Topic: Marketing

Seth Godin

Seth Godin is the author of 18 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything.

"Seth Godin may be the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age," Mary Kuntz has written in Business Week nearly a decade ago. "Instead of widgets or car parts, he specializes in ideas—usually, but not always, his own." In fact, he's as focused on spreading ideas as he is on the ideas themselves.

After working as a software brand manager in the mid-1980s, Godin started Yoyodyne, which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998, one of the first Internet-based direct-marketing firms, with the notion that companies needed to rethink how they reached customers. His efforts caught the attention of Yahoo!, which bought the company in 1998 and kept Godin on as a vice president of permission marketing. Godin has produced several critically acclaimed and attention-grabbing books, including Permission Marketing, All Marketers Are Liars, and Purple Cow (which was distributed in a milk carton).

In 2005, Godin founded Squidoo.com, a Web site where users can share links and information about an idea or topic important to them. Seth Godin is the author of fourteen books translated into more than 35 languages. All bestsellers. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, spreading ideas, marketing, quitting, leadership and most importantly, moving ahead and changing. American Way Magazine calls him, "America's Greatest Marketer," and his blog is perhaps the most popular in whole world written by only an individual.

In one of his latest books, "We Are All Weird", writes about ending the usual mass and bringing people more choices, more interests and more space to control and reflect their own unique values, and once again Seth breaks the usual model of publishing by releasing it through The Domino Project.

His recent Kickstarter for The Icarus Deception, published in January 2013, broke records for its size and the speed that it reached its goal. As an entrepreneur, he has founded a lot of companies, most of which failed. Squidoo.com,was ranked among the top 125 sites in the US (by traffic) by Quantcast. It allows anyone to build a webpage in any topic of your passion. In 2014 Squidoo was acquired byHubPages.

Seth is a renowned speaker, who is consistently rated among the very best speakers by the audiences he addresses. He holds an MBA from Stanford.

Nathan Schulhof

For more than 35 years, Schulhof has been involved in a wide variety of entrepreneurial ventures, ranging various entrepreneurial adventures as a young man growing up near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to starting an air charter service in Florida in the 1970s.

While attending two years at Lincoln University Law School in San Francisco, Schulhof worked as an agent for New York Life before deciding that neither law nor insurance were ideal matches for him. Schulhof entered the technology world in the late 1970s when he began working on a software idea that eventually bore fruit as Silicon Valley Systems, the developer of Word Handler, the first and best-selling high-resolution graphics word processor for the Apple II computer. SVS was also the first technology firm to implement a telemarketing effort targeting the retail channel.

Prior to co-founding audiohighway.com, Schulhof formed TestDrive Corporation, a pioneer in the distribution of encrypted computer software on CD-ROM and the first company to distribute a CD-ROM inside a magazine. TestDrive was later sold to R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co.

He also participated in the DotCom craze of the late 1990s, leading the transformation of Information Highway Media Corporation into audiohighway.com, one of the leading destination web sites for downloading and streaming media in the world. Schulhof also helped take audiohighway.com public in 1998 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Schulhof co-founded Solar Components, LLC, Silicon Valley-based firm in the solar power industry. His current focus is dedicated to finding a more productive use of alternative energy.

Through the years, Schulhof has been extensively quoted and featured in technology and consumer media, including pieces in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Businessweek, Inc., Success, among others. He has spoken extensively at industry events (including COMDEX, CES, Fall Internet World and Apple Computer’s Independent Developer Conference, among others), and has raised tens of millions of dollars in private and public equity.

Sahar Hashemi

In 1995 Sahar Hashemi and her brother Bobby founded Coffee Republic, the UK’s first coffee bar chain. Within 5 years they built Coffee Republic into one of the UK’s most recognized high street brands with 110 bars and turnover of £30m.

Hashemi was a lawyer and her brother was an investment banker. They gave up their highly paid professional jobs and staked everything on a dream. They made Coffee Republic one of the main players in the ‘coffee revolution’ that transformed a nation of tea drinkers to one obsessed with ‘triple grande vanilla skinny lattes.’ How they came to build a nationwide coffee chain is a fascinating and inspirational tale of the ups and downs of following your dream.

Hashemi left the day-to-day management of Coffee Republic in 2001 and wrote a book about her journey of entrepreneurship, Anyone Can Do It - Building Coffee Republic from Our Kitchen Table. Anyone Can Do It has become the 2nd highest selling book ever published in the UK on entrepreneurship after Richard Branson’s book - according to Nielsen Bookscan. Hashemi believes that if she can make it as an entrepreneur, anyone can make it.

In 2005, she launched her new business Skinny Candy, a brand of sugar free confectionary, low-fat sweets and chocolates. Skinny Candy was sold to confectionery conglomerate Glisten PLC in 2007.

Her most recent book, Switched On, published in 2010, focuses on 8 habits that foster a more entrepreneurial mindset for employees.  It is based on her experience of the transformation in culture when a small entrepreneurial company becomes big and successful, when the obvious and easy entrepreneurial habits are often forgotten as bureaucracy take over.

In 2011 Sahar was nominated by Director magazine as one of its Top 10 Original Thinkers. The magazine praised her view that “Entrepreneurially minded talent shouldn’t have to leave large corporations in order to achieve fulfillment. Entrepreneurial behaviour, including ideas like bootstrapping, prototyping and celebrating failure, can help turn stuffy corporations into creative environments. They can also transform automatons into valued, engaged employees”.

In 2011 she was invited to join the Entrepreneurs Forum set up by UK Business Secretary Vince Cable to give informal personal advice to the government on enterprise policies.

In June 2012 Sahar was awarded an OBE for services to the UK economy and to charity.

She was also awarded: Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Top 10 original thinkers by Director Magazine, ‘Pioneer to the Life of the Nation’ by her Majesty The Queen, 100 most influential women in Britain by Daily Mail, one of the 35 top women in British business by Management Today and 20 most powerful women in Britain by Independent on Sunday, Top 5 in a Shell Livewire survey of inspirational role models.