Guest: Dan Primack - PE Week
Host: John Furrier - PodTech

John Furrier - PodTech
We're here at PodTech.net on a Podcast with Dan Primack, who's been on before a couple of times, from PE Week, Private Equity, and he's got the newsletter, it's very popular, that you send out. Dan, Welcome back!

Dan Primack - PE Week
Thanks for having me again John, I appreciate it.

John Furrier - PodTech
So some big news announcing here that, you finally got your blog going, because you've taken a lot of heat from people that, in essence, your email newsletter which has been really popular has been growing to, in essence, a daily post via email, and great resource there at your company, and you're finally putting on a blog. So tell us about what's happening with the blog, and how this all happened?

Dan Primack - PE Week
I think it was about two years ago that somebody posted that it was time for me to blog already, so I figured it's been a long enough period of time, that now it's ready to go. We're launching -- today we're launching something called Private Equity Hub, or PEHub.com. The idea really is to compliment via daily email, we're kind of going in an opposite direction. Most folks seem to put blogs up first and then create newsletters. We've gone the opposite way, we've had a newsletter for four years, which will continue, and now we're launching this website which is blog based with the goal being, it's supposed to be a public forum for the Private Equity community, everyone from early stage VC's, all the way up to the mega buyout folks, and kind of everybody who touches them, whether that be entrepreneurs or attorneys or bankers or business schools students. Its blog based, it's going to be myself, and the editorial team here, writing. We also have a group of about 50 guest authors who will regularly be contributing to the site. Again, it's a kind of wide range, we've got venture capitalist, we've got big buyout folks, we've got some entrepreneurs, we've got placement agents for funds and limited partners. It's a good group.

John Furrier - PodTech
You obviously had traditional media business, and the newsletters' key, and you got a great community there, so this is just the natural extension to me. Talk about your view on the community side, because you're obviously opening it up to 50, specially pre-qualified, essentially members if you will, to write stuff and you've got linking, you've got permanent links, you've got comments, you've got voting. Talk about your view on how this is going to extend out as a community in the blogesphere.

Dan Primack - PE Week
It's interesting, I've had this email publication within, and there have been community aspects to it. We've run contests, for example, we've been running internship drives for the past three years for current MBA students, and the fact that we're into the third year of that, or the fourth year now, it gets to the point where there's actually people who are at Associate or even Principal level, adventure capital firms who come up to me and say, they got their first job in the market, because they got my newsletter when they were in college, and got a free -- got a summer internship that way. So there's been a community that's grown up round it, and I get dozens of responses to my column a day, but I really had no where to put them, every now and then aggregate them, but I haven't had any where for this. There's been kind of a desire to have a community around these side, or around that publication, and this is kind of the manifestation of it. I'll give you an example, I had never accepted linked in invitations, I'm sure John, you like myself, receive those fairly regularly, and I had always just ignore them. About two months ago, I decided, just on a lark, I would accept them for one week. So I announced that anyone who sends me one, I'll just say yes, which I know kind of defeats the permission encorpus (ph). But I just said yes, and....

John Furrier - PodTech
Here comes a stamp.

Dan Primack - PE Week
But all the sudden I had 800 people sitting on there and these are people who want to connect with each other, these are people who have something to say to one another, and as you know, this is a networking business, and this is kind of a place people can do that. They can discuss ideas, without having necessarily go around -- fly somewhere to the industry conference, and not have to spent an entire day somewhere.

John Furrier - PodTech
Obviously, the way you write, you've got a lot of -- great reputation for holding court with your style, but not only do people enjoy that, they can hook up with each other. I mean, the readers can now participate with that.

Dan Primack - PE Week
I'll give you an example of that. We've got something -- and now these aren't for the VC's, but these are for the next VC's and the next bio folks. We have something on the site called MBA Forum which isn't, from a technical point of view, very tricky, it's basically a message board, but it's only a message board for current MBA students. So the only way you can get into this is, if we've confirmed that you actually are at Stanford, or you are at Harvard Business School et cetera, and this is going to be something where they can talk, everything from academics to how much their summer internship at a certain firm sucked, and what kind of partner they did like and didn't like. So this is going to be a community for them, and a place where people from London and Boston and New York and San Francisco and Seattle, who are current MBA candidates, can all kind of talk to one another, and network among themselves.

John Furrier - PodTech
So you've the face booked on one hand while they're in school they grown in, it's kind of like, they get their first car, their first job. You've brought people in, and shared your knowledge with them, and they end up running the VC firms that you get scoops from.

Dan Primack - PE Week
They will, they're the next generation, that's the goal of this site. The goal of this site really -- and this is probably true of all blogs, but my goal isn't that different, the goal here is to kind of foster discussion, and foster a sense of community, and give people a place when they've got something to say, to say it, and to get feedback on it, so they're not just sitting in their insulated offices.

John Furrier - PodTech
I was just speaking with Robert Scoble, who is here at PodTech now, the famous blogger, now video blogger. We're talking about blogging and how this is an authoritativeness happening in the bloggers, so that's kind of great for communities. What can you say Dan, and you've had a great view from deals that have gone great, they've gone south and in media, what have you learnt on the blogesphere over the past 2-3 years that you can say, hey, this is kind of a nugget here that we see and we're building around. What have you learned and you share with folks?

Dan Primack - PE Week
You mean in terms of blogging companies that are succeeding or failing or about the blogging market as a whole?

John Furrier - PodTech
Kind of everything in general. You're launching a blog, I mean this is important, it's a big part of it, you guys just don't do things on a whim, this is going to be a real big project, it's going to be open, it's going to be community, I mean...

Dan Primack - PE Week
I mean its interesting John, actually you mentioned this when you and I first met about a year and a half ago or two years ago, when you were talking about podcasting. This is, to a certain extent, just a different distribution method for content. Now granted, blog content reads a little different although my column's probably read like a blog, since before there were many blogs. But to me, this is a question of different people read things different ways. We did a demographic study of our email readers recently, and we were shocked to find out that about 50% of them were between 18-34, which was far a larger number than we've had thought. Those people spend a lot of time online, and they like the interactivity of blogs. It's not just, I read this and that's it, or I read this and I respond to Dan via email, maybe he reads it, maybe he doesn't, maybe he posts it, maybe he doesn't. There is a real interactivity here as you well know, and I think that's the value of this. Whenever anybody, whenever you read something interesting, whether it's in a magazine or you see something interesting on TV, you have an opinion about it, and sometimes you've got a strong one, or you got a question, this sort of format, it's interactive, it let's you ask the question, it let's you make the comment, it lets it be a two-way conversation instead of somebody, in this case me, talking at you.

John Furrier - PodTech
Yeah, and you have got to really put in the knowledge out there in the content in just another form. It's really not really conflicting with really any other format, it's just a new way for the new generation and for people to also be more participatory and share, so the advertisers end up wining too, because you got an engaged audience there.

Dan Primack - PE Week
It is, and what I'm hoping with this site John, as you well know, there's a lot of people out there who're writing about Venture Capital and writing about early stage technology, we will have that stuff, and some of our guest bloggers are early stage tech VC's. What we're really also -- part of the reason I did this was, it seemed to me in the blogesphere, there's a lot of types of voices that are missing. On the early stage side, you don't see many people writing about Life Sciences or Farmers, Biotech, you just don't see many of those people blooging. When you go later stage in the Private Equity world, the buy-out firms, you don't see anybody blogging. It's just not something that's happening, you don't see, from what I can tell, attorneys who work in this space blogging, it just doesn't exist yet, and that's kind of part of the hope of this, particularly with the VOP populize (ph) section, that we can bring those people into the conversation, and show the entire market, there is value in this kind of technology for you. It's not just the guys who're trying to invest in the next blogging company, it's the entire market. This is a new way to have a conversation.

John Furrier - PodTech
I'm impressed. I'm really excited to see it, because it's really just extending out the reach you have, and pushing knowledge out there. It's already interesting to the target audience, it maybe little entertaining with some flamemail, and comments here and there and moderation.

Dan Primack - PE Week
I hope so, I'll tell you, it scares the hell out of me, but I'm looking forward to doing it none the less.

John Furrier - PodTech
It's great stuff Dan, a great job. Congratulations, and we'll be linking to it at PodTech, and we'll be pushing Podcast your way, and anything you want to do with us, just let us know here in Sand Hill Road.

Dan Primack - PE Week
Sounds good. Hey John, thank you very much for taking the time with me.

John Furrier - PodTech
All right, thanks Dan.