Jay Adelson is the CEO at Revision3, CEO at Digg, and founder of Equinix. There are many doubts in life, but when it comes to this man's successes, there is no question about his achievements and vision.

Read about his achievements in this interview and his blog.

We had the pleasure of hearing him speak at this year's Web 2.0 expo, April 15-18 2007, Moscone West, San Francisco where he spoke at the keynote, "Built to Last or Built to Sell: Is there a difference?"
Stay tuned for the Session Description.

You have clearly exemplified that CEO material is not reliant on age, what were the primary factors that led to your success and capability in handling this kind of responsibility? “They say behind a successful man is a woman?”

Well, I am old enough to have been around the block. And having worked for startups during the first boom, I learned a few things about how to manage and run a successful company. With Digg, I was originally involved mainly as a mentor and co-conspirator to Kevin Rose to brainstorm some early ideas and finally providing the motivation he needed to get a prototype together quickly. I saw the potential in the idea for Digg right away and Digg began to grow very quickly. So I agreed to come on as full-time CEO to help out with the scaling and capital fundraising.

In 1998, I formed my first company, Equinix. That was my catalyst for my career as an entrepreneur. Equinix is now a leader in internet exchange and collocation/network infrastructure space.

And I couldn’t have done all this without the love and support of my wife Brenda Shea, who even when our first daughter, Rowan was born, agreed to support the risk I was taking in starting a new business. So yes, there was a woman behind me.

With the explosion of Web 2.0 apps and talks of Web 3.0 around the corner, where do you see our current market heading?

We have seen a tremendous amount of interest in greater user interaction with sites as part of collaborative communities. I believe that this trend will continue. Sites like MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, and Del.icio.us were responsible for introducing these collaborative concepts to the masses. It’s not a technology revolution but rather it’s a change of user acceptance of collaborative tools. As implementation of these sharing aspects becomes more intuitive for users to adopt, we will truly start to see the power of information sharing.

With Digg, we are headed into different areas where a collaborative filter will also be useful. Right now, we have only implemented a fraction of Digg's overall vision. Expect to see improvements in Digg when it comes to sharing information between people within the site, in years to follow.

Revision3, home to Diggnation, has become more and more prominent in the new media landscape. What factors are contributing to its success?

I think we know our audience extremely well. The fact that in a relatively short period of time, we are able to get approximately 2 million programs downloaded per month demonstrates that our Internet TV programs are striking a chord with the audience.

Diggnation is a runaway hit. We do technology programming, but Revision3 is also moving toward a much broader audience with shows like “Ctrl+alt+chicken,” a light hearted cooking show, “iFanboy,” a show that profiles comic book culture, and “NotMTV,” our very own music show that was basically born out of frustration.

We wanted to be able to make shows that are frank and irreverent about the topics we geek out about on a daily basis. This is clearly something that people want and advertisers have been excited about. We get through to a demographic that can be very hard to reach.

Does Revision3 see Youtube as a competitor in this online media space and what are your long-term goals?

We have no intention to compete with YouTube. We feel that they address a different, user-contributed, and short-form market. Revision3 is a network focused on creating original programming. If you log into YouTube, you are most likely to see user-generated content or something that was produced professionally and given copyright permission for their site.

To produce and distribute on-demand audio and video technology entertainment content that reflects the changing demands and sophistication of today’s consumer, you first need to make it available and viewable in as many ways as possible.

At Revision3, we do this through multiple distribution partners, such as BitTorrent, Odeo, iTunes, and Palm’s mobile portal which gives us accessibility through their internet-enabled devices. In fact, we consider YouTube to be a partner in this, acting as yet another distribution method for our content.

Everything is open platform and licensed for re-distribution through Creative Commons. We can get fresh content out to as many people that want it. With RSS, our hardcore fans are able to get new episodes to what they subscribe to as soon as they are posted. It’s really an exciting time to be able to do all this with the talent I work with both on camera and off. This is ever more prevalent because the costs relative to television production are so inexpensive.

We all have production backgrounds at Revision3 so the short answer is we believe our production standards make our brand stand out and match the level of commitment and talent that comes from our on screen hosts.

In light of Revision3’s purpose to provide content for new audiences, what are your plans to penetrate other vertical markets like the baby-boomers?

Our audience now definitely enjoys an edgy feel. But while our content is irreverent and funny, it’s also witty so I’m confident we’ll establish continued interest from a wide reaching demographic. On that note, in development, we do have shows which are catered to wide variety of enjoyed topics such as cooking, music, and news, just to name a few.