Washington Post’s CDO Vijay Ravindran

Vijay Ravindran graduated with a B.S. degree in systems engineering from The University of Virginia in 1996. After a seven-year stint with Amazon in Seattle, he eventually returned to Virginia to work as Chief Technology Officer for Catalist LLC, a successful start up political technology company. In February of 2009, Ravindran joined The Washington Post Company as their first ever Chief Digital Officer (CDO). Modern DC Business recently interviewed Ravindran, who resides with his wife and son in Chevy Chase, MD about his past, present and future.

VIJAY RAVINDRAN - Photography by Ray Ally

Vijay, the title of Chief Digital Officer is a fairly new term. Help us understand what it means. What exactly does a CDO do?

VR: I think the title and job responsibilities vary quite a bit from organization to organization. Here at The Washington Post Company, we’ve focused my job on the rapidly changing online media space and what we as a company can be doing to look at what’s around the corner. I wear several hats: I work closely as an advisor to our media properties, mainly washingtonpost.com and Slate, I look at opportunities for us to make investments in promising tech start ups as well as incubate new business ideas like SocialCode, our Facebook advertising agency, and I’ve built a team called WaPo Labs that works on experimental products that might one day make up part of a future online news experience. Unlike some of my counterparts in the industry, I do not operate any of our existing mature websites, as our corporate belief is that the operating unit CEOs are best positioned to also be the operators of their web and mobile presences.

One of your primary responsibilities these days is working on the launch of Trove, a free news aggregation website from the Washington Post. How different will Trove be from the enormously successful Huffington Post? The website’s recent acquisition by AOL is a clear indication that it performs its job exceedingly well. Why does the world need another news aggregator?

VR: We think Trove will be different than anything else out there. Trove is focused on personalization, and enabling users to easily build a custom news experience built across the many interest areas they might be passionate about from personal to professional, celebrity gossip to serious world affairs.

Considering the difficulty of publishing print media in this day and age, how do you and The Washington Post Company plan to make news profitable again?

VR: We are as an industry in a grand experimentation stage for news, we know that our legacy businesses are under great threat, and that we have to not only build an engaging consumer experience, but also a viable business model that can support the business of journalism as we go through this evolution. And our position at The Washington Post Company is to be a leader in the industry. That’s why we’re investing in Trove, incubating SocialCode, and just recently partnered with the New York Times and Gannett as investors in Ongo.

THE APPEAL OF TROVE News aggregation business keeps getting more and more interesting. Trove is coming to this world to face the likes of Zite, an Apple iPad magazine/news reader app which consequently received a cease-and-desist letter from big media giants including the Washington Post. There is also the Flipboard, another Apple iPad app, which recently nabbed $50 million in funding, bringing its valuation to $200 million. If that sounds like a lot of money to pay a news aggregator that does not generate its own content, consider Huffington Post which was acquired by AOL for $315 million. Trove searches over 10,000 different sources and finds stories that the user might find interesting based on the articles the user has already read. Apps for iPhone, iPad, Droid and Blackberry are currently in development Similar technology is already widely used today. For example, Pandora custom tailors music for the member based upon their members towards hidden gems that they might otherwise have passed by.

How do you respond to the claim that ‘print is dead?’

VR: My wife and I continue to enjoy our paper, so I don’t buy into that. There’s no question that there is a generation rising of potential consumers that are not going to find the printed paper as useful as previous generations. But we’re going to be putting out a print product for a long time to come. We firmly believe that consumers will value high quality journalism in some form in the future, and our job is develop the right product for them.

Trove’s primary goal for the Washington Post Co. seems to focus on generating an audience, with revenue concerns coming in as a secondary goal. This strategy seems to carry the motto,“If we build it, they will come,”(with revenue following shortly after). This differs greatly from Rupert Murdoch’s more traditional approach to content, audience and revenue generation. Do you think this new approach will be the golden standard in digital media?

VR: We’re heavily influenced by the success stories of the past few years. My boss, Don Graham, is on the Board of Facebook, and we think a viable business model can be developed if we truly have a differentiated product that attracts a loyal and substantive audience. So that’s what we’re aiming for.

What are the secrets to building a great online community for digital content?

VR: I hardly consider these secrets, here are 3 things I aim for: 1) Focus on a great first experience that rewards the community with something they can’t find anywhere else. 2) Recognize and reward those who actively contribute. 3) Develop a cycle that allows those contributions to enhance the experience for new first time and ongoing passive members of the community. It sounds simple, but it is quite hard to develop something that achieves these three things. Amazon customer reviews are something that heavily influenced my thinking here since I got to see its evolution (though I never directly worked on these systems at Amazon). If you look at Amazon reviews, they followed the above principles. The reviews helped first time visitors and passive ongoing visitors in a meaningful way. The Amazon site rewarded those who contributed reviews into the system by highlighting them, ranking them, and over time for the best reviewers, engaging them on first looks at products. And the more those engaged reviewers interacted with Amazon, the better than Amazon site became for everyone involved.

Following graduation, you began working for companies on the cutting edge of innovation and technology, such as American Management Systems, Amazon and Catalist. How is working for an established business like The Washington Post Company different from your past experiences?

VR: Each experience I’ve had is unique. At American Management Systems (AMS), I worked at an extremely forward looking consulting firm, and worked on developing customer care and billing systems for European telcos using technologies that had not been used before in those spaces. Experience with those technologies got my foot in the door at Amazon in 1998. At Amazon, the business’s rapid explosive growth forced every nook and cranny of the business to require technology in new and innovative ways from how to do customer service to running the largest e-commerce website. Catalist was probably more similar to AMS, in that more than anything, we brought modern technology to an industry (political campaigns) that had not fully realized what was possible. I’d say working at The Washington Post Company is a combination of both types of experiences. There are certainly aspects of online news media where simply taking smart uses of technology already in place in other industries (like e-commerce) can vastly improve the business. In other ways, what’s needed for the online news industry is a sea change, and true innovation is needed to get the type of customer engagement and advertising value to support the business model of the future. The biggest difference is the impact of the print business to the bottom line. That’s why Don and I think it is best to place my team and I outside the operating unit of the Washington Post.

What do you consider the most exciting aspect of your current responsibilities?

VR: I am always excited to build. I’ve built a great team and we’re extremely excited to show the world Trove, and rapidly iterate the Trove experience. I’m also very excited by SocialCode, our Facebook advertisng agency that we think is developing some incredible capability for advertisers. Meanwhile, the interactions with the journalists at the Post and Slate are really special for me. I’ve always had enormous respect for the Post since living in Charlottesville and getting the Post while I attended UVA, and to be able to now talk to the very folks I read voraciously while working on the campaign trail is just a huge treat.

You have spent most of your life in small college towns – first Norman, Oklahoma, (home of The Sooners) and then on to Charlottesville, Virginia, where you attended UVA. Do you miss the small town college life or do you find yourself better suited for a bigger city like Washington DC?

VR: That’s a tough question. I had a life changing experience when I was at American Management Systems and was shipped out to Dusseldorf Germany for 6 months. Though not the biggest or most exciting city in Germany, I had my first real experience with urban living. That’s heavily influenced me since. I feel very strongly that I am happiest in a place with good public transit, and a lot of walkability. Throughout our 7 years in Seattle, we had that. When we moved to D.C. 5 years ago, we moved to DuPont Circle and enjoyed living in the middle of everything. With the birth of our son, we decided we needed more space, so we’re in Chevy Chase MD, but still in walking distance to the Metro, groceries, restaurants and coffee shops.

Is the Metro DC area a good place to start technology companies? Please explain why or why not?

VR: There are pros and cons from my experiences these past 5 years, and I am mainly contrasting it to building a great team while at Amazon. We have great universities near by that produce excellent computer scientists who are the lifeblood of a new technology company. However I find that culturally, there’s such an emphasis on government consulting and contracting that it is a little harder to find the type of start up mindset that you look for when making those first few critical hires needed to launch an idea. At the size of team I lead here, it is not such a problem, since I’ve been able to use my extended network to find great people. But if I needed to hire at the volume I hired at Amazon, I think this area would be challenging to hire culture fits. That being said, DC is extremely attractive to people looking to move when considering spousal opportunities, and great schools for kids. So it is a mixed bag.

I know that you don’t like to plan out your career and have let faith guide you, but what’s next for you? Have you considered a career in politics?

VR: I am definitely firmly focused on how to best help The Washington Post Company. We have huge challenges in front of us as a company, and a mission that is meaningful to me. As for politics, working behind the scenes of campaigns while at Catalist definitely got most of that bug out of my system. I have enormous respect for people who choose a career in politics. I’d never say never, but it feels pretty remote.

I get most excited by opportunites where I feel I can make a big difference and that have an underlying social mission that accompanies a commercial one. Right now, the opportunity I have at the Post Company fits perfectly!