Web Masters

Web Masters

Aaron Dinin

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...

Startup Gold Episode #5: The Purpose of Entrepreneurship With Peter Sunde

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 c

Jan 31, 2024 • 15:56

Startup Gold Episode #4: Seeing the Future with Raj Kapoor

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

Dec 27, 2023 • 13:10

Startup Gold Episode #3: The Importance of Timing with John Danner

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 f

Nov 30, 2023 • 14:11

Startup Gold Episode #2: The Dangers of "First-Mover Advantage" with Jason Olim

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? A

Oct 31, 2023 • 13:51

Startup Gold Episode #1: How to Build a Truly Great Product with David Cummings

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.

Sep 30, 2023 • 8:38

Taegan Goddard @ Political Wire: The Political Junkie Who Built a Community for Fellow Addicts

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

Jul 31, 2023 • 37:38

Daniel Ha @ Disqus: The Entrepreneur Who Made Commenting Easier

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 pur

Jun 1, 2023 • 38:03

Jed Carlson @ ReverbNation: The MBA Who Taught Bands How to Share Their Music Online

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

Apr 24, 2023 • 30:27

Osman Rashid @ Chegg.com: The Man Who Turned Textbook Rentals Into Big Business

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 c

Mar 27, 2023 • 39:33

Terry Jones @ Travelocity & Kayak: The Travel Agent Who Put Travel Agents Out of Business

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

Feb 27, 2023 • 39:22

Steve Kaufer @ TripAdvisor: The Entrepreneur Who Wanted a Better Vacation

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 websit

Jan 23, 2023 • 47:04

Ben Huh @ Cheezburger Network: The Guy Who Did Haz Funny Cat Pictures

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 m

Dec 19, 2022 • 26:33

David Gardner @ The Motley Fool: The Brothers Who've Been Giving Online Investing Advice for 30 Years

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 j

Nov 21, 2022 • 47:13

Craig Newmark @ Craigslist: The "Forest Gump of the Internet" Who Helps People Find Stuff

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 i

Oct 17, 2022 • 28:26

Marc Seriff @ AOL: The Network Engineer Who Introduced the Internet to Everyone

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

Sep 12, 2022 • 40:41

Jason Calacanis @ Silicon Alley Reporter: The Guy Who Threw the Best Parties in New York City

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 a

Aug 8, 2022 • 35:01

Charles Adler @ Kickstarter: The Music Lover Who Popularized Crowdfunding

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 h

Jul 11, 2022 • 46:58

Amir Ashkenazi @ Shopping.com: The Coder Who Made Online Bargain Hunting Easy

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

Jun 27, 2022 • 30:09

Mark Chasan @ eMusic: The Lawyer Who Loved Music

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 he

Jun 20, 2022 • 32:56

Alon Carmel @ Jdate: The Real Estate Investor Who Took Niche Dating Mainstream

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, foc

Jun 13, 2022 • 37:52

Carl Lipo @ Allrecipes: The Archaeologist Who Taught People to Cook

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

Jun 6, 2022 • 39:46

James Hong @ HOTorNOT: The "4 or 5" Who Helped People Figure Out Their Attractiveness

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

May 23, 2022 • 46:47

Jesse Lipson @ ShareFile: The Solo Founder Who Bootstrapped an Enterprise SaaS App

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 numb

May 16, 2022 • 37:29

Mitch Kapor @ Lotus, the EFF, and Mozilla: The Founder Who Became an Activist

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. A

May 9, 2022 • 37:25

Matt Shobe @ FeedBurner: The Designer Who Helped People Monetize RSS

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 he

May 2, 2022 • 38:57

Scott Heiferman @ Fotolog: The Serial Entrepreneur Who Created Instagram Before Instagram

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

Apr 25, 2022 • 25:45

Scott Heiferman @ Meetup: The Neighbor Who Helped People Find Their Communities

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 bigges

Apr 18, 2022 • 32:47

Michael Robertson @ MP3.com: The Entrepreneur Who Got Sued for Making Music Streamable

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 na

Apr 11, 2022 • 1:02:48

Andrew Conru @ FriendFinder Networks: The PhD Who Made Online Dating More 'Friendly'

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 orig

Apr 4, 2022 • 46:17

Steve Madere @ Deja (Google Groups): The Developer Who Could Have Built Google

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 popula

Mar 28, 2022 • 33:38

Mike Davidson @ Newsvine: The Designer Who Re-Built Journalism for the Digital Age

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

Mar 21, 2022 • 43:29

Patrick Lee, Stephen Wang,  Senh Duong @ Rotten Tomatoes: The College Buddies Who Liked Watching Martial Arts Movies

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,

Mar 14, 2022 • 42:21

Marshall Brain @ HowStuffWorks: The Writer Who Built the 'Coolest Site on the Internet'

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 eve

Mar 7, 2022 • 36:12

Nugget McNett @ FlightAware: The Pilot Who Helped Make Flight Tracking More Accessible

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

Feb 28, 2022 • 51:21

Jon Oringer @ Shutterstock: The Software Engineer Who Created a Marketplace for Photographers

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

Feb 21, 2022 • 31:03

Jane Metcalfe & Louis Rossetto @ WIRED: The Partners Who Published the Mouthpiece of the Digital Age

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

Feb 14, 2022 • 42:38

Erik Selberg @ MetaCrawler: The Grad Student Who Searched Other Search Engines

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 wer

Feb 7, 2022 • 34:20

Rand Fishkin @ MOZ: The Writer Who Helped Everyone Become Better at SEO

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 a

Jan 31, 2022 • 43:28

Yvonne Marie Andres @ Global SchoolNet: The Teacher Who Pioneered E-Learning

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

Jan 24, 2022 • 37:23

Dries Buytaert @ Drupal: The Coder Who Helps People Manage Their Websites

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, Dr

Jan 17, 2022 • 45:12

Phil Fernandez @ Marketo: The Marketer Who Helped Jumpstart the SaaS Industry

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 indust

Jan 10, 2022 • 38:16

Jacob Lodwick @ Vimeo: The Filmmaker Who Pioneered Online Video Sharing

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 n

Jan 3, 2022 • 1:05:25

Who Invented the "Like" Button?

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.

Dec 27, 2021 • 10:53

Milo Medin - @Home: The Farm Boy Who Gave the World Faster Internet

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 unt

Dec 20, 2021 • 41:27

Peter Rojas @ Gizmodo & Engadget: The English Major Who Built Two Popular Gadget Blogs

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 gad

Dec 13, 2021 • 50:00

Joey Anuff @ Suck.com: The Guy Who Thought the Early Web Sucked

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.I

Dec 6, 2021 • 38:49

Dennis Crowley @ Foursquare: The 'Location Guy' Who Wants to Curate Experiences

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 la

Nov 29, 2021 • 45:36

Sabeer Bhatia @ Hotmail: The Engineer Who Made Email Free

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 H

Nov 22, 2021 • 39:20

David Cummings @ Pardot: The Founder Who Productized B2B Marketing Automation

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 ope

Nov 15, 2021 • 46:03

Steve Kirsch @ Infoseek: The Entrepreneur Who Wanted to Charge for Web Search

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, s

Nov 8, 2021 • 32:54

Caterina Fake @ Flickr: The Digital Archivist Who Invented Photo Sharing

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 thou

Nov 1, 2021 • 37:39

Josh Abramson @ College Humor: The Freshman Who Helped the Internet Laugh

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 Abra

Oct 25, 2021 • 43:27

Bob Metcalfe @ Metcalfe's Law & 3Com: The Man Who Invented Ethernet

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 la

Oct 18, 2021 • 42:05

Chris Maguire @ Etsy: The Ice Cream Maker Who Built a Marketplace for Crafters

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, yo

Oct 11, 2021 • 40:06

Genevieve Field @ Nerve.com: The Editor Who Pushed the Boundaries of Online Content

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.comLaunched in parallel with the signing of the Communications Decency Act in 1996, Nerve.com was one of the earliest websites

Oct 4, 2021 • 36:26

Fuzzy Mauldin @ Lycos: The Robot Warrior Who Made Searching the Web Easy

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 s

Sep 27, 2021 • 39:36

Mark Organ @ Eloqua: The Neuroscientist Who Automated Emails

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 Saa

Sep 20, 2021 • 42:54

Gary Kremen @ Match.com: The Elected Official Who Pioneered Online Dating

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 e

Sep 13, 2021 • 28:43

Jason Olim @ CDNow: The Miles Davis Fan Who Revolutionized Commerce

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

Aug 30, 2021 • 28:44

John Battelle @ The Industry Standard: The Journalist Who Created a Magazine About the Internet

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 quick

Aug 23, 2021 • 36:28

Eli Shapira @ Webtrends: The Security Entrepreneur Who Pioneered Web Analytics

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

Aug 16, 2021 • 31:36

Chris Jaeb @ Broadcast.com: The 'Idea Guy' Behind Mark Cuban's Billion Dollar Success

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 episod

Aug 9, 2021 • 35:47

Rob Malda @ Slashdot: The CmdrTaco Who Popularized Social News

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 di

Aug 2, 2021 • 47:22

Barry Appelman @ AOL Instant Messenger: The CTO Who Secretly Created Buddy Lists

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 bes

Jul 26, 2021 • 34:05

Robbie Allen @ Automated Insights: The Sports Fan Who Automated Writing

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 becom

Jul 19, 2021 • 41:33

Bruce Judson @ Time/Pathfinder: The Executive Who Invented the Banner Ad

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 tea

Jul 12, 2021 • 40:37

Lane Merrifield @ Club Penguin: The 'Dragon' Who Reimagined Social Networking for Kids

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 ep

Jun 28, 2021 • 45:30

Stefanie Syman @ FEED Magazine: The Writer Who Merged Tech and Culture

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 epis

Jun 21, 2021 • 32:00

Andrew Weinreich @ SixDegrees: The Lawyer Who Patented Social Networking

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 t

Jun 14, 2021 • 33:54

Paul Mockapetris @ DNS: The Computer Scientist Who Created the Internet's Phone Book

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 h

Jun 7, 2021 • 37:04

John Danner @ NetGravity: The "Horrible" CEO Who Invented Internet Advertising

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, al

May 24, 2021 • 40:10

Jeff Tarr @ Operation Match: The Harvard Student Who Connected People from His Dorm

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 we

May 17, 2021 • 30:14

Sam Yagan @ OkCupid: The College Buddies Who Pioneered Freemium Dating

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 strategie

May 10, 2021 • 38:28

Greg Newby @ Project Gutenberg: The Professor Who Gives Away Books

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

May 3, 2021 • 47:16

Ron Burr @ NetZero: The Coder Who Found a Way to Make the Internet Free

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 stran

Apr 26, 2021 • 30:40

Ira Fuchs @ BITNET: The Administrator Who Connected the Scholars of the World

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 could

Apr 19, 2021 • 44:51

Justin Hall @ Links.net: The Virtual Tour Guide Who Pioneered Personal Blogging

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

Apr 12, 2021 • 39:45

Sky Dayton @ EarthLink: The Coffee Shop Owner Who Gave People Internet Access

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 onli

Apr 5, 2021 • 43:42

Tom Truscott @ Usenet: The Grad Student Who Accidentally Invented Social Media

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 n

Mar 29, 2021 • 36:36

Kevin O'Connor @ DoubleClick: The Advertiser Who Introduced Retargeting

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 o

Mar 22, 2021 • 37:28

Raj Kapoor @ Snapfish: The MBA Who Predicted the Future of Photography

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

Mar 15, 2021 • 27:56

Jean Armour Polly @ Net-mom: The Librarian Who Taught People to Surf the Internet

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

Mar 8, 2021 • 36:16

David Mikkelson @ Snopes: The Disney Lover Who Fact-Checks the Internet

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

Mar 1, 2021 • 40:42

Joe Colopy @ Bronto Software: The Peace Corps Volunteer Who Pioneered Commerce Marketing Automation

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

Feb 22, 2021 • 35:11

Michael Merhej @ Audiogalaxy: The Music Lover Who Pissed Off the Recording Industry

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 st

Feb 15, 2021 • 36:42

Peter Zaitsev @ Percona: The Specialist Who Keeps Your Database Running

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, PostgreS

Feb 8, 2021 • 39:41

Alan Emtage @ Archie: The Pack Rat Who Invented Internet Search

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

Feb 1, 2021 • 39:10

Drew Curtis @ Fark.com: The Farker Who Monetized Doom Scrolling

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 f

Jan 25, 2021 • 37:43

Lex Sisney @ Commission Junction: The Llama Farmer Who Popularized Affiliate Marketing

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 advertisi

Jan 18, 2021 • 34:40

Jonathan Abrams @ Friendster: The Programmer Who Invented Social Networking

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 them

Jan 11, 2021 • 45:58

Bill Martin @ RagingBull.com: The Teenager Who Fueled the Dot-Com Bubble

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

Jan 4, 2021 • 31:11

Jon von Tetzchner @ Opera: The Researcher Who Built His Own Web Browser... Twice!

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.

Dec 28, 2020 • 43:38

Scott Crosby @ Google Analytics: The English Major Who Helped Google Conquer 70% of the Web

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 ti

Dec 21, 2020 • 39:52

Chris Evans @ Accipiter: The Founder Who Gave the Web Targeted Advertising

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

Dec 14, 2020 • 41:28

Bo Peabody @ Tripod: The College Kid Who Was Lucky... or Smart

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

Dec 7, 2020 • 35:31

Craig Kanarick @ Razorfish: The Blue-Haired Designer Who Rebranded Companies for the Digital Age

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 yea

Nov 30, 2020 • 49:32

Philip Rosedale @ Second Life: The Physicist Who Built a Pocket Universe

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 abo

Nov 23, 2020 • 32:55

Peter Sunde @ The Pirate Bay: The Pirate Who Went to Jail for Your Illegal Downloads

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 i

Nov 16, 2020 • 37:22

Joshua Schachter @ Del.icio.us: The Banker Who Invented Social Bookmarking

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 thi

Nov 9, 2020 • 31:52

Scott Maslowe: The Electrician Who Perfected Email Marketing

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 orig

Nov 2, 2020 • 25:58

David Bohnett @ GeoCities: The Developer Who Built Online Cities

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 (be

Oct 26, 2020 • 35:56

Gregg Spiridellis @ JibJab: The Brothers Who Perfected Viral Videos

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 susta

Oct 19, 2020 • 43:34

Yoni Belousov: The Guy Who Owns All the Domains You Want

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 cu

Oct 12, 2020 • 24:48

Linda Lightman @ Linda's Stuff: The Woman Who Wants to Help Sell Your Stuff on eBay

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,

Oct 5, 2020 • 34:34

Chris Heivly @ MapQuest: The Map Geek Who Gave Everyone Better Directions

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 beca

Sep 28, 2020 • 36:25

Henry Copeland @ BlogAds: The Entrepreneur Who Turned Blogging Into a Business

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 the

Sep 21, 2020 • 32:59

Louis Monier @ AltaVista: The Man Who Could Have Bought Google for $1 Million

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"

Sep 15, 2020 • 26:41

Web Masters Preview

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.

Aug 6, 2020 • 6:07

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