Sam Sethi, CEO of BlogNation

13:31 | Kiruba Shankar | Jul 22nd, 2007 3:47pm |

Sam Sethi is a London-based technology entrepreneur and consultant. Sam recently launched BlogNation, a worldwide network of blogs focusing on Web 2.0, mobile and enterprise startup space in 22 countries around the world (except the United States).

Sam was known in the blogosphere for the good coverage he did at TechCrunch UK. After a public split with Mike Arrington , he began Vecosys, and now BlogNation.

Sam has worked in the IT industry for over 18 years for companies like Microsoft, Netscape, Gateway Computers and CMGi, in a variety of senior technical and marketing roles. Sam has also experienced the joy and pain of running his own start-ups. Recently, Sam has been working as a freelance consultant with companies such as MSN (UK) and BT, helping develop their Web 2.0 strategies.

When not blogging, consulting or presenting, Sam loves nothing better than spending time with his wife & young family, running, drinking fine wine with his friends or watching his beloved Liverpool FC.

Oh, just a quick note to let you know that the audio quality isn’t the best. To make it easy, I have transcribed the conversation below and it will be a good supplement to the podcast.

Photo courtesy: Library House

Transcript:

Kiruba : Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Sethi: Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.

Kiruba: Congratulations on the launch of BlogNation. That’s a very ambitious project you have started.

Sam Sethi: Yeah. It has started on a post I wrote on my own blog “Go Big or Go Home” which really was related to the fact that most Europeans were told by Americans that we don’t have enough ambition. Alright. OK. Let’s see how ambitious we can get and if we can cover most of the world’s Web 2.0 news and that’s what BlogNation will do.

Kiruba: Alright. If a person in the US were to listen to this and one of the obvious questions that would be asking is, “Are there enough innovation happening outside of the US?”. What would be your answer?

Sam Sethi: The answer would be Yes and No. Let me explain. Yes, there is a lot of innovation happening outside of the USA, outside of the Silicon Valley. Companies like Jaiku,Vimeo, get on the American radar very early. The answer, ‘I don’t know’ is because of the language barrier. Up until now, I’m trying to understand what’s happening in Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Brazil, Japan, China. Its just impossible for us if we don’t know the language. BlogNation will be moving into 22 countries…there is a lot of activity in the Web 2.0 space and we’ll get to understand them better.

Kiruba: In countries like India and UK, obviously there is no problem because English is the main language but like you just said, in China, Bulgaria, Germany, a lot of blogging and coverage of technology happens in the local language. How are you going to overcome this barrier?

Sam Sethi: OK. What we have done is that BlogNation will be written in English only. We will rope in 22 very good bloggers from around the globe who live in their country, who are native speaking and who can write very good English. The idea is that they will write about what is going on in their country in English and hopefully we can use one common language on the Internet to appreciate what is going on in each country and learn quicker about the new startups rather than wait four to five months to learn about them.

Kiruba: OK. Let’s go back in history. Now, Sam Sethi as a person came into prominence for a lot of bloggers because you were with TechCrunch UK and you did some real good work. So what happened after that and how did BlogNation came into being?

Sam Sethi: OK. TechCrunch UK was really a project with myself and several friends in London who organize events to try and realize how we can make the UK start up scene much more available around the world. We started on a project called unplugged London and we realized that it would be much simpler teaming up with Mike Arrington. Post Mike Arrington and Post TechCrunch, we started a blog called Vecosys which really was a knee jerk reaction to me leaving TechCrunch.

In the three months that we wrote Vecosys we realized that its not sustainable unless you build it big. Really, we were covering too small a market and not getting any revenues in.

BlogNation was born as a project that would be built from the ground up having an advertising network. The company Index is an important feature of the site. The company Index is really a lesson learnt in blogging. If you write ten posts they would appear on the homepage but once it drops off the homepage, its gone. The Company Index of BlogNation is a link between the post and the company. Every time there is an article written, it would be added to the company Index. Basically if you look at a particular company in the Index, you can access all articles relating to the company. If there’s one or more articles about the company, you will be able to see the history of the posts. So a great way to track a particular company, read news about the past and the current. BlogNation is a professional version of what we were doing at Vecosys.

Kiruba: Alright. Now, the scale of BlogNation is quite ambitious with 20 plus countries in the plans. So how are you funding the entire project.

Sam Sethi: The project is currently self funded and angel funded. We hope that we encourage startups who haven’t advertised before. So a lot of startups I know say they haven’t advertised on Google or Yahoo or other social networking sites because the advertising is very expensive. We are looking at providing a simple targeted advertising for entrepreneurs for a very reasonable CPM rate to encourage them. The other revenues will come from larger companies who fund BlogNation. More revenues will come from other activities that we be doing which I will be talking about later.

Kiruba: Alright. When you say other activities, would events also be in your business model just like how Rafat Ali is doing.

Sam Sethi: Events is certainly in the business model. When you have got 22 editors covering news around the world covering news, you have a very strong view of whats happening around the world and what technology we feel we will be able to attract people. Today, its just in the plans.

Kiruba: BlogNation typifies a startup company. And for a lot of startup companies the biggest hurdle they face is ‘How do I make myself known to a lot of people?” which is marketing basically. So, how are you planning to take care of that?

Sam Sethi: Like any startup we need other bloggers around the world to connect to us. We need people to talk about us. We need to provide quality relevant content which makes people want to come back to us and make BlogNation their destination site throughout the day or once a week or whatever is their frequency. I don’t think there is a quick way. I think we will take six months to build a good traffic or maybe longer.

We have very good people in our team who are well connected. The combination of writing well and sponsoring and reporting events around the world, linking to people, talking about interested things. Overtime, if we are the right thing, people will come to us.

Kiruba: Awesome. Your plans for the next year. One year down the line where do you anticipate BlogNation will be?

Sam Sethi: I would hope it is the river of news homepage which is all the world stories, will become the destination choice. Our page views, we have some figures in mind, which will make us one of the top blogs in the world hopefully. Outside of that we have a couple of other plans in mind. One is to create a TechMeme for the rest of the world. Again I feel, TechMeme is a US centric blog and cover mostly the valley and when they don’t have enough to cover, they occasionally look outside. I’d like to cover everything outside of the US . And we would be supporting a community of entrepreneurs.

Kiruba: Awesome. We were talking about Sam Sethi, the business guy. Let’s talk about Sam Sethi, the person. Tell us about your personal interests other than business. I know that now BlogNation would take more of your time but in your spare time what would you like doing.

Sam Sethi: I’m a family man with two children. So, that takes care of more of the free time. I like sports, running, rugby, football . I like socializing with friends..the thing that most family people tend to do. I don’t think I’m any different.

My interest before blogging was to learn all about learning, about what new and exciting things in technology is all about. I have a technical background. So, my natural extension is get into writing about exciting companies.

Kiruba: Alright. Fantastic. Sam, here’s wishing the very best for BlogNation.

Sam Sethi: Thank you.

Kiruba: Thank you, very much.

Tags: Sam Sethi, entrepreneur, BlogNation, Web 2.0, TechCrunch UK, Mike Arrington, Vecosys

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 3:47 pm and is filed under PodTech, Enterprise 2.0, India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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