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Russell Rothstein Show Notes Russell Rothstein is founder and CEO of IT Central Station, the leading product review site for enterprise technology. Before founding IT Central Station, Russell worked in senior product roles at enterprise tech vendors Nolio (acquired by CA) and OPNET Technologies (acquired by Riverbed). He was co-founder and CEO of Zettapoint (acquired by EMC), and was co-founder of Open Sesame (acquired by Bowne/RR Donnelley). Russell received a BA in Computer Science from Harvard University, an MS in Technology and Policy from MIT, and an MS in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Follow Russell on Twitter @RussRothsteinIT (11,000+ followers). Most passionate about It all started back in April 2011, in NYC, Manhattan. I had dinner with a friend of mine who ended up being my co-founder… We talked about how review sites have become so popular – we’d chosen our restaurant based on reviews from Yelp – But not in the business world, where both (of us) worked for our entire careers – how can it be that businesses are making decisions about technology; what software, solution, service provider, etc. to use, without tapping into reviews from peers. The example of hotels – it used to be the travel agencies or reviewers in newspapers, and today, by far, online reviews from sites like TripAdvisor are the most influential source for how people spend their dollars for travel and for hotels. And today, we are seeing the same phenomenon happen in the B2B enterprises technology world. The review site is the most influential source for how businesses build a short list and how businesses decide which technology products to use.  I’m really proud that we, here at IT Central Station, were the first ones to build up this vision for enterprise technology IT reviews and be the leader at this space. The vision I have is based on market research that shows on the annual survey that, for the first time in 2017, the number one most trusted source of technology information worldwide is peers, people like me and you. More than paid experts, more than newspapers or governments reports. If you look at the trends of technology innovation today, it almost always starts in the consumer world; social networks, media, and different types of communication technologies. Then it tends to move more to small-medium businesses, and only then the enterprise market that tends to be more conservative, but that’s a very large market – three trillion dollars are spent every year by enterprises on technology. The company We started by building a beta website, using an agile approach, building up what was called an MVP – Minimum Valuable Product, we launched that in August 2012, and we were fortunate that The Wall Street covered our launch and called us, “The Yelp for Enterprises Tech” and since then, we just continue to grow and grow and grow… The customers today As a review site, we are providing value to two different audiences: the enterprises – the people visiting our website, reading those reviews, making better buying decisions. We don’t monetize this audience. On the other side of the equation are the technology suppliers, the vendors. We don’t require any type of payment in order to be listed, and with most of them, we don’t have commercial relations. Some of them, who want to take advantage of additional marketing value like lead generation, social content, better data, etc., will use one of our marketing programs. It’s usually large companies, like Oracle, SAP, etc. and sometimes also small to medium technology companies or startups that are getting additional value from their involvement with IT Central Station. Today there is a lot of skepticism in the market about analyst reports, there is a lot of skepticism about vendor created content, like white papers and so, if I look at the data of the research, the level of trust in content created by the vendors is very very low. Russell’s best...