Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Interview With Jim Fowler - CEO of Jigsaw
I just got off the phone with Jim Fowler, the CEO and Founder of Jigsaw Data Corporation. I must say that in the beginning I simply didn't understand their whole business model but after an hour long conversation I was good to go. Most people don't have the time or ability to spend an hour talking to the CEO of a company they want to learn more about but I guess I'm lucky, hah! Anyway, understand of the Jigsaw business model only took about 10 minutes once the privacy issues were explained.
It was pretty fun talking to Jim about how Jigsaw works and how contacts are traded among the users of the system. He reminds me a lot of one of my all time favorite salesmen, Steve Wayne. Jim made no bones about the fact that he's a salesman first and he's motivated by money and a good business model. Perhaps that's one of the reasons Jigsaw was able to secure Series A VC funding from El Dorado Ventures back in 2003 when the VC's weren't getting handing out cash for anything. It's also important to note that back in '03 when they received their Series A round of funding they had not decided to allow users to purchase contact information for cash rather than just points. That's kind of a big deal since they began offering the ability for users to purchase contacts straight-up in September of 2004.
Okay, okay, I've said too much already. I don't want to spoil your appetite to see the Q & A with Jim when I post it later this week so I'm going to stop now. I will have a lot more inside angles on how their operation works as well as what makes them uniquely dissimilar from other business service social networking sites like LinkedIn and from data companies like Dunn and Bradstreet and InfoUSA.
Posted By Jason Dowdell at 02:58 PM
Permanent Link: Interview With Jim Fowler - CEO of Jigsaw
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