Len Short (Red)ily Discusses Google, Bono and Steve Jobs

Author: John Greathouse
Published: November 16, 2011 at 6:14 am
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Len Short is truly an online marketing pioneer, heading up marketing at Charles Schwab, AOL and then (PRODUCT)RED. He is now leading Chug, a car buying search engine, as its Founder and CEO.

Before his career moved online, Len worked on major marketing campaigns for credit card companies and rolled out MCI’s highly successful “Friends and Family” marketing campaign.

I recently caught up with him outside of George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. He was kind enough to conduct a video interview from his car. Fortunately, he spoke with me while he was parked and not careening down the highway. Unfortunately, his iPhone flipped his image to landscape mode. Despite this technical glitch, I opted to publish our discussion, given the high-quality content of his comments. If watching the video is too distracting, simply minimize the screen and listen to Len’s insights as you would a podcast.

 Len has enjoyed an incredible online career. He was the CMO at Charles Schwab during the emergence of the online brokerage revolution, helping to guide the company’s transition from a high-touch retail broker to a no-touch self-serve trading platform. After leaving Schwab, Len was recruited by AOL as its EVP of Brand at a time when the company was seeking to remain relevant, just as its dialup subscriber base was in its initial stages of decay. Len later joined (PRODUCT)RED as its Founding CMO. In this capacity he worked with U2’s Bono, as well as Steve Jobs and a number of other notable celebrities whom Len encouraged to lend their brand equity to bolster RED’s cause.

Len remains an active advisor to several startups. In this regard, I asked him to share the lessons from his early days of online marketing that remain relevant to the startups he currently advises. “We are focusing now on re-disrupting categories that moved early online, but in some ways, have been freeze-dried since then. My history has always been with challenger brands, back in the credit card days and then with MCI and the phone wars, I did ‘friends and family’ for MCI which really changed that industry. And then with Schwab, who was just a small, discount broker when I joined them and we rose to dominant market share in three categories in brokerage.

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Article Author: John Greathouse

John Greathouse is the author of the hands-up startup advice blog infoChachkie (http://www.infochachkie.com) He has held a number of senior executive positions with successful startups which generated more than $350 million of shareholder value. …

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(product)red, bono, eds-pick, entrepreneurship, google, infochachkie, john greathouse, len short, startups, steve jobs,
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