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About ZBIZ.TV
ZBIZ.TV is dedicated to broadcasting weekly interviews with entrepreneurs from early stage companies. Most of the companies we interview have received at least one angel round of financing and are less than one year old.
We seek to elicit from the entrepreneur an “oral executive summary” of his or her company: the problems they are seeking to solve, the markets they seek to serve, the competitors they will be facing as well as an overview of their financial picture. We ask about the funding they’ve received thus far, their overhead and expenses and their revenues. We ask about when they anticipate reaching profitability and what their exit strategy will be.
We focus on the company and the management team that runs it, not just the product.
We have found that most entrepreneurs are quite willing and open to “raise the kimono” and tell us about their financial picture, but that’s not always the case. We appreciate when they do share that information, but don’t force them to divulge anything they would prefer to keep private.
We believe this site will be of interest not only to other entrepreneurs, but to investors of all stripes: angel investors, private investment firms and venture capitalists. It’s likely you may find an investment opportunity in one of these companies that somehow may have passed you by.
We hope you find our interviews interesting and informative. If you have any suggestions as to how we can improve our offering, please don’t hesitate to email Andrew Bourland at andrew at bourland dot com.
How the Content is Prepared
For those of you who - like me - like to know the details of how the video content is prepared for the weekly broadcasts of ZBIZ.TV, here is how I prepare for each production.
I have a network of MIT Sloan graduates who are all in various stages of starting their own businesses. They stay in close touch, and have provided me with introductions to the others - which I have very much appreciated.
We generally conduct the interviews in their offices, though in a couple of cases I have met them in their home or at a convention center.
I bring along my video camera , a Canon GL1, and my sound equipment, a couple of microphones, a mixer and a Powerbook G4 with Garageband 3 running in podcast mode.
I have a set of about 15 questions which I work through to maintain some degree of consistency among the interviews, but I don’t stick slavishly to the script, as often there will be certain questions that turn out to be irrelevant or redundant. The more I work with it, the more comfortable I am going off script.
I try to keep my interviews to around 20 minutes, which is beyond the limits I should probably be following, but seems to be enough to get the core of each entrepreneur’s story. As I write, I have six interviews prepared for production which range from as short as 15 minutes to as long as 28. I’ve thought about chopping them up into multiple 5-7 minute segments to run throughout a week, but the interviews are far more interesting when listened to in one sitting. I hope they will be compelling enough to maintain our viewer’s attention. Let me know if they aren’t, OK? Just write me at andrew at bourland dot com.
When I complete the interview, I take the tape back to my office where I load it up into my PowerMac G5 using iMovie HD 6 software. I add the opening and closing graphics, do the voiceovers, delete extraneous content, clean up any lighting or sound problems and then export it over to GarageBand 3 software.
In GarageBand, I add the musical score at the beginning and the end, export the audio and video version of it to iTunes 7 for later upload and then create the Quicktime version of the interview.
I take the Quicktime Movie of the interview, load it into Sorenson Squeeze 4.3, resize it for the web page (the version of the movie which emanates from Quicktime is way too small), compress it, prepare it for the streaming server, and then out comes the final product which you see.
I load the Quicktime Movie up to VitalStream to serve the video so that it downloads the entire video almost instantly when you press the Play button.
From there, I do some coding to embed the video into the page, write the commentary that will accompany the video into my WordPress template, then save it for the date that it will be published.
Going through the learning curve to find out how to do all this with absolutely no previous knowledge, no guidance and no books or tutorials (just a lot of Google searching) was a time consuming process, but now it takes me about 45 minutes for the interview process and about an hour and a half to do the post production work. Not bad.
Of course, I’m still on a learning curve and this page will continue to change over time as I take new approaches to improve the final product you see and hear. As I write this just days before the site launch, I’m not totally satisfied with the look and feel of everything, but am confident that with a responsive audience and an open mind, I can continue to improve ZBIZ.TV.
Again, please feel free to write me anytime at andrew at bourland dot com to let me know what works - and especially what doesn’t - for you.
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