For budding entrepreneurs, Prendismo offers the ultimate master class: conversations with top executives from Kraft, Citigroup, Procter and Gamble, and other Fortune 500 companies on everything from branding strategies to startups, and from the art of the deal to the first days on the job.
Deborah Streeter, the Bruce F. Failing Senior Professor of Personal Enterprise in the Department of Applied Economics and Management, launched the site, a collection of video interviews on business and leadership, in 2008 with the aid of two CALS alumni, Kirsten Johnston Barker ’92 and Tony Eisenhut ’88. They worked with Cornell’s Center for Technology and Commercialization to bring to market the concept, which follows in the mold of Streeter’s eClips, a database of more than 13,000 interview clips with business professionals that launched in 2002, well before the rise of YouTube.
On both sites, the taped interviews are edited into shorter segments in order to “best capture the wisdom, knowledge, and stories of companies and their employees,” according to Streeter.
Clips in the Prendismo database cover a wide range of topics ranging from the practical, such as business planning and cash flow, to the philosophical, like handling risk and learning from failure. Interview subjects include CEOs, presidents, and other professionals from small businesses up to multi-national corporations.
What separates Prendismo from its predecessor is that the new site licenses, for a fee, the eClips catalog to corporations and other entities. In addition, Prendismo has begun working with corporations to use it as a channel to share their executives’ knowledge internally with employees.
“Prendismo allows us to initiate and grow relationships with companies, while eClips is able to maintain its educational focus,” says Barker, Prendismo’s president. “If you are at Procter and Gamble and want to capture the company’s methodology behind branding, you can interview corporate leaders, clip it, tag it, aggregate it, and then offer them in playlists or podcasts using Prendismo as a platform.”
Beyond corporate users, Prendismo offers the general public a trove of business knowledge in an easy-to-search format. All of the interviews on Prendismo are transcribed and searchable by keyword. Users can also browse by topic, theme, collection, company, or even by entrepreneur.
“If you go to YouTube and type in ‘cash flow,’ your most relevant hits will be a popular band from the Middle East,” says Eisenhut, chairman and co-founder of Prendismo, who views the site’s specialized focus as one of its defining features. Search the same term on Prendismo, and the site will return dozens of snippets of entrepreneurs reflecting on the subject.
The next challenge for the company is to push Prendismo’s original videos out to all corners of the web. “We have a wealth of incredible business content, but now we need to figure out the best way to share the clips,” says Barker.
Streeter has watched her idea of an educational tool for her classes grow into thousands of hours of valuable footage. Still, she sees lots of untapped business wisdom that could become part of Prendismo’s library. “We’ve only scratched the surface of what can be captured here at Cornell,” Streeter says. (Written by Isabel Sterne '10)
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