FLM: Because you achieved a lot of success and tech entrepreneurs are becoming younger and younger, describe how you’re helping others move along in the tech space and the advice you provide to startup companies.
Eric: The two books I've had published, Return of the Hustle: The Art of Marketing with Music and Hit Brands: How Music Builds Value for the World’s Brands are now taught in universities throughout the US and Europe. So I'm happy that my learnings in that area have found scale and are reaching many young minds. However, I also try to take a more hands-on role and participate in hackathons, mentor sessions, and accelerators for startup entrepreneurs. The Junto Institute here in Chicago is a great educational program for startups and entrepreneurs. They ask successful entrepreneurs to share their experience in specific areas of expertise. I enjoy speaking to the class about the things I did wrong so they could learn and save time.
FLM: You seem to have your hand on the pulse of the tech industry. What industries are lagging behind in technology and should be a focus for the world in the next 5-10 years?
Eric: Top is the music industry. It's just not set up to sustain in the 21st century. It was established at a time where there were three TV channels and their programs required a long time to film and edit. They also had control of the recording process and radio play, meaning you only heard who they wanted you to hear, when they wanted you to hear it. But with the digitalization of music creation and consumption, the power has shifted from the labels to the consumers. The consumer has choice. They also have a choice in what TV program they watch, so content is being pumped out at an unbelievable speed. When a song was used in a TV show, the label would take weeks or months to negotiate pricing and get all the rights in order. Now, there's 300 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. It needs music, but the music industry just hasn't caught up with the rest of production.
The retail sector is also being transformed by technology. The emergence of e-commerce is slowly but surely killing off traditional bricks and mortar as convenience and customer recommendation become key purchase drivers. We saw it happen with Tower Records and Blockbuster Video going out of business, as consumers, driven by advances in technology, abandoned stores in favor of online shopping. This trend in retail represents a massive shift in consumer behavior given the sheer scale of the industry. Social media allows us to share our wants, our likes, our needs, our desires, yet retail and specifically gifting is the last major industry not to embrace the benefits of social media. It would be a lot easier to gift someone if you knew what that person wanted, what restaurants they liked, what expenses they could use some help with etc. That's what desirelist is set to do, and in the process we hope to capture a significant amount of the 200-billion-dollar gifting industry and the 135-billion-dollar gift card market.