Bootstrapper.com - Confessions of Serial Entrepreneurs

So here’s the first brief interview from the RichmondEvents cruise. While I admit I’m not much of a journalist and don’t quite know how to interview (though under my belt are interviews with Eliot Spitzer & Paul Reiser - though are stories for another day), I asked a couple of questions to understand the attendees and the quality of the event so here goes…

Interview with Jon Winsett

RH: What’s your company?

JW: NPI

RH: How’d you get involved in the business?

JW: After a career of hi-tech vendor experience and years of seeing the great disparity in the pricing of
products and services, I decided to become an client advocate for IT purchasing. NPI has since grown to become a significant tool for bringing pricing transparency to corporate America — with over 200 clients ranging from Boeing to Hilton to Sears.

RH: What brought you on the Richmond cruise?

JW: It is a great forum to meet and share experiences with high level executives in the Global 2000.

RH: What was the most valuable thing you got out of the cruise?

JW: The networking — with not only prospective clients but industry experts
across business.

RH: Tell us a story from the cruise …
JW: NPI is launching a social networking site called OnTheHoot.com. It is tailored for financial services IT execs who want to discuss IT purchasing with their peers and comes with a price benchmarking component driven by NPI. This most recent cruise allowed me to meet with not only potential members, but I had dinner with a founder from another
social networking site, lunch with a Web 2.0 guru that helped shape our venture, and drinks with a marketing agency who focuses on online community promotion.

If this isn’t the superstar of conferences I don’t know what is.

So I just got back from the Richmondevents.com Super Cruise. I was planning on blogging live but I didn’t have wireless internet on the ship and instead I got to live like a normal human being without phone, fax or email. It was friggin amazing! I highly recommend detox’ing yourself. It’s refreshing.

The cruise itself was great. It was the CIO Forum, Marketing Forum, HR & Logistics Forums all rolled into one. The way Richmond works is the delegate (buyer) is free to attend as long as they have a multi-million dollar annual budget and the suppliers pay between $20,000-100,000 to be on the ship. The whole event is based around double optin one on one meetings so buyers get to meet suppliers they may want to work with and suppliers get 30-40 meetings with potential clients all once. It’s a super networking event. It also happened to have been the friendliest biz event I ever attended. Everyone was nice and friendly and just looking to make friends. Really cool environment. Also, the food was amazing and the hot tub very nice.

Richmond even ports in these lovely British chics to stand outside of rooms and look pretty (seriously). They are there to be eye candy. No good event is complete without trade show models with British accents. Did I say, I love British Accents.

To Roger, Joel, Shane and co…kudos on a great event. Also, the founder of Richmond, Marc looks like the head doctors on Scrubs.

Some interviews will follow in the next couple of days as I post them up…

Hey so I’ll be press on richmondevents.com cruise this week. It is a cruise with 4 C level events going on. There is the Chief Marketing Officers Forum, Chief Information officers Forum, HR Director and another forum which I won’t name because I don’t remember it. I’ll be interviewing a lot of the attendees and throwing it up on here so expect to hear a lot of what’s happening at the top of corporate America in the coming days. Should be fun. I will be armed with my 1000 misprinted business cards!