PostDesk

PostDesk is an interview podcast whose guests range from the founder of a web security company to an anime retailer at MCM Expo. What holds it together is the line of questioning. Guests are asked how their work started, what changed along the way and what it would take to grow further. Matthew Prince, CEO and founder of Cloudflare, gives a plain answer to the first of those. He and two co-founders started the company because of a simple gap: the internet's top 10,000 websites had ways to stay fast and safe, and the other 250 million mostly did not. The goal, as he puts it, was to make that protection easy and affordable for anyone with a website. He also says what Cloudflare is not built for, and sends sites that stream their own video to traditional content delivery networks such as Akamai or Limelight. His bigger hope is that data pooled across the network could make denial of service attacks something people only read about in history books. Ben Parr, a past Mashable contributor, gets a different kind of origin question. In 2008 he was a product manager writing on a personal blog when Mashable noticed him and took him on as a part-time writer, and later he moved to the valley. The talk then turns to what a writer needs now: an audience, connections, a distinct voice and opinions one is not afraid to put in writing. Asked what it takes to start a startup, he names fearlessness, a streak of insanity and the talent to actually build things. He has little patience for so-called startups that have not written a line of code. Craig Fletcher of Multiplay admits his view of eSports is a dim one. Poor sportsmanship and bad language at tournaments, he says, have to be stamped out before sponsors treat the scene as a serious professional prospect. He wants better players, better tournaments and better journalism, and says he is glad to see newcomers taking an interest. He also wants the good stories told, like players who find out they are good at Halo or Call of Duty and end up flying to Los Angeles for a world final. The Tokyo Toys interview, tied to MCM Expo, puts the same questions to fan culture. A guest who goes by the Pocky Ninja remembers when the event had only a small anime corner and one or two cosplayers were a big deal. Now there are more cosplayers, games, sponsors and retailers, and anime has gone from a few videotapes to DVDs, streaming and manga sold in mainstream shops. Listeners get to compare: the same questions put to insiders in very different fields.