I interviewed the “Godfather of Videoblogging”, Steve Garfield, on the official publish date of his book, “Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business“. In this video Q&A:

• Steve talks about how he went from idea to market with his new book.
• Shares his advice for someone looking to get started with online video for their business.
• Reveals the mindset that enabled him to do the work on the book – without it feeling like work.
• Identifies the most important things you must do online for your personal brand.

In addition to knowing his stuff about online video, Steve is one of the nicest and most genuine people in social media, and he’s someone you should get to know.

What do YOU think? If you’re not already building your business with online video, what obstacles have been in your way? If you’ve already started, what are some of the key lessons you’ve learned?

I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview last year with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’m publishing excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: If you were to go to work at a company more mature in it’s lifecycle, what would be your approach to innovation and new product development?

MARISSA MAYER: I think a couple of things transcend. I think 20% time, letting your employees know that you trust them and that they’re empowered to work on the things that they think could have the biggest impact on the business or that they think could be most impactful for the world is an important idea and I think works largely everywhere.

And there are key elements that we look at in terms of overall metrics and trends that you want to coach the organization towards. One of them is small teams.

When I joined Google, there were 9 engineers and we organized in 3 teams of 3. And we knew we were going to add 9 engineers by year end, so there’d be 18 of us. And Larry and Sergey said, “You know what? By year end, we don’t want to have 3 teams of 6, we want to have 6 teams of 3. Let’s keep the core team at the size 3. Because if we have twice as many engineers, we don’t want to be doing all the same things twice as well, we want to be doing twice as many things.”

So there’s a conscious decision to sacrifice some element of quality and polish for the sake of doing more things and having more of a breadth of efforts going on.

The other nice benefit this has is it keeps the culture much more entrepreneurial and much more motivated. Because when you’re working on a smaller team you have a much greater sense of ownership. You’re not sitting there thinking, “If I don’t do X today, someone else will pick up the slack or it can wait for tomorrow.” Because it’s important enough for one of the 4 of you to do it. Or it’s not. So I think by creating a culture that has those small teams, you’re much more likely to get innovation.

That’s true in start ups, that’s true in large companies.

And then there’s the concept of leapfrogging. We’ve noticed that as Google has matured as a company, some teams, while they may be structured in smaller teams within them, they’re large teams. Our search team is a large team. We have more people working on search now than ever. The same is true for ads.

What we’ve noticed there is when we add a small disrupter team, that’s supposed to think about things in a new and different way, two bad things happen.

One, the large, experienced, mature team wants to talk with the disrupter team, and say, “I know that seems like a good idea, because it seemed like a good idea to us too. But we tried it, and it was a waste of a year. So please, don’t bother to do that. Skip that idea and move onto the next thing. So they’re trying to influence what the disrupter team does.

The other thing that happens is usually that big team is successful, and they have a lot of tools and infrastructure that the disrupter team wants to draft off of. So as a result, in a big company with a large successful team, it’s difficult for the disrupter team not to get sucked into the larger team over time.

So what we started doing as we rolled out leapfrog initiatives, we structure them organizationally and from a communication standpoint where they’re out of touch with the core team. They’re in a different reporting structure, a different engineering VP. And also physically diverse.

We’ve had a bunch of attempts at leapfrogs, such as in search, with a team in Kirkland trying to build a better search engine than Google itself. And I’m not allowed to talk with them [laughter]. And that’s a good thing, because I know they’re wasting time. I know they’re doing things we tried that just don’t work [laughter].

I’d love to talk with them and I’d love to save them that effort. But that very action of me doing that would ultimate change their outcome and change how disruptive they can be. So it’s really important that I not talk to the Kirkland search leapfrog and let them do their thing.

And who knows, maybe they’ll build a better search engine. But we do think that with a few years under their belt that they will have different features and different ideas that maybe could stand on their own and be stronger than Google itself. Or maybe it [the features] should be folded into the main search engine after they reach a level of maturity and have proven their value. We have similar efforts in Maps and Advertising.

Again, you want to keep a small team. But you also want a disrupter to be far enough away that they don’t get overly influenced or voluntarily pulled into the larger, more successful team.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing two Web 2.0/new media businesses.

Photo credit: eirikso

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I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview last year with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’m publishing excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: Could you talk about the product management process at Google, how you go from idea to product, a high level overview?

MARISSA MAYER: Every product has its own genesis. But we gather ideas from all over the company. Some of the ideas are top down, us realizing we have strategic holes in what we’re offering our end users. A lot of the ideas are bottoms up, engineers and other employees coming up with ideas and prototypes of what they’d want to build.

From there, there definitely are phases of a product.

For example, a prototype at Google is worth 100,000 words. It’s one thing to talk to someone about an idea; it’s a whole other thing to be able to show a series of mock ups and/or a functioning website that illustrates your idea.

From there we try to put a small team on it, sometimes a volunteer effort with what we call 20% time. 20% time is a notion we have at Google that we want employees to work on whatever they want to work on regardless of it is part of their core assignment with about 20% of their time. So some of the times the prototype is developed voluntarily, other time by a small team. But generally it’s a couple of individuals who develop the prototype.
And then we launch it. We try to send it out to Google Labs as quickly as we can.

We try to launch early and often and then change the product, iterate it based on user feedback, adding more resources as something gains strength and popularity.

DAVID ECKOFF: What kind of return on investment do you see with 20% time?

MARISSA MAYER: We call it 20% time, that’s our slogan that provides our employees with a creative license to know they are empowered to spend 20% of their time to do whatever it is they feel most passionately about. Because we believe it is that kind passion that creates really great and beautiful products. At the end of the day it’s about building something that you think will be particularly powerful.

What we’ve found is that often supports the core and gives us a disproportionate return on investment.

Someone once asked me to quantify the outputs of 20% time, and I looked over our launch calendar which had all our historic launches for a 6 month period, tagging where the different ideas came from. And we realized over that 6 month period, over 50% of the products and features that had launched, came from 20% time. So it was disproportionate by a factor of about two and a half. So for us, it is very worthwhile.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing two Web 2.0/new media businesses.

Photo credit: jwowens

Related posts:

I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview with Marissa Mayer of Google last year, filmed before a live studio audience. Marissa leads Google’s product management efforts on search products. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’ll be publishing more excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: What cultural attributes makes Google special when it comes to innovating and developing new products?

MARISSA MAYER: People like to question the status quo and they like to think about doing things in new audacious ways. If the standard in the industry is to give away 4-6MB of mail space, let’s not make it 20 MB of space, let’s give them a gig.

Try to have big and audacious goals for how to do something and how to approach new problems. Larry and Sergey will talk about, as we start off new ideas within the company, we really want a new idea to have a billion dollar revenue run rate opportunity. That doesn’t mean we think about monetization all the time, what we really think about are the end users and what they ultimately want. But we want them to be big opportunities, things that really matter to people that they will use every day. Because when you work on really big important problems that matter and that are fundamentally useful to people’s everyday lives, you’ll find a way to monetize them. Either it will be so valuable that users will pay for a subscription and/or there will be a way to have advertising.

DAVID ECKOFF: Google has seen tremendous growth in the number of employees. How do you maintain the culture of the company?

MARISSA MAYER: I started when there were 18 people and now there are about 18,000 people. I think we were very lucky when we were small, the people we hired were all likeminded they were all interested in working on products that mattered they all wanted to do good things for the world and work on problems and projects that their friends and family would use every day. As a result, we had a very stable culture then.

As new hires come, you make small talk with new employees. I’d ask “What drew you to Google?” At around 1200 employees, I heard this interesting answer I’d never gotten before: “the culture.” I thought, that’s such an odd reason to go to a company. For me graduating from school and deciding to go to Google, it was about working on really interesting problems involving artificial intelligence and how it gets applied to search. It was the intellectual challenge that drew me to Google. So going for the culture seemed like an odd answer. But then I started hearing that answer all the time. And I noticed as we went from about 1200 employees to 1500 employees, almost 50% of the new people I talked with started citing the culture.

And I realized that the culture was having a very interesting reinforcing effect. There’s the point of maintaining stability up to 1200 employees. But once we hit 1200 employees, the culture became very self reinforcing. Because when you have a majority of employees joining a company for the culture, the last thing those employees want to do when they arrive is change it or screw it up. They came there to experience it, to participate in it, to benefit from it. And as a result, the culture has become very stable.

I think that what one of the most stunning things is how similarly motivated the early Googlers are to today’s Googlers. The conversations that happen every night around the foosball table or in the snack kitchens, you hear the same kind of aspirational language: what could Google do, what would be possible, what’s interesting in technology and how could we combine that with the infrastructure we’re building? What would be a big and audacious goal in this area? Those same conversations happen every night. The people who come now are inspired by the same principles that we had early on.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing two Web 2.0/new media businesses.

Photo credit: Esthr

Related posts:

I’m co-planning a session proposal for the SXSW Interactve conference, with Biray Alsac of FITTmaxx Institute. Hope to see you there in 2009!

“Reduce MySpace Between Waist & Thighs So Wiki Live Longer.”

Let’s face it, most of us in the Web 2.0 community lead a non-stop lifestyle, with jobs that keep us plugged in 24/7, online, time-starved and sedentary. And that could be killing us. Literally.

When Internet famous blogger Om Malik suffered a heart attack December 28, it was a wake up call that he needed to change his non-stop unhealthy lifestyle. “Living a healthier life isn’t just one of my New Year’s resolutions,” Malik wrote. “It’s doctor’s orders.”

We know we should be taking better care of ourselves. We might even know a few things we could be doing. But how to get started? And how to keep it going with all the demands on our time?

In this highly participatory session, discover how Web 2.0 platforms and technologies can help us achieve our health and fitness goals. Gain insights from expert panelists about the most important things you can do right now to get the best results in the least amount of time. Discuss real life practical examples: what works, and what doesn’t work. Discover the keys to feeling better, looking great, having more energy. Be inspired by your fellow Web 2.0 friends and colleagues.

Is a heart attack in YOUR future? Could be…

Don’t wait for doctor’s orders, learn how to make positive lifestyle changes now and how to get fit with the help of Web 2.0 technologies.

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Some early user feedback posted on SXSW:

“A much needed discussion!” – Karen Gurney

“Amen! I’ll be there!” – Rebecca Newton

“Excellent panel idea.” – Janice James

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I recently interviewed Sarah Lacy, BusinessWeek reporter, Tech Ticker host and author of the book “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and Rise of Web 2.0″ (scheduled for release tomorrow).

Sarah and I had an in-depth conversation about her new book, life in Silicon Valley, Twitter, her infamous SXSW interview, and much more.

You have a new book coming out, could you tell us more about it?

The book is called “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and Rise of Web 2.0″. While it’s about Silicon Valley, it’s really written for people outside Silicon Valley who heard all about the dotcom bubble, heard all about the bust and then heard nothing about Internet companies for a long time. Then out of no where we started hearing about MySpace, YouTube and Facebook, a lot of these modern Web 2.0 companies. And there were a lot of misunderstandings about what this wave of companies meant. There were a lot of stories saying it’s like 1999 again, but it couldn’t be farther than 1999 again…

I’ve covered start ups in Silicon Valley for about 10 years. Stayed in close contact with a lot of my sources after the bust. I had a front row seat as a lot of these companies were bubbling back up. When it started to become a big story and I felt like I was seeing it was being reported on so wrong over and over again and people didn’t really get it, I felt like I was in a unique position to be the person to help these guys tell their story.

So what are some of the things you and the entrepreneurs you write about see as different than 1999?

I think one of the biggest things is you look at who was the most important person in a Web 1.0 company vs. a Web 2.0 company? In the dotcom days, it was the business development guy. The Internet then was all about doing these big content deals or revenue sharing deals with all the old economy companies. And it was really common in San Francisco to see a lot of business school drop outs wearing blue shirts and khakis and hanging out at the champagne bar, called the Bubble Lounge, they order a bottle of Cristal and smoke cigars and being mini ‘Masters of the Universe’. None of that is happening now.

The most important person in a Web 2.0 company is the engineer. I think that it makes sense, because if you think about these companies the bulk of their content and the bulk of what makes these sites special is the community of users that are really providing what’s important on the site. If you look at Facebook or LinkedIn or something even more extreme like total user generated content like YouTube or blogs, you don’t need a bizdev guy because this isn’t a deal like AOL-Time Warner, we’ve got this big portal let’s go put some content on it. Obviously those plays didn’t work when we look back at it.

This is a phenomena that is driven up by the users. People at these companies just need to build the best design, the best user interfaces, the best networks to make sure scales to make sure it’s robust and intuitive and easy to use and beyond that get out of the user’s way.

On the topic of culture in Silicon Valley, you’ve got a chapter in the book called “F-ck the Sweater Vests”. Interesting title, tell us more what that’s about.

That’s Jay Adelson, the CEO of digg that’s his rallying cry. By sweater vests, he refers to old school business people venture capitalists, gate keepers. Jay started a networking company and he had a brutal experience during the bust. He got screwed over by a lot of people he trusted in the industry. That’s where “F-ck the Sweater Vest” came from. That sense is a large part of why these companies were built the way they were, using angel money, using cheaper or free open source software not having to go to the sweater vests until you had something so great that they had to do it on your terms.

For people who are not in Silicon Valley who are reading this book, what do you hope they take away from it?

I wrote the book for those people. I try to give a real flavor of Silicon Valley. The launch parties get a lot of attention. But this is really just a place where people who are nerds, people who love building stuff, people who can’t work for anyone else, who are just misfits and they feel this immediate sense of home and belonging and as bruising as the bust was, that’s why so many people didn’t leave.

There are a couple of scenes in the book of parties at people’s houses, not these big launch parties or company parties. These guys forge these deep relationships because of what they go through socially, what they go through emotionally, it’s something that’s very unique in the valley. Just being able to relate to each other. There’s this deep glue that holds these people together. So it’s not surprising that a lot of these guys back each other’s companies, even if they’re competing with each other, there’s some way in the Valley that work and friendship are able to co-exist.

There’s also a certain way of doing business in the Valley and I take people through raising a funding round in an easy to understand way, demystifying all the terms and technical jargon.

When you live and work in the Valley you see so many times at a movie theatre, two guys run into each other and they ask what they’re each doing. And maybe that chance meeting turns into an angel investor investing in his friend’s company. Or maybe that other friend ends up working on something and they end up being partners.

There are thousands and thousands of these throw away moments in Silicon Valley life that lead to why these companies wind up being hugely successful. It’s something you have to live here to experience. It’s the magic of Silicon Valley.

Well those are the upsides, what are some of the downsides of Silicon Valley?

It’s probably the personal toll that it takes on you. It’s a brutal, brutal life here. Even for me, and I’m not even starting a company, there’s this expectation, this macho thing in Silicon Valley that you’re going to work 48 hours each day, that you’re going to find a way to carve out another 24 hours and get stuff done.

Things move very fast here and you have to be on top of it. Not just if you’re starting a company but if you’re investing in one, if you’re writing about them, if you’re an attorney.

It’s an all consuming scene here and that can get very exhausting for people. It’s obliviously not a really healthy work life balance.

But also, these guys can go from being a nobody to being on the cover of business magazines in such a short period of time. It’s very hard when you’re a single guy to date in that situation. It’s hard to make friends with people in that situation. That’s why these guys cling to each other.

You go from someone who’s really shy and doesn’t necessarily want to go to a lot of parties or talk to a lot of people to not wanting to go to a lot of parties or talk to a lot of people because you get mobbed.

These guys become celebrities just as much as anyone in Hollywood. They don’t start out with that goal. Sometimes there’s the sense that ‘I didn’t want this.’

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Related Links:

Go2web2.0 (Orli Yakuel): An Interview with Sarah Lacy Regarding her New Book

The NEXT web: Once You’re Lucky, Twice Your Bloody Lucky!

CNET TV: Loaded: Once you’re lucky, twice you’re good

TechCrunch: 10 Signed Copies of Sarah Lacy’s “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good”

CenterNetworks: Sarah Lacy on Fox Business Explains What Web 2.0 Is and Why LinkedIn Is Hot

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Smoking hot Sarah Lacy has a smoking hot book ranked #1 on Amazon

AllFaceBook: Mark Zuckerberg, Sarah Lacy Interview Video

This Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, I will be a judge for the semi-finals of the GRA/TAG 2008 Business Launch Competition.

Applicants, then semifinalists, then finalists are competing for a prize that includes a $100,000 cash award and services valued at an additional $200,000, for a total grand prize of $300,000.

This event is conducted by the The Georgia Research Alliance and the Technology Association of Georgia with the goal of supporting the creation and growth of new technology companies in Georgia.

In addition to the cash and services award, entrants have an option to work with a mentor to further develop and refine their business plan. A group of Georgia’s most successful high tech entrepreneurs has agreed to serve as mentors.

A preeminent panel of judges consisting of business leaders, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists includes:

Semi Final Judges: