Audio File:& Download MP3Transcript:& Interview with Leslie Bradshaw Lucy Sanders: & Hi, this is Lucy Sanders and I'm the CEO of the National Center for Women in Information Technology or NCWIT. With me is Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hi Larry. Larry Nelson: & Hi, I'm real happy to be here. Lucy: & We are in love with this series of interviews, very interesting women from all sectors of tech with lots of interesting stories. Today, we are interviewing another serial entrepreneur who was named to the top 30 women in tech under 30 by the "Wall Street Journal." Very interesting and she herself has started a new company. Leslie Bradshaw is the founder and COO of Guide and this is a really cool company. It's sort of a visual news reader application for your personal computer. It takes all kinds of blogs and social media streams, online media news, then turns them into these video news segments if you will. With avatars and other cool stuff. Lucy: & I'm sure I'm not quite saying that right, and Leslie will set me straight in just a moment, but it sounds just fascinating. Before she started Guide, Leslie co‑founded and served as the president and COO of Jess3, and really helped them achieve their success. Landed on the 2012 Inc 500 list. So, a very successful entrepreneur. When she's not starting companies, she's a partner at her family owned vineyard in Oregon which sounds fascinating as well. Welcome, Leslie, we're happy to have you here. Leslie Bradshaw: & It's wonderful to be here, thank you so much for having me. Lucy: & You know, we have a couple questions about being an entrepreneur, but first why don't you tell us just a bit about what's going on with Guide. I'm sure our listeners will be interested in having an update. Larry: & Plus, we'll have it linked on the website. Leslie: & It's an exciting moment to be able to actually share some of the things going on at Guide. If you would have been speaking to me a month ago, everything was still in an alpha form. We were just testing it out with a number of private users. We are officially launched and you can download it if you have an iPad. We are, right now, number 3 if you can believe it, in the charts in the news category in the United States. Leslie: & We're also trending in a number of other countries, some of which are complete surprises to us because English is not the native language. A lot of the South American and Asian countries that are downloading our apps in force. It's so exciting to see that people really enjoy what we put out there. Certainly it's been resonating with thousands of people worldwide. Lucy: & It certainly sounds like an interesting app. Just a couple minutes, maybe, on what the technology is and what people use it for. Leslie: & Certainly. If you think about the app eco system around newsreaders, a couple of big players come to mind. You have Flipboard, for example. Flipboard aggregates your favorite online news, blogs, and social streams like Twitter and Facebook into a magazine experience that you can actively read. If you've ever used Flipboard, there are other platforms out there like Zite and Pulse. Those all do that in what, again, I call an active reading experience. I don't know about you or the listeners out there, but I have a very busy day. I cannot read all of the media that I want to actually review. Having the ability to have a passive consumption model is very important. Things like [inaudible 02:59] and SpokenLayer are creating apps that just read you your favorite online news, social streams, and blogs through text to speech. You have Ferry which is a text to speech engine. You have GPS which is a text to speech run engine. A lot of the other applications that I mentioned are doing that pure audio. Think about it for a second. Although audio is great and it's certainly helpful, I'm a visual learner. I know a lot of oth