Interview with an Entrepreneur: Hooman Radfar of Clearspring - Part 1

Hooman Radfar and Austin Fath founded Clearspring Technologies Inc. in 2004 after finishing graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University.

Yesterday, the upstart company landed a deal with NBC Universal to use its so-called widget technology to help the peacock network challenge fellow Clearspring customer CBS Interactive and ABC.com.

I recently completed this interview before the deal went public and the following is part 1:

On Hooman, the Man and CEO…
Please provide us with a bit of your personal background in business and entrepreneurship.

Well I am 26, so this is going to be a short.

Since I was an undergrad at Penn, I knew I wanted to make a dent in the universe with technology. I didn’t exactly know how it would happen, but I geared my academic career to be a switch hitter in business and technology - completing a dual degree in Computer Science and Economics. After undergrad, I enrolled in Carnegie Mellon to find my co-founder Austin (he did not know it) and strengthen my engineering background. The funny thing about graduate school was that the only thing I did not do associated with entrepreneurship was my research. As it happens it was my research – social networking theory - that would ultimately guide my career.

We started the company out of graduate school with in 2004 by bootstrapping with consulting work and grants. We had a simple vision – give people choice. Empower the world with the ability to weave their own computing experiences with their favorite content and services from across the web. Since founding Clearspring, I have managed to gain a ton of experience across the board - from properly cleaning toilets to raising institutional financing. I have had to learn more in the last 3 years than I did in 6 years of school. Suffice to say it has been quite the crash course.

On What Clearspring is and isn’t…
Your current venture is Clearspring - what’s your elevator pitch for it?

Clearspring provides the most scalable widget syndication platform on the planet. Our flagship service enables content creators to reach new audiences by quickly creating, distributing, and tracking cross-platform widgets across blogs, startpages, social networks and more. This service abstracts away the complexity associated with creating widgets in a world of fragmented formats, standards, and APIs, while providing a normalized view of widget performance. Widget developers should be able to focus on creating great applications without suffering the headaches of infrastructure. Given that 2007 has been declared “The Year of the Widget,” by Newsweek we think that we are in the middle of something exciting.

On Being Unique…
There’s a ton of competition in the widget market. What makes Clearspring unique?

Great question. We are focused on making life easy for widget creators. We believe that the way to do that is to provide a platform that enables the simple creation, distribution and measurement of distributed applications.

From a technology perspective, we have delivered on this value proposition by creating a super scalable serving and tracking infrastructure. We have already served nearly 4B widgets through our system and have the ability to provide real-time analytics at this scale of serving. That’s pretty unique.

From a team perspective, we have cultivating a rather unique team that we like to call Web 2.0 meets Media. Our founding team established the basis for Clearspring with an expertise in web services and social networking fresh out of Carnegie Mellon University. Since then, Clearspring has attracted the folks that built Web 1.0 to our management and investor team. On our management team we have the former SVP of Business Development for AOL, the former COO of AOL, and the founding CTO of WebMethods. On the investor side, we have attracted investors Steve Case, Ron Conway, Richard Edelman, Miles Gilburne, Mark Jung, and Ted Leonsis.

On Web 2.0 and Making Money…
Since your business model seems really aligned with the Web 2.0 style of site (where free is so prevalent.) Could you elaborate a little more on your approach to revenue creation?

Our current business model is simple. We will provide a base level of services at no cost via our Community platform. This service is currently available via an invitation-only preview. You can sign up our website here. <LINK> We will release this to the public coming weeks.

Over time, we plan to introduce services to enable monetization. In addition to the Community Platform, we offer premium services. There are a number of major media companies that are already leveraging these premium services today. We leverage a usage-based pricing model for these customers.

We have some others models that we are piloting as well and are confident that – as the idea of widget syndication matures – we will be in position to capitalize on the massive growth of this space.

NEXT TIME: Promoting Entrepreneurial Spirit, Raising Money and Marketing Your Company

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