Monday, February 26, 2007
Interview with James Sun, CEO of Zoodango
James Sun is the CEO and founder of Seattle-based Zoodango (www.zoodango.com), an online community for business people and is also on the current season of the television show, The Apprentice. We caught up with James to get more on Zoodango and what it is trying to achieve, and to hear more about his experience on The Apprentice.
What's Zoodango about, and what do you offer users?
James Sun: We created Zoodango to fundamentally solve a problem. The problem we are trying to solve is that entrepreneurs and business folks want to network with other business leaders in the community and want to find a place online, that also allows them to set up face-to-face meetings as well. As a business owner or entrepreneur, I want to meet in person to find an accountant I want to interview, or a lawyer I want to work with, or to meet with other entrepreneurs I am going to partner with--I don't want to just do it online. One of the things we've seen with MySpace, Facebook, and even LinkedIn, is they have a great virtual platform where people have set up profiles. However, we're really hitting the market where people want to network locally, not only online, but offline. We have nine thousand Starbucks locations integrated into our site, so you can do what's called a ZooVite, which is simply finding what someone else's most frequently visited Starbucks is, to set up a meeting there and increase the changes for a meeting. Likewise, we also have events on our site, but our events are user-driven meaning that we've set up partnership with other organizations that enable them to market their platform into their user group. They can put events on their site, so people attending events can pre-network online before they go there, and have a pre-arranged meeting and ensure they get good return on investment from that event. If you go to the WSA-the Washington Software Alliance, and click on the social networking event, they have a link and a description of their partnership with Zoodango, and have a direct link to Zoodango on the event. So people who are going to that event can say -- this is cool, the WSA is offering me a platform for me to network with people online before the event.
How'd you come up with the idea, and when did you decide to start the business?
James Sun: There were two reasons. The first one was self interest. I was looking and talking to my friends, about how we're not on MySpace or Facebook, and we figured out that we have a very different interest than people on MySpace or Facebook. I was 29 at the time, I'm now 30, and I don't want to go on Facebook and network with college students. I want to network with entrepreneurs and people in business. There was a place missing to do that. The only place that might be like that is LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is like just uploading a resume. You don't get to express my whole picture of who I am as an entrepreneur, with features to meet online and offline in a way that follows human and social conventions. I didn't want to blast out to my whole address book that I had a LinkedIn account and sign up--it was almost like chain letter to me. And the other reason is I used to go to these events, association and professional events--and there would be 3, 4 or 5 people at the event there who could help me and I could really help too, but I'd always leave those meetings not meeting those people, not having the right business contacts. I realized it was due to a lack of information, not having that information beforehand to set up meetings ahead of time. So now, it only makes sense for me to prearrange a meeting. So it was really out of a personal frustration that I came up with the concept.
What's your background and what was your experience before Zoodango?
James Sun: I went to the University of Washington here. In college, I started a technology investment company with $5000 and started investing in companies that I saw that could scale. The very first company I invested in was eBay. I said -- I bought a baseball card on eBay, I'm sure other people would too -- I saw a platform that could scale. That was the strategy--whatever could scale, that's what I'm interested in. It had to simple. I mean, there are things that aren't simple enough and obviously won't scale. I graduated from college, invested in some really good companies in private deals as an angel. I cashed out with a little bit over $2 million dollars, while I was going to college full time. I then joined a company called Deloitte Consulting, and was a management consultant for Internet companies and the Fortune 500. After that, I realized at Deloitte that I was an entrepreneur at heart. Entrepreneurs are built a little different blood, and have a different edge. I needed to pursue what I needed to do. That was when I really started to think about where I wanted to be, and founded another company, 3P Networks, which was a wireless software firm. We sold that company off, and I'm now doing Zoodango.
What's the relationship of Zoodango and the Apprentice, did you come up with the idea before or after the show?
James Sun: The Apprentice was after Zoodango. I came up with the concept of Zoodango about 15 months ago. I started putting together a team to help build this and to make it happen. Then, I was at the mall one day with my wife and kids, and there is the Apprentice tryouts, and I ended up trying out. I was in blue jeans and a T-shirt, and ended trying out when everyone else was in fully decked out suits. I'm here in line, with other folks in Seattle who I know usually dress like me, but they were staring at me wearing jeans like I was crazy. I try out, and I go through about 13 different rounds of selection process--you name it, I went through it--and I got on the show. We filmed it right in time with the launch of our company and when the Apprentice was about to air. I don't think it was luck, but it was meant to be. The audience group that watches the apprentice are mainly entrepreneurs and business people. And that's kind of the same audience that Zoodango is going after. It's been a great marketing platform for our company, and I'm sure we're the only Web 2.0 company that has a national television platform to launch us. So we've just launched about three weeks ago, and have gotten over 2,000 users already. And that's real profiles--not just people who have visited. And we're getting a lot of hits. It's been a very good platform for us. Now it's time for us to take it to another level, where we're marketing the company strategically and opening up a $1M venture round, too. The product is out, we've got a good marketing platform the Apprentice has been a great viral tool for us, and now people have an association with us. We have a differentiator in our market and a brand.
What did you learn most being on the Apprentice?
James Sun: I learned a lot of things. One interesting insight that came about is how un-tech savvy most people are in this world. You know, we're in the technology world, you figure that you implement this feature, everyone should get it, people buy gadgets they should get how to use it--but that's just not the case. I realized that the 17 other candidates are very, very influential in their industries. They're smart, and highly educated, but regarding technology--forget about it. It was a great awakening for me. You've got to build things simple, so that mainstream users can use your site. It was very insightful for me as an entrepreneur in technology. From an overall business perspective, I learned that you can accomplish so much with very few people and resources, if you just focus on what you're doing. Some of the tasks we did, in the normal world, the expectation would be it would take two or three months. We'd have to do it in two or three days. I also learned that you can't wait for 100 percent of the information, you have to go with 30 or 40 percent of the information and listen to your gut and business experience and make a decision.
Looking at your bio, it looks like you immigrated to the country?
James Sun: I came to this country at the age of 4, and my parents had literally $35 when they arrived at the LA airport. So we really had nothing, didn't speak the language, and had to survive in this country. It was hard, but at the same time it created a fire in me to find innovative ways to do things without the means or the cash. It was a great learning lesson as a kid, which is how to make money without a lot of money. For example, I started my first company at eleven, a window cleaning service. I basically partnered with the window cleaning service companies in the neighborhood. They would get doors slammed on them, I told them to let me market for them because people won't slam a door on an 11 year old kid. That's what it takes--innovation, and I take that philosophy event with Zoodango. You don't need to raise $10 million dollars right away. That allows you to focus. With too much money, you don't really focus. I didn't want to raise any money, or opened up our round until we knew exactly which way our product was going, what the exact demographic was, down to the T. That's something I learned as a kid--is you have to be creative to create the money you need, without much.
Do you think that being an immigrant--in this case almost being a second generation immigrant--is that something that encourages entrepreneurship?
James Sun: It's almost opposite. When you're a second generation immigrant your parents want you to become a doctor, or a lawyer. That's really how parents think. So my sister, she got her doctorage degree and all that, but I realized at a young age that I was different. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. Being a second generation immigrant makes it harder--you have lots of pressure to just get a salaried job, getting benefits--but as an entrepreneur, you have to take a lot of risk. Our parents didn't want us to take risk, because they had to take the risk themselves.
Interesting, it's great to hear about your company.
One other thing I wanted to mention about Zoodango is that we are going to be the very first sites, with a new feature coming out March 12th, where we are not going to just allow companies to advertise on the site--which is the traditional way to leverage social networking for marketing purposes. We're actually going to be the very first site to create a community where businesses and people can coexist in the same social network.
Thanks for the interview!