Audio File:& Download MP3Transcript:& An Interview with Victoria Ransom Date: August 1, 2011 [music] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of NCWIT, the National Center for Women in Information Technology. With me is Larry Nelson from W3W3. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: Hi, Lucy. We are so excited to be a part of this series. At W3W3.com we support technology as well as business, and we have a particular interest in what we can do to help promote women and young girls into technology. Lucy: Well, and this is a series of interviews with fabulous entrepreneurs who have started tech companies. They have a lot of great advice for our listeners, and so we'll get right to our interview today. We're interviewing Victoria Ransom, who is a serial entrepreneur. She has a very impressive track record. She has started three companies, all of which are operating today. That's very unusual. Larry: [laughs] Yes, it is. Lucy: And her existing company has been profitable after just one year. It totally blows my mind. [laughs] Larry: Wow. Lucy: It's such a great accomplishment, and she is an adventuresome spirit as well as being a serial entrepreneur. She once spent over a month living with a remote Amazonian tribe, so we won't let her off this interview until she tells us what that was all about. Today she's the founder and CEO of Wildfire Interactive, which helps organizations leverage and engage millions of users of the social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Basically what they allow people to do is leverage the power of the social networks to do things such as branded campaigns, sweepstakes, contests, or giveaways and really getting into that viral nature of the social web. So it's not only the campaign, but they also provide tools and analytics so you know if the campaigns are successful or not, which is really important. Larry: I love it. Lucy: Yeah. So Victoria, welcome. Victoria Ransom: Thank you very much. I'm excited to be involved with this. Lucy: Well, tell us a little bit about what's going on with Wildfire. It seems like a lot. Victoria: Yeah. [laughs] Yeah, it has been a wild ride. We only started the company three years ago, and for the first year it was pretty much my co‑founder and I and a couple of engineers. Then once we launched our product, it really took off, which we launched the product officially in August of 2009. So really about two years ago. We hit a real need at the right time. Within the first month we had hundreds of customers, like you said, reached profitability, and now we've got tens of thousands of paying customers. We've got over 140 employees. [laughs] So it has been a really busy, busy time. In terms of what's new or what's happening at the moment, we actually just launched a pretty expanded version of our product. So the introduction that you gave about Wildfire is very accurate in terms of what we started out in terms of what our original product was, which is a social campaign builder that makes it really, really easy for companies to launch different kinds of social media marketing campaigns like contests, sweepstakes, give‑a‑ways, coupons, group deals. All sorts on different social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others we select as well. But we've now expanded really to create what we consider is a software product that helps companies with all aspects of their social media marketing. So we are within that suite of tools. We have a product that really helps companies, like a content management system for their social properties like their fan pages, for example, helps them create really engaging content, edit it, change it, review the performance, the analytics, et cetera, which is really important because one thing that I think companies forget is that we can't just launch a Facebook fan page and put up some content and then leave it because then why would a