Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/81015
what startups and entrepreneurial life have been for me for the last 15 years. V&WM: After your success with IBG, what brought you to VinTank? PM: It was a couple of things. I felt that I hadn't achieved my goal at IBG, which was solving the wine industry's problems through digital. The wine industry was challenged because (its members) were, and are, unable to touch their custom- ers every day. This was true for wineries, retailers and the distribu- tors. I knew I could do better and I worked very hard to make that hap- pen with VinTank. After leaving IBG, I wasn't sure what direction I wanted to go in. I had a lot of CEO positions offered to me in technology, as well as some general manager positions at wineries, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to do either of these. My decision to go to VinTank in 2008 really came out of my surveying my network. I went to my most trusted mentors and asked them what I should do next. Every one of them said that I was the guy that brings the future to today, and that they expected me to continue with that path. With that backing, and the promise of my first few clients, I made the jump. V&WM: What does VinTank do? PM: When I started VinTank, Coppola, which was a perfect blend of film and wine. Eventually, I left film and continued down the wine path. After Coppola, I went in start- up mode with Wineshopper.com. V&WM: What appealed to you about a startup environment? PM: There is a lot of creativ- ity that you have to do in a startup. You have to think out of the box, and manage constant and fast- moving change, while always thinking ahead. I found my train- ing as a director in film school was really about managing chaos; that is WWW.VWM-ONLINE.COM it was a digital think tank. We focused on the problems we had to solve, and how to figure them out. What VinTank did and what Vin- Tank does are very different things. What we are now has evolved to be the digital answering machine for social media. We collect every con- versation about a winery, wine, and related to wine, and present them to wineries on a unified platform. We do social listening, social media management and social CRM (Cus- tomer Relationship Management). We are the social platform for the wine industry. V&WM: What is social listening? PM: We listen to the entire cat- egory of wine on the Internet. With Social Connect, we listen to over 40,000 keywords about wine, their misspellings, their synonyms and their abbreviations. We collect this data and present it to winer- ies. What makes us unique is that we listen to every single conversa- tion from the category, and analyze over 300 million conversations. That gives us a rich perspective on what the customer looks like based on what they are talking about. It's not something that any of the other (social CRM) platforms can do. We don't want to narrow our focus; we listen to everything, and allow the customer to choose what information to pull from – whether it's about their brand, their com- petitor, varietal, region, sub-region, brand, vineyard designation, etc. By listening to all the conversations about the customer, we can start understanding who they are by what they say. V&WM: You have quite a history as a revolutionary in wine technol- ogy. Why do you think technology is so important in today's wine industry? PM: People ask me this question a lot. The reality is that we live in PAUL MABRAY'S RESUME Birthplace: Tacoma, Wash. Moved to Napa in 1982 Education: B.A. in English and film, San Francisco State University Current Position: Chief Strategy Officer, VinTank Previous Experience: Project manager, Niebaum-Coppola. Senior director of trade development, Wineshopper.com. Founder, Inertia Beverage Group. Personal: Proud father of Finn, India and Dryden, and partner of Angelica. He's a voracious reader, and loves to play Xbox in his spare time. SEPT - OCT 2012 VINEYARD & WINERY MANAGEMENT 83