Blog Business Summit: Pitching the Executive

Mitch Ratcliffe is a name that’s known throughout the tech world – for good reason. He writes for Red Herring and has been fueling conversation since the dawn of time (or, at least, the early ’90s). During my energetic presentation this morning, which Marc Canter began with a bang, Mitch pitched a very important angle into the audience.

For more than 15 years I have chronicled and participated in the development of the Internet. I spent my early days on The W.E.L.L. In the 1990s, I was covering networking, privacy and cryptography for MacWEEK, and was the editor of Digital Media, the first publication to really explain how the Internet would really work (we were right, and the evidence is on this site). By 1996, I’d launched Internet/Media Strategiesand was starting and investing in companies for SoftBank, consultingto leaders like America Online, Audible, EarthWeb, Time Warner, Personify, and many others. ZD Net brought me on to lead their Year 2000 coverage for the two years leading up to Y2K, a time when I made many enemies, though my only fault seems to have been being virtually dead-on in predicting the actual scope of the computer problems that occurred.

Listen to Mitch pitch in WMA
Listen to Mitch pitch in MP3