 2020
Bo Peabody @ Tripod: The College Kid Who Was Lucky... or Smart
Even though Tripod eventually became one of the most popular online webpage builders in the world, that’s not how it started. Instead, Tripod began as a digital magazine. At the time, Bo was a college student, and he'd been dreaming of an online publication targeting young, college-aged audiences. It was going to be the MTV of the Web. However, for fun, one of Bo’s developers experimented with a new concept to allow people to publish their own content online for free. They called it the "homepage builder," and it went viral literally overnight. Within its first month, Tripod had thousands of users for its free homepage builder. Soon, it had hundreds of thousands. And, then it hit its first million shortly before being acquired. Along the way, Bo became known in the popular press as an entrepreneurial wunderkind. But was it skill and smarts that helped Bo reach the pinnacle of startup success? Or was it just dumb luck? Find out on this episode of Web Masters! For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, November 30, 2020
Craig Kanarick @ Razorfish: The Blue-Haired Designer Who Rebranded Companies for the Digital Age
There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of Craig Kanarick and Razorfish. But that’s only because you’re not reading this article in 1999. Back in the late 90s, Kanarick and Razorfish were household names in the entrepreneurial world. Launched in 1994, Razorfish was one of the first digital media design agencies. Their early customers included mega-companies like Time Warner, KPMG, and Charles Schwab. Razorfish was founded by Kanarick and his childhood friend, Jeff Dachis. In just five years, the two friends in their mid-20s grew Razorfish to 1,200+ employees, nearly a dozen offices around the world, almost $100m in annual revenue, and a successful IPO. But, as Craig explains, that success had a price. He and his co-founder became the poster boys of late 90s, Internet tech excess and, ultimately, the failed dot-com boom and bust. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, November 23, 2020
Philip Rosedale @ Second Life: The Physicist Who Built a Pocket Universe
If you were born by 1990, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Second Life. In 2006, over 600 articles per day were being written about it. That was around the time the Internet was becoming fully “mainstream,” and people were fascinated by the possibility of what it might lead to. The concept of Second Life, in particular, excited the general public, perhaps because it seemed so futuristic. People began to imagine living inside of computers. Even though most people weren't thinking about what it might be like to live inside computers around the turn of the century, the founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, had been thinking about it since he was a kid growing up in the 70s. The only problems: computers weren't powerful enough and the Internet wasn't fast enough. That all changed in 1999, and it's what allowed him to launch Second Life. Today, Second Life is home to 1 million people, and, as Philip explains in this episode of Web Masters, he thinks it's about to get a lot bigger. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, November 16, 2020
Peter Sunde @ The Pirate Bay: The Pirate Who Went to Jail for Your Illegal Downloads
In the early 2000s, online file sharing was a huge part of Internet culture. It was also a huge problem for media companies who viewed piracy as an existential threat to their revenues. As a result, they aggressively prosecuted file sharing services, forcing them to shutdown almost as quickly as they launched. Unfortunately for the media companies, one file sharing service refused to shut down. That service was called The Pirate Bay. On this episode of Web Masters, we speak with one of its original founders, Peter Sunde. Peter helped grow The Pirate Bay into the world's largest torrent search engine and one of the world's most visited websites. In the process, he was sued by nearly every major music, TV, movie, and software studio. He ultimately got sent to jail, and he owes the Swedish government more money than he'll ever make. While you'd think that kind of outcome would be bad, Peter's actually not too upset about it. In fact, when you hear his story, you might even come away feeling a little jealous. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, November 09, 2020
Joshua Schachter @ Del.icio.us: The Banker Who Invented Social Bookmarking
In the late 90s, a weblog called Memepool was gaining popularity for more than just its posts. Half of its million-plus users per month were enjoying a unique feature built by the site's operator, Joshua Schachter. The feature allowed Joshua to bookmark interesting links from around the Web and share them with the site's followers. This was the start of social bookmarking. To that point, it was only Joshua sharing his links. Thinking other people might enjoy being able to do the same thing, Joshua built a tool anyone could use to bookmark and share interesting links. He called that tool del.icio.us. del.icio.us grew in popularity so quickly that it had thousands of user in its first month, investment from a top NYC venture capital firm shortly after, and, within eight months, an acquisition offer from Yahoo! On this episode of Web Masters, Joshua shares the story of how it all happened and his thoughts on why the site became so popular so quickly. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, November 02, 2020
Scott Maslowe: The Electrician Who Perfected Email Marketing
The dirty little secret of most new media technologies is that the stories of how they became mainstream are rarely as wholesome and altruistic as people tend to think. That's true of the World Wide Web, too. In fact, things like email marketing, which, today, seems dull and boring, were originally taboo and avoided by most companies. In this episode of Web Masters, we learn about how email marketing became mainstream by talking with Scott Maslowe, an email marketing pioneer who was originally using email to drive traffic to adult websites. He eventually took those same tactics to lots of other companies and showed them just how powerful -- and valuable -- email marketing could be. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here . Also, if you're interested in buying or selling an Internet business, be sure to check out our sponsor, Latonas.com , the Internet's best source for buying and selling web-based, work-from-home businesses.
Mon, October 26, 2020
David Bohnett @ GeoCities: The Developer Who Built Online Cities
In 1994, David Bohnett setup a live webcam pointed out of an office window at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine. That ability to engage in a community on the other side of the world got so popular so quickly that it inspired David to create a system for everyone to create, join, and participate in online communities. He called those communities "GeoCities." Within five years, GeoCities grew from a simple online website builder into one of the world's most popular social networks (before that was even a thing!), with millions of users and a multi-billion-dollar acquisition from Yahoo! On this episode of Web Masters, you'll learn how GeoCities got started, how David grew it, and, ultimately, how David sold it in order to continue pursuing his original vision of helping everyone participate on the Internet. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, October 19, 2020
Gregg Spiridellis @ JibJab: The Brothers Who Perfected Viral Videos
When Gregg Spiridellis and his brother, Evan, first launched their online animation studio -- JibJab -- in 1999, nobody knew how to monetize short-from video content on the Web. And that was still true five years later when their first massively successful viral video, This Land , spread to millions of people around the world in a matter of days. But Gregg and his brother knew they were sitting at the front of a media revolution, and, if they kept iterating, they'd eventually find a sustainable business model. And they ultimately did, turning JibJab from a creator of one-off video shorts into one of the Web's largest personalized e-card services. During the episode, Gregg shares his experiences with Aaron about growing JibJab from a Brooklyn garage working alongside his brother to a Southern California office with 100+ employees and, ultimately, a successful exit. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, October 12, 2020
Yoni Belousov: The Guy Who Owns All the Domains You Want
Ask any early Internet entrepreneur about the biggest opportunity they feel like they missed in the early days of the Web, and they'll all tell you the same thing: they wish they would have thought to buy all the valuable domain names while they were still available. Our guest on this episode of Web Masters, Yoni Belousov, didn't exactly buy all the valuable domain names while they were still available in the early 90s, but he's spent his career acquiring plenty of them. In fact, he's currently one of the largest private investors of domains in the world. During the episode, Yoni shares his experiences with Aaron about buying and selling domains while providing some expert tips on his strategy for getting started in domain investing. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here . Also, if you're interested in buying or selling an Internet business, be sure to check out our sponsor, Latonas.com , the Internet's best source for buying and selling web-based, work-from-home businesses.
Mon, October 05, 2020
Linda Lightman @ Linda's Stuff: The Woman Who Wants to Help Sell Your Stuff on eBay
In 2000, a New Jersey lawyer wanted to help her children sell their old video games. The local video game shop wouldn't give her what she thought they were worth, so, at her son's urging, she decided to try out a rapidly growing website where anyone could sell their stuff online. That website was eBay. A few days later, she sold the same video games for nearly 10x what the stores had offered her, and she was hooked. That former lawyer was Linda Lightman. Today, Linda owns Linda's Stuff, the world's largest seller of luxury fashion on eBay. This episode of Web Masters features host Aaron Dinin in conversation with Linda Lightman as she tells the story of how she grew a business helping her friends sell stuff on eBay from her home into a 100,000 square foot warehouse and $25 million per year in revenues. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, September 28, 2020
Chris Heivly @ MapQuest: The Map Geek Who Gave Everyone Better Directions
In 1995, a mapping company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania that had been developing CD-ROMS for point-to-point navigation decided to see if it could provide the same service for consumers in real-time using a new technology called the World Wide Web. They contacted the owners of their nearest Internet node -- a local college -- and were given a tie-in to the network. With access to the Web established, they launched their new website: MapQuest.com. It was an instant hit. MapQuest quickly became one of the most popular websites in the world while completely changing the way the world traveled from place to place. This episode of Web Masters features host Aaron Dinin in conversation with Chris Heivly , one of MapQuest's co-founders and one of the world's earliest map geeks. He tells the story of how computer mapping grew out of the labs of a niche group of academics and ultimately became the backbone of the global economy. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Mon, September 21, 2020
Henry Copeland @ BlogAds: The Entrepreneur Who Turned Blogging Into a Business
These days, kids dream of becoming social media influencers in the same way they've always dreamed of becoming actors, athletes, and politicians. Those dreams are, in part, because of the fame and wealth that comes with online notoriety. But that wasn't always the case. The first social media influencers -- the early bloggers of the late 90s and early 2000s -- weren't creating content because it could make them rich. In fact, it was the opposite. They actively resisted monetizing on their popularity. That began to change in 2002 when an entrepreneur named Henry Copeland launched a new advertising platform called BlogAds. BlogAds gave bloggers the ability to easily monetize on their content for the first time. Adoption was slow at first. Bloggers didn't want to violate their personal space with intrusive ads. But, as the demand on bloggers grew alongside their audiences, more and more online influencers began realizing they had to turn their passion into a business if they wanted to survive. Lucky for them, BlogAds was there to help. This episode of Web Masters features host Aaron Dinin having a conversation with Henry as he shares the story of BlogAds. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here . Also, if you're interested in buying or selling an Internet business, be sure to check out our sponsor, Latonas.com , the Internet's best source for buying and selling web-based, work-from-home businesses.
Tue, September 15, 2020
Louis Monier @ AltaVista: The Man Who Could Have Bought Google for $1 Million
On July 4th weekend of 1995, Louis Monier deployed a spider across the Internet to search for and catalog all existing web pages. He chose July 4th weekend because he was worried that his spider might break the Internet. And, to be fair, it actually did... at least for New Zealand. As in the entire country of New Zealand. That initial crawl helped Monier develop the index that would eventually become AltaVista, the world'd leader in web search years before anyone would be using "google" as a verb. This episode of Web Masters features host Aaron Dinin having a conversation with Louis as he shares the story of AltaVista in his own words and gives some incredible insights into what the earliest days of the Web were like. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here .
Trailer · Thu, August 06, 2020
Web Masters Preview
The host of the Web Masters podcast, Aaron Dinin, introduces the show and explains why it was created. You'll also hear interview excerpts from some of the people that'll be featured on the show as they recount the internet businesses they built and how those businesses helped shape the evolution of the World Wide Web.
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