Interview with Jas Dhillon, CEO of ZeroDegrees

ZeroDegrees is a business networking site that is focused on enabling business people to leverage their connections to locate business expertise, candidates for job openings, and accelerate the sales process by connecting our users with economic buyers through trusted intermediaries. We were formed just over a year ago and launched the service on August 5th of 2003. We currently have approximately 245,000 people in the network.

That is correct. Our technology integrates seamlessly into the MS Outlook email platform as well as sales force automation packages. We minimize the change in behavior patterns required to utilize our service. That makes our service attractive to business users who might be working from behind a firewall. They still access our hosted service, but we don’t provide our customers any software that they install. We also allow individual subscribers to sign up as well.

Think of it this way, we are a very powerful networking technology that typically would only be available to enterprise level customers. We have made it available to individual business users; way we have built a solution that is targeted towards the business community, which is also useful to consumers.

Our focus is to build out the network, and continue developing proof of the value that the network is providing. At some point downstream we will begin charging for our service.

Our objective in the short term is to build the largest business network. We will probably charge users based upon a subscription formula that incorporates a flat fee as well as a fee for premium services. The different revenue models will play out over time and we will be very flexible in the way we look at the business model.

We are focused on business networking. The other sites tend to be used more for social networking. Business networking is something that has just begun. There are three key areas where we are different from the other companies. The first being our approach to security, privacy, and confidentiality. We think we are setting the Gold Standard in this areas. The individual subscriber controls what information about them is available and who can contact them. It is very important that we let users control that, and we have built the technology, which provides next generation capabilities in comparison to the other sites. This prevents what we call “introduction fatigue”, where individuals are getting spammed by people they don’t even know looking for introductions. The second area where we differ is the tight integration with existing technologies so that the user isn’t required to learn a new application. The final area is how we actually deploy this technology. It is fundamentally deployed as an ASP, yet still exists within email applications. Those three things taken together provide material differences that differentiates our solution.

If you look at what these services are all about and how people are using them you will find that the social networks are used to facilitate dating, friendships, etc. We find that users will use one network for social oriented activities and a business network for developing contact to fill open positions, make sales contacts, etc. There is a cross over because people are looking to accomplish two different objectives and will use multiple networks. The social networks also appeal to a slightly younger demographic, while we appeal to business professionals.

We think these services will evolve in a number of different ways. There will be a number of freestanding networks, which will be very large, and we also see social and business networking being embedded by other existing service providers.

I think they are two sides of the same coin. Business networking technologies essentially take out the non-value added piece of finding the right connections and getting an introduction to them through a trusted intermediary. We already do that today, but it requires 20 phone calls to find the best contact offline. Our search engine allows you to identify the key people that can assist you in your objective, so we are eliminating the non-value added piece of it. It is still very important to follow social protocols, because the connections are made via email, phone call, etc. You have to communicate a clear value proposition to convince the intermediary to act as a reference.

It is all about the team. You have to have an idea that addresses a specific pain in the market. I learned early on that people pay for painkillers and they don’t pay for vitamins. You have to address a pain point, and you have to have an excellent team to build a great company.

In the last three years it has been especially challenging, particularly in the technology sector. These same challenges have created opportunities and that is why we are here.