We were recently able to steal a few minutes to glean some wisdom from Greg Galant, founder of Venture Voice and CEO of Sawhorse Media. Greg speaks from a wealth of knowledge acquired through a variety of experiences that all began with an internet consulting firm he started at the age of 14. Greg is now a leading expert on social media, venture capital, entrepreneurship and how they all relate.
Flowtown: What is Venture Voice and why did you start it?
Greg: Venture Voice was started at the time I was finishing college and simultaneously working at CNN.com. I was helping CNN figure out how to do more things with social media and talking with them a lot about podcasting.
It all happened because I kept getting stuck in Atlanta traffic and I couldn’t stand Atlanta radio. It occurred to me that CNN had all this great audio content that I had seen on their site, but it wasn’t available for download to use on an iPod or to listen to in a car. This was back in 2005 when the word podcast hadn’t come into popularity yet, and so I pitched them on downloadable mp3.
Then I decided to go off and do the same thing for myself, but I had to think of a topic to do a podcast on. Having started my own business before and having worked in venture capital, I knew that one of the big challenges for entrepreneurs was just knowing what other entrepreneurs are doing. At the time, so many entrepreneurs operated without any other entrepreneurs around and they didn’t know what other people were doing to get ahead. Now there are a tremendous number of entrepreneur and VC blogs, but in 2005 there was very little media out there.
When I would hear the stories about a guy who started a company and then sold it for a billion dollars, I wanted to know what happened in between. I simply started Venture Voice to answer that question. I have had some really great entrepreneurs on there over the years and it’s been a great audience to build.
Flowtown: How did your role at CNN prepare you for the work you do now?
Greg: I had a lot of fun working at CNN. It’s unique in that it’s probably one of the largest online-only newsrooms in the world. It was exciting to see many people come together to produce a profitable web-only product back in 2005. So it was a great example of an early web property that was successful and where everything happened as it should – it was meaningful, we figured out the scale, and we figure out how to operate efficiently.
Flowtown: Can you tell us a little more about your time in venture capital?
Greg: I spent the summer working at a capital venture firm called Newlight Associates which had invested in companies including Massive, which is one of the first video game advertising platforms [Massive has since been acquired by Microsoft]. I also got to work with Herman Fialkov who was one of the early investors of Intel.
It was cool to see things from the other side of the table – how VCs analyze deals – and I got talking with a lot of entrepreneurs and got to know how they pitched their companies and put together presentations. It still wasn’t nearly as fun as being an entrepreneur, but it didn’t hurt to spend a little time seeing how it works.
Flowtown: I understand you started and Internet strategy firm called Halenet Inc. at a really young age. Can you tell us a little about that?
Greg: Halenet was my first company and I started it when I was 14 years old. I was going door-to-door to companies explaining what a website was and why they should have one. Then, in a couple years the conversation shifted to them knowing they needed a website and talking about who to get to build their site. So it was a good experience that I find I’ve had over and over in my career which is that the actual sale is won by first answering the question, “why should we do this in the first place?”, then followed by “here’s why you should work with us?”.
Flowtown: What drove you to do this at such an early age?
Greg: It was a combination of boredom and intrigue with the power of the web. It was an exciting time to me that you could go from being limited by the software on your computer to being able to put stuff out there and communicate with thousands and millions, and now billions of people in the world. It totally shifted my view of computers and I wanted to put myself in a position to do it on a grander scale. I thought helping these companies would be a good way to get into it.
Flowtown: How have you seen social sites, especially recently, change the way companies interact with consumers?
Greg: I think they have completely remade the way that companies interact with their customers. I think one big thing is that now every customer has their own voice. You always knew that customers were important, and there was word of mouth, but not every customer was a publisher.
Companies used to have two separate divisions: your customer service and your public relations. One division talked to customers and the other one talked to people who could write about you – and they were clear and distinct. Now there’s really no distinction in that every customer is just like Walt Mossberg at WSJ in that they have an outlet via Twitter, Facebook, or a blog to write about you and they’re not afraid to use it. They’ll take a picture of a great product and they’ll tweet or Facebook status update about it. When they’re put on hold during a lousy phone situation they’ll publish about that too. And even with the B2B companies now, the buyers all have blogs and Twitter accounts and they’ll write about it. So it’s really this complete shift where everyone you deal with is a publisher.
Flowtown: What new strategies or tactics do you feel are really useful for companies but aren’t totally mainstream yet?
Greg: You know, there have been a lot of case studies around this area so far, but I think what’s exciting now is we’re starting to see more sophisticated implementations on how to manage those communications. If you look at companies like Cotweet, Hootsuite, Buddy Media and Invoker, they are starting to monitor what everybody is saying about them and then engage with those customers.
But then the big challenge for companies is that you can’t just have some outside PR person do the social media because they need to be empowered to actually engage with somebody and be knowledgeable about the company. One great example is the questions going to Whole Foods. Someone may ask if a specific product is gluten free, and no one would probably ever know that unless they actually worked there and had access to the buyer or some specialist. So there are a lot of superficial things going on, but the next level is getting into actually restructuring how these companies work.
Flowtown: How has the voice of the entrepreneur changed with the growth of social media?
Greg: I think it’s a lot better starting a company today than probably any other time in history because you have the benefit of so much knowledge. When I was studying up on the industry before my venture capital gig started, I remember trying to find any information on VC. There were maybe two venture capital blogs at the time: David Hornik had the first one and I think Fred Wilson had the second one. So, there was barely any information and very few entrepreneurs had written about this stuff.
If you were going into a deal and just wanted to know what some term meant there just wasn’t anything. Or you might get something extremely general like a magazine article on how to open a deli, but you weren’t getting the actual explanations you needed for your industry. And now, through all the blogs and Twitter accounts by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs you can learn about any little issue – like how to put together board minutes and how to answer questions like, “what does ‘participating preferred’ mean as a term,” and “what is the best way to scale the sales force?” There are a lot of blog posts about all these little issues so that even if the first person didn’t get it completely right you can read through five to ten great posts and get a good feel for it.
One of our sites at Sawhorse Media is Venture Maven and it aggregates all the VCs on Twitter so you can drill down even further now and look for a given VC firm and find out if they’ve been having a good week. I knew a guy who was going to pitch to a VC firm and the partner he was going to meet with had tweeted that his kid was sick that morning. That’s something that you’d want to know going into the meeting, that the guy is having a bad day.
Flowtown: Where do you see social media going in the next five years?
Greg: There are a few big trends going on right now. For a while the social networks looked like they might fracture and there would be all these vertical networks, but now it seems like there are these platforms that are strengthening to a new level.
It’s becoming clear that if you want to work with social media you really have to integrate Twitter and Facebook because people only look at a small number of streams. I think that’s one big trend that will keep playing itself out. And I think the other thing that’s corollary to that is that people are looking for more structure on these platforms. I don’t see Facebook or Twitter being completely altruistic by opening themselves up to app developers. They’re doing it because they realize that this is what their users will demand.
Being on Facebook or Twitter now is like buying a computer in the 90′s with Windows installed – we’ve all played minesweeper and solitaire – but we know that we need application developers to put the good stuff on there. So I feel like that’s the phase we’re in right now where we’re all sitting there with our boxes and one or two apps and we’re looking for really great apps now to use that will let us get a lot more value out of the platform.
Flowtown: Good point. There’s just so must information and potential out there and we want to tap into that.
Greg: Yah, exactly. Right now the number of tweets and status updates and friends and Twitter sources is overwhelming – it’s gotten to an almost infinite point that human beings can’t understand. The opportunity now is for people to come along and make sense of it all and give us more utility.
To learn more about Greg visit Venture Voice, Sawhorse Media, or follow him on Twitter.
