Stephen Chao: From TV Exec to Entrepreneur

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>> Hi. Welcome to Dog and Pony. I'm Vince Thompson. There seems to be so much how to content on the Internet but why doesn't someone tell us how to find it all? Stephen Chow, Co-Founder and CEO of wonderhowto.com takes his experience as a season TV executive and his passion for finding the most exciting content and he translates that for us online, helps us navigate. Wonderhowto.com--what are we going to find if we get there?

>> Stephen Chow: Probably on the first page, the easiest thing to do is you could look and see what the community is looking at in terms of hot and that has its own character. On Clip of the Day I tend to choose those videos so I like to find things that I wouldn't normally know of.

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>> Stephen: We don't care where the how to comes from as long as it has its own integrity and is a great tutorial. You find all these subcultures in there in addition to things that you might be interested; football, whatever and that's kind of what I get a big kick out of.

>> Vince: You Tube's an amazing repository for video. What's the problem in finding how to video on You Tube?

>> Stephen: Because of the navigation in You Tube, it's very hard to find interesting things unless you know exactly the phrase you want. So there's no characterization; we're broken down into 437 subcategories so if Lacrosse assumed spelling is your thing you can roll around in Lacrosse; if something else like pottery is your thing you can roll around in pottery and explore as much as you want.

>> Vince: Do you see a day when we don't do anything without checking out the how to video version first or the best practices?

>> Stephen: The curious mind will always know how to do something because we can't know 427 categories of life; we can't know how to prank your roommate; we can't know how to make souffle

necessarily so there's always a curiosity you don't know and if we have that answer I think that's really thrilling.

>> Vince: A super accomplished television executive, you were the President of Fox Television, you worked for Rupert Murdock, you've ran big television divisions for Barry Diller, how's that translate this knowledge as a killer TV executive into this little Internet world and Internet video?

>> Stephen: To me the satisfaction is really I just like looking at videos so if the video takes me into worlds and windows that I would never otherwise see then I say hallelujah. Twenty years ago some nut friend of mine came in with this piece of footage that was--he said this is something I shot in the Bahamas, it was a live drug bust in the Bahamas on a crack house. I go wow that's kind of interesting can you do it every week? And that of course became tops but the point is you don't know what's going on until you start watching video and the weird stuff that's out there might be mainstream stuff, it might be goofy cultish stuff but it's kind of the window into all these worlds.

>> Vince: You've run several businesses. This is the first Internet Company that you've run. What's different?

>> Stephen: I just love it because it's an entirely different process from television which I've done for 20 some years; and the idea of advertising and traffic and SEO are entirely new languages to me and I kind of get a big kick out of it because I've kind of done a lot of television and I like television but I just love the way the Internet works. It's kind of just frictionless and efficient compared to television. You do something wrong in television the FCC might get on your case and take your license away, so you're playing a weird walking on eggshells game and the Internet's just very honest. I like it.

>> Vince: Your departure from Fox came after you hired a male stripper for a company event. Got a lot of press, I'm sure a lot of people talked about it, with a little perspective back on this is, there something you can share in a career perspective?

>> Stephen: I think I was kind of oblivious to the risk I was taking. I wasn't really doing it in order to take a risk or to get fired. Contextually it made sense--on its own it's like why is this guy hiring a guy to strip at a company event? That's a pretty weird question but in context it's a little less weird. As it turns out I ended up being quite friendly with Rupert directly after he fired me and for the subsequent years. It's part of a long string of things and if you really enjoy your job you really should have conviction, and if you're going to do something that you believe in then you should do something stupid that you believe in and that's turned out fine it hasn't really harmed me so I think that's kind of the nice thing.

>> Vince: Stephen Chow, CEO, Founder of wonderhowto.com.

>> Stephen: Thank you very much. Thank you Vince.

>> Vince: Yeah thank you it's great having you here. As always if you have questions, ideas, if you'd like to suggest a guest, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an e-mail at info@dogandpony.com. I'm Vince Thompson thanks for watching.

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