Ken built an e-commerce company in 1995 without outside funding, kept clients like Disney and Warner Brothers for decades, then sold to Vista Equity Partners in 2015. He and TJ Walker discuss how timing shapes startup success and demo a digital clone product that uses AI to create interactive video agents. TJ shows ChatGPT writing a poem for his daughter's vocabulary test.
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Our customers are Disney, Warner Brothers, Armani, Party City, all these major retailers across the US Mainly US based. And we used thought leadership, knowledge, education to continue to engage our customers. And I will tell you this, we had customers for 8, 10, 12, 15, 20 years in an industry where people would jump platforms every three or four years. E commerce platform again. I started in 1995 when e commerce had just started. And I rode that wave all the way through 2015 when I sold the company to Vista Equity Partners for a lot of money, which was my successful exit. That's great. But it didn't even mean anything to me. What meant something to me. We were grew something from nothing to something and that was what was motivating. That's what I want all of your listeners to do by, by kind of using, whether myself or others as examples and mentors to that growth. And by doing that, I think that, that, that and, and, and what we did in that business was the reason we hung onto our customers so much was because we continually educated them, we continually gave them new knowledge and information and made it easy and easy for them to grow their business through our knowledge. If you do the same thing in your business, whether it's free content or paid for content, that's the key to growing your customer base and keeping them there.
Let me bring you just touched on something, Let me bring up something that a lot of entrepreneurs don't like to touch, talk about. Michael Lewis has written about this, but it's the issue of simply timing and luck. You started your business in 1995. I'm not suggesting anyone who started a business in 1995 was successful, but if you were going to start an online E commerce business, that was probably a lot better than 2001 or 2017. How much of success as an entrepreneur is based on typing?
That's a great question. So I think that the timing is when I talk about trends to my entrepreneurs and teach them about trends and how kind of that upswing in trends. Right now we're in the AI trend and nobody knows exactly what AI is yet and what it's going to be. Even the experts don't know really truly what it's going to manifest itself into. So there's a lot of wild, wild west and right now we're in that era and there's these points in time, in technology and in the world where you have these pivot points. If you read Malcolm Gladwell's book, of course I know you have, he talked about the. Yeah, yeah, outliers. Sorry, yeah, outliers is really, really good. I mean, it's amazing read. And you know, he correlates the time that the tech giant started back in Bill Gates days, back in Michael Dell days, you could do the exact same thing with Zuckerberg and the social media craze. And now we're in it again. We're in the AI craze right now. And I see it because I'm actually in the Silicon Valley, I'm in the San Francisco Bay area and, and it is a craze right now. It's the wild, wild west and people are trying to figure it out. Now my luck was I started in 95 and I dove right into E commerce. E commerce was really just very nascent. It wasn't really a big deal. And we just became kind of the leader. I mean, I didn't get funded for the first 11 years of the business. I kind of bumbled around and you know, back in the day, you could start a business without funding. Today it's a little bit harder to do. And I kind of bumbled around and I just sold and got customers. And all of a sudden we had a bunch of customers and people were looking at us and as a really cool company. And we were one of the survivors of some of the dot bombs and the, and some of the craters over 19, 2001, 2008 and, and beyond. So because we learned how to run a business, we had good customers that paid us. So you need to learn all of that. So I think there's a certain level of luck with timing. I agree. But I will also say I think that you can build a business out of almost anything. There are certain businesses that I probably wouldn't go into right now. Give you an example. I, I don't know that I would become a writer today or a tech writer that, you know, AI has just displaced that and it displaced it about a year and a half ago. I'm not saying that the skill of writing is gone and you know, all these book authors are going what? But a lot of it is that's not going to be a job that's going to pay a lot of money. There aren't going to be a lot of jobs left in that or it's.
So hard to be better than AI. I mean, just this morning, my daughter has a vocabulary test.
Yeah.
And she had like 11 words that archaeology and hunter, gatherer, things that related to history. And we did it last night. We practiced the words and she knew them and could spell them properly and define them. But this Morning I woke him, I thought, am I really making this as interesting and as fun, as memorable for her as possible? So I, I went to my Chat GPT dictate and I said, hey, Chat GPT make a funny poem that would be goofy and memorable and interesting for an 11 year old that uses the following 11 words and defines these words. And I said the words and boom, 10 seconds later it was saying it and she was laughing and listening, paying keen attention. And then it also had it by text, she could read it again and that motivated her.
That's great.
To ask ChatGPT to write a poem making fun of an old grandpa who had one hair on his head. But it really engaged her in a way. Could I have written that?
Yeah.
But it would have taken me two hours.
Yeah. And you have the ability and skills to do that. Most people don't. Right. I mean, you are a communicator and a writer extraordinaire. A lot of people have to rely on that. Yeah.
So, Ken, I want to throw you a curveball here. You are mentor. You are a professor of entrepreneurialism and a lecturer at prominent business schools. I need you to coach a young entrepreneur who is trying to do something new in the world of communications and AI. I'm going to bring him on in just a moment. He's very young, in fact he's only three months old. And I'm specifically talking about a digital club. I have created a digital clone. And here's my challenge as an entrepreneur. I'm trying to get people to even understand what a digital clone is. It's interactive. It is video based, audio based, tech based. When people say clones, unfortunately they think, what they think of is, oh, a chatbot. Oh, Expedia's had that for years and years and a big deal. That's not what I'm talking about. You say clone, they may think, oh, audio, like an AT&T operator, voicemail hell, oh, I don't even like that, that's awful. Or you think a video clone. You think of someone where you have you got to write a script or have an AI write a script and then you see a robot, blah blah, blah, blah. And that's not particularly interesting. This is completely different. This is completely interactive, as if you were having a one on one zoom call. So I happen to think this is the biggest communications breakthrough since the Internet. Arguably. Since arguably. Excuse me one second. My phone automatically answered and I need to make sure I'm not. I gotta turn it off. Sorry I didn't answer, but it just Sometimes goes on through my phone, through my watch. I think this is so big. It's, it's, it is certainly bigger in my view than the transition from a book or in person training to online video training. And I got in early on that training and that took me 15 years to really get to the point where people understand it. So I want to, I want to pick your brain, get some feedback on. If I were your student or your client, how would you guide me? How would you advise me on how to make this thing real and understandable? So let's just take a look. It's sort of changing and improving on a daily basis, but let's just call and take a look at it in a moment. And sometimes it's faster than others and it doesn't always work.
It's okay.
Hey there. How's it going? What can I do for you?
Hi, tj. I want to know what are the keys of being a successful entrepreneur? What sort of mindset should someone have and what sort of daily habits should they have if they want to be a successful entrepreneur?
To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to cultivate daily habits that build discipline and momentum. Start by setting clear, actionable goals each day. Prioritize tasks that drive your business forward consistently. Seek feedback and adapt quickly. Dedicate time to learning and improving your skills. Network regularly to build valuable relationships. Maintain a healthy work life balance.
That I, I want to get something even more personal. My friend Ken is going on CNBC tomorrow to talk about his new business, microcasting and how he's going to help small and large businesses create more valuable content to help their clients. What advice do you have for Ken as he goes on CNBC tomorrow to talk about his business? What messages would be good for him? What sound bites would be good for him?
Ken should focus on clear, concise messages that highlight the unique value of microcasting. Here are some sound bites. 1. Microcasting empowers businesses to create tailored content that directly engages their target audience, driving higher engagement and loyalty.
