Ryan Scott: Driving Social Change

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Vince Tompson: Hi, welcome to Dog and Pony. I'm Vince

Tompson. Some people who have been successful in their

career take their money and run. While others stick

around try to make the world a little bit better than

when they found it. Brian Scott, founder and CEO of

Causecast is doing just that with his latest venture. A

venture that inspires people to get involved with the

issues that they really want to support. Tell us about

causecast.org.

Brian Scott: The overall mission is to drive massive

social change. In order to really make the kind of

change that we all want to see in the world, it's not

enough to just have the people who are already involved

with non-profits to stay involved or get a little bit

more involved. We really need to give individuals the

tools to -- to get involved, really, to get everybody

involved

Vince Tompson: Give me an example of the type of

causes somebody might find or how they might engage with

it.

Brian Scott: A lot of people nowadays are interested

in environmental causes. So you could go into Causecast

and you could read environmental blog posts or you could

look at some of our original content that we're

producing. We also have content from some of the

organizations that we're working with. But one of the

different things that's important about Causecast is

we're producing original content that's really punchy,

kind of like MTV style content. The people who are

already interested in causes already kind of know where

to get this information, and they can deal with an

hour-and-a-half documentary. But to really start to get

the public inspired you need to have short, punchy

clips. Things that are funny, entertaining, things that

they're going to want to send to their friends.

Vince Tompson: So why structure the business with

part of it for profit and part of it non-profit.

Brian Scott: Well, what you run into with being a

non-profit is where you spend your money is -- is --

there's a very critical eye put on that. And this is

one of the reasons that non-profits have trouble to

begin with and why Causecast was formed. If you spend

too much money on developing your web site or doing some

of the thing that's we're doing, you know, original

content and things like that, you can actually get

dinged because you're spending too much on

administration. So the idea was that you know, the

non-profit portion of what we do can just handle the

transactions, but the for profit we can -- we can really

do whatever we want with that. We can spend money on

making original content or having events or doing things

like that.

Vince Tompson: So what's your big dream for

Causecast.

Brian Scott: A few years from now I'd really like to

know that Causecast has driven a lot of change, and

really touched a lot of peoples lives. Really, I

started to see this -- it's called the Obama effect, of

course, where you get a lot of really small donations,

you get people who just -- get really fired up about

these things, and without prompting, they go and create

viral videos. People inspiring people. When people

join together they can really help improve the world.

Vince Tompson: You've made a lot of investments that

are green.

Brian Scott: Yeah.

Vince Tompson: Is that because you're a guy with a

lot of money who thinks it's a good idea, or as a

business guy, do you think you can make a lot of money

doing this.

Brian Scott: It's really both. I feel that switching

to clean energy is going to be the biggest transition in

the history of the world. And so it -- it just becomes

more and more compelling as we learn more about global

warming, all of our sources of energy come from

politically unstable places. It's going to be a huge,

huge change. So there's enormous opportunity there.

Vince Tompson: As you built Causecast.org, what has

surprised you along the way.

Brian Scott: I was ready for a good response, but

what has happened is we've had a tremendous response.

And really, the challenge now is growing the company in

a sustainable way and really just managing the --

managing the growth.

Vince Tompson: At the age of 26 you started Net

Creations, and you built that company from just a couple

people to a company that billed $58 million a year, and

was public. Right?

Brian Scott: That's right. We took it public without

any venture capital.

Vince Tompson: And what did you learn from that

process that you're applying to today's work.

Brian Scott: I think a key to being a successful CEO

is to hire really smart people. Smart passionate people

who will, you know, really will give it their all. And

that's what I've done with Causecast.

Vince Tompson: Brian Scott, founder and CEO of

causecast.org. Thank you so much.

Brian Scott: Thank you.

Multiple voices speaking

Vince Tompson: It's a pleasure having you here. As

always, if you have questions, ideas, you'd like to

maybe suggest a guest, we'd like to hear from you. Send

us an e-mail, info@dogandpony.com. I'm Vince Thompson,

thanks for watching.

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