Interview with Marc Shedroff, VP of Business Development

What did you do before Cooliris?
I joined Cooliris about six months ago. Prior to that I was at YouTube, where I did most of the content licensing deals – all the content that comes from trusted partners. Before that I was at Google, so I joined YouTube through Google. And even earlier I was at Time Warner, AOL working on business strategies. My career started off with a couple of random things including management consulting, venture capital, and business school.

What do you do at Cooliris?
I run the partnerships team. That includes basically three things. We are a piece of software so we need distribution. That’s actually a lot of the charter right now as a small company trying to expand our footprint. We also do media partnerships, so this involves licensing content very similarly to the way I did at YouTube. Lastly, we have a Flash product that sits on third party websites (the Embed Wall) so we do partnerships to distribute that around the web.

How do you compare such a small start-up to the media giants you worked at?
The beauty of Cooliris is that I am actually building a business. It’s not just coming in and doing a job that other people have done before me. YouTube was a little bit in between – since I joined YouTube when it was about 65 people and I saw it grow to be a pretty large company inside an even larger company. Knowing what it was like at 65 and also knowing what it was like as a bigger company made me even more excited to be at Cooliris.

What are the advantages of the small company?
You are making decisions, you are growing a business, you have a lot more responsibility, much less red tape. It’s a more dynamic place to be. You can change things pretty quickly, you don’t have this rhythm that 10,000 people are used to doing. You have 30 people and you can just walk down the hall and get something done.

What is one thing you have really enjoyed about Cooliris as an environment?
When I thought about going to a start-up the biggest thing besides what I would be doing on a day-to-day basis was what does the company do.  I wasn’t interested in going to a company that was just trying to change things on the margin. I really wanted to go to a company that was doing something big and had a big goal. So I think the neat thing about Cooliris is the huge goal to fundamentally change the way people use the web.

One particular feature that you love about the product?
The feature that I like the most is the ability to email friends content items, whether it’s a video or photos.  I am not a technical guy so probably there should be a lot of things I should be more impressed by, but if you go in and try to send an email to a friend and you can literally just drag content items into it, I think not only it impresses me as a user but it’s this really neat feature that tons of partners are wowed by. Unfortunately, I don’t think a lot of users know about this.

What partners is Cooliris looking for?
You know, the bigger the better. We have done some things in the past where we have partnered with web sites to distribute our client. But again because we are piece of software it is better to be at a place where other software is being distributed. So from the stand point of PC original equipment manufacturers  they send a product out that has lots of software preinstalled. We are certainly in discussions with all of those guys. Anyone else who distributes software is also a natural fit for us. The other thing that we have been working on a fair amount recently is this notion that not a lot of people know about, but you can use Cooliris across any device. You can use it on a PC, on a mobile phone, on a TV. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see us on mobile devices other than the iphone in the next year. And probably also things like set top boxes, television sets.

What the challenges do you encounter when you try to close a deal?
The biggest challenge, and this is true for any start up probably other than the ones that get the zeitgeist of the moment, is that you are just that “ you are a start up. Not everyone knows about us. The product is newer, it hasn’t been in the market for 10 years. So I’d say the biggest challenge and part of what it also makes it exciting is being a small company that can change a lot and can change quickly, but doesn’t necessarily have this big company reputation or just even the notoriety a big company would have. So I think the most challenging part is making sure people know what Cooliris is.

What big deals and developments can the Cooliris users expect?
If you go the web site even now you will see that we launched a beta of something we call a builder, which is effectively a way for anyone to put our Flash embed wall on their own site. Over 10,000 publishers to date – from bloggers all the way to CBS – have implemented our Flash product on their sites, but all of whom used some relatively technical documentation. The tool we launched a couple of weeks ago allows anyone, even someone like me who is not technical, to put a wall up on their own blog, iGoogle page, or website. It literally takes 3 minutes to be up and running. That’s really exciting. Distribution-wise we have a bunch of deals in the pipeline, some of which are closed and I can’t talk about. And then on the content side we continue to do a ton of really great deals with big media companies. CBS was the most recent launch so you can find that all over Cooliris today.

Could you give us an example of one deal which you have been particularly excited about?
One of the most exciting deals we have done over the last year or so was actually the deal with CBS. It encompasses not just CBS-owned properties like CBS News, CBS Sports but also includes all the content that TV.com syndicates. And the fact that we now have CBS and we also have Hulu, who’s been a partner with for a year, I think that’s one of the biggest things we can deliver to users. Cooliris is the one place where you can come and get basically the two biggest profession premium sites of web content out there.

One fun fact about yourself?
You can’t really tell that I am not super tall but I was captain of my basketball team at high school and I am going to have a baby next month!