Benjamin Wayne: Customized Video Solutions

>> Vince: Hi, welcome to Dog and Pony I'm Vince Thompson. The age of the Internet makes it possible for any business to reach mass

market audiences with multi-media, a privilege traditionally reserved for the giant corporations that could afford it. Benjamin Wang,

CEO of Flicks is giving the big boys a run for their money today by empowering businesses of all sizes to reach that mass market

on-line with on-line video. Would you like to tell us little bit about Flicks, how does this all work?

>> Ben: Sure, so Flicks has been around since 2005 and our mission has basically been to take any business and give them the tools they

need to put video assets on-line. Flicks is based on 3 fundamental value propositions, one, make it really easy, two, make it really

cheap, and three, do it in a way that allows the brands to reflect their unique personality on-line through customization and branding.

So, Flicks provides a full suite of tools that allows for the ingestion, trans-coding, streaming, management, and tracking and analytics

of video content.

>> Vince: So, you've been incredibly successful, somebody starts an Internet company and they're the CEO, they have 90 they sell it.

Now some of us can say, "I got kind of lucky," right? You've done it twice, which is a different league of entrepreneur, help us

understand how do you come up with these ideas?

>> Ben: So, in every business that I've created it's been very market driven in terms of looking at where is their existing market

demand that's going unmet. So if you're not on the list of the top three things that someone wakes up in the morning worrying about

and if that person doesn't have a budget to spend associated with those points of pain, the likelihood that you're gonna have a

successful company is really diminished. I mean, the historical idea has been that if you create a better mouse trap then you'll

create a successful business. In order for it to work within that business market it needs to be easy plug and play and it needs to

be cost effective, and historically there hasn't been a solution that met those criteria. What we did was we gave any brand the ability

to emulate that lifestyle experience with on-line publications. We believe that over the next 2 to 3 years every website in the world

adopts video for competitive purposes.

>> Vince: That's great advice, so how do you find these unmet market needs?

>> Ben: Well, part of it has to do with what are you exposed to as an individual either as a business or as a consumer, and where

do you find on your own experience where there are holes in the market place. So, it's very difficult, I think, to be passionate about

a business unless you as an individual really feel that there's a need for the product or service that you're creating. Many people

create businesses where they think someone else will be the customer for this but they never be the customer themselves, in my mind

that's a bad business to be an owner of.

>> Vince: How did you learn to do this?

>> Ben: I'd like to say that I've done a lot of things wrong so I know a lot of what not to do. Many companies can't separate what's

on the critical path from what's unimportant to the company's success. Typically with the company you have three types of risk, you

have market risk, which is does anyone care, you have technology risk, which is will it work, and then you have execution risk, which

really come down to people. What I've found is that the best path to success is to get people who are really knowledgeable as specialists

in the area of expertise that matter and people that have a track record of success themselves. So if you can take the execution

risk off the table and if you can be market driven in terms of the market opportunity and if you can use technology components where

you're not having to reinvent the wheel in order to deploy a solution, you're really maximizing your chances for success in a start-up.

On any given day you have 90 things that are on fire within a start-up but only 2 or 3 of them really matter, so the ability to focus

on the 2 or 3 things that really matter is critically important.

>> Vince: What's the most fun part about running a company today?

>> Ben: Well, I think it's really seeing your customer's success stories, I mean; we have over 17,000 publishers on the Flicks

platform today and over 300 large enterprise customers and if we look at the multitude of way in which those clients are using video,

the success they're having, we really get the opportunity to participate vicariously in their success, which is really gratifying as

a start-up. In part because video is the most passive form of consumption and so we've turned into a nation of people we like to press

the remote control and then absorb what we're getting from a consumption perspective. The Web has become such a prevalent source

of how we consume content today and video is now within the reach of all businesses and so it's really becoming a mainstay from a

content perspective.

>> Vince: Fantastic, well it's an exciting business, Benjamin Wang thank you so much --

>> Ben: Thanks very much.

>> Vince: great having you on Dog --

>> Ben: Pleasure to be here.

>> Vince: pleasure. As always if you have questions, comments, or write-ins for guests please email Info@DogandPony.com. I'm Vince

Thompson, thanks for watching today.