This week’s guest on Speaking Of is no stranger to the world of television. She’s Jesse Draper, creator and host of online talk show, “The Valley Girl Show.” The show profiles entrepreneurs and businesspeople, but in a format not often seen in Silicon Valley: on a pink-themed set, Draper draws her guests out of their shells in fun, light-hearted interviews that focus less on numbers and more on what the guests are like outside of their work lives.

A Silicon Valley native, Draper grew up around entrepreneurs. Her inspiration for The Valley Girl Show came from watching her father’s friends – her heroes – being grilled in television interviews, and noticing that no one was talking about the fun, creative sides of these entrepreneurs. She set out to create an entertaining business talk show, decided to play off of the stereotypical Southern California “valley girl” persona, and ran with the pink.

Now, most guests of The Valley Girl Show know to expect more than a traditional interview. Draper has hula hooped with MC Hammer, eaten escargot with Elon Musk, and played Guitar Hero with the game’s creator. Next up for the show that ends every episode with a dance party: Draper hopes to become the Ellen DeGeneres of business, broadening the show’s appeal to non-businesspeople in the hopes of inspiring anyone to start a company.

As always, we end on Draper’s advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. She’s going places with her “pink talk show,” so take a look as she explains how to take a leap and start a business.

Vibrating sex toys have been around for over a century, starting out as crude steam powered devices and now resembling something very cool that you might pick up at an Apple store. Sex toys have been the source of giggles, controversy, pleasure and up until the last 5 years, were not a mainstream product. They were devices you bought and had shipped in unmarked brown packaging or slipped into a toy store late at night to buy, but were not something you’d ever imagine picking up at Nordstrom or your local Wal-Mart.

Millions of men and women use them every day and yet, it isn’t something we talk about much. Considering there’s a lot of tech that go into these devices these days, I think it is a topic worth exploring and definitely something we should no longer be ashamed of.

Today’s episode of Speaking Of covers the journey of an amazingly brave entrepreneur, Ethan Imboden, Chairman of Jimmyjane, who set out to design something meaningful that would change people’s lives. He’s not the first to create a stigma free product. Many cool products have been sold in stores like Good Vibrations for years, but he’s the first to bring a safe, non-toxic, sexy, virtually stigma free brand to the mainstream market. His efforts were what I consider truly disruptive and changed the landscape for the availability of pleasure toys for consumers everywhere. I’ll never forget the day I saw one of his products in a local lingerie store and how I started stumbling into them at mainstream stores everywhere. Seeing these products available to people in comfortable settings brought me so much joy and I’m excited to be able to share his journey into creating such a wonderful product with all of you.

Ethan shares his journey of starting out as an electrical engineer, becoming a designer for Herman Miller and how he was encouraged to start revolutionizing the sex toy space. We learn about him as a DJ, world-traveler and the fact that his arch nemesis designer was the guy who designed Swingline staplers. At the end of the episode, we get a tour of some of his products that are quite stimulating to look at and at the time of the interview, he hinted at the launch of their new Form 4 product, which is now available.

We have one product giveaway for commenters. Best, most insightful comment on the sex toy industry wins one of Jimmyjane’s awesome products that they gave to us in the studio. The deadline is Sunday 6pm PT. You must be 18 years old to win.

Congrats to Taylor Alexander and Kay Pamela Ray for winning!

Ethan Imboden – Photo credit: Laist.com

We read a lot of news about amazing companies when they receive financing, have a change in leadership or launch new products, but we rarely get a glimpse into the companies and people that use those products and tools in incredibly meaningful ways. This week’s Speaking Of… is with Roxy owner Nic Alder, son of Lou Adler who’s famous for producing bands/acts such as Cheech and Chong, The Mamas and the Papas and films such as Up In Smoke and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Lou Adler is also the creator of the Roxy nightclub that Nic now runs and operates.

The Roxy is a 37 year old international brand that was born the same year as Nic and has been the destination for legendary bands through the decades. Nic grew up around musical legends such as Bob Marley, Guns and Roses, etc. and when he took over the club, he had a very different vision for how it should operate. Lou ran a very successful club using traditional promotional tools, but the club was eventually displaced by bigger and hotter venues in different parts of Hollywood and deeply impacted by the move of consumers searching for how to spend their time using Internet tools and ditching old media.

Even though Nic’s father was a naysayer and didn’t approve of Nic’s new ways of operating the business, Nic forged ahead and eventually his father came around once he saw the results. There’s no denying that Nic was correct in changing everything, because if it wasn’t for social media, the Roxy would no longer exist.

Now, I hate the word social media and really, the word social, because it is so overused. When I hear someone say they are a social media “expert”, I vomit in my mouth a little. However, The Roxy is a strong example of how focusing on making your venue/business social really can work and is absolutely necessary in order to be relevant in today’s fast moving world. Nic says that social media, to him, is a mirror of how your business is performing. It isn’t all about reaching out. He’s learned more about his business through real time interaction than he ever could have before. He places so much importance on this as part of his business that he’s hired Kyra Reed, co-founder of Markyr Media, and several other team members who’s sole job is to interact and build meaningful relationships with fans + customers.

Nic’s openness for embracing new widgets, applications and tools actually shocked me. He’ll throw anything against the wall to see if it sticks and he’s hoping more and more startups develop tools that he can put to use in the club. Nic is also thinking about coming to the Bay Area to host a Roxy Presents event where he brings in an awesome band and listens to startups pitch him on ideas. The top idea that wins would get a chance to be featured in his club. If this interests you, please let us know in the comments and we’ll pass it along.

The Roxy was the first venue of its type to use Groupon and they were pretty excited with the results, but experienced some backlash from some of the music community when they did it, but his experiments turned out to be a huge success, drawing in more customers and ultimately benefiting the bands. The venue has almost 140k fans on Facebook and 53k fans on Twitter (the most fans/followers for a venue of their kind online). This is a small number for a famous person or a big brand, but for a venue this is an astronomical number, especially when you consider the club’s capacity is 500 people.

This fan base they were able to build isn’t just local. It’s global and it caught the attention of Facebook. They published a case study this week to show how effective their ad campaigns have been. The community they have built has absolutely changed how they do business and most importantly, has made them profitable and sustainable once again.

I went down to LA to get a tour of the Roxy and was invited on a journey through what they call the “Social Strip”, which is a group of businesses that have banded together in order to help one another. You might think, “ahh, well, isn’t that nice?!”, well, it is, but business traditionally wasn’t done that way. The businesses on the Sunset Strip saw themselves as competition and refused to work with one another. What changed? Well, Twitter changed them.

The Roxy was the first to come online and they did one simple act that changed the history of entertainment venues on the Sunset Strip. They said hello and welcomed a fellow club when they started their Twitter account and gave them a shout out and a retweet. They started being social online with their neighbors. Eventually, they all met in person and shared their financial woes and banded together to help one another. Businesses in the Sunset Strip coalition include the world renowned 200 person venue The Viper Room, The Comedy Store and House of Blues and they are adding new businesses every month. When one venue is closed, they cross-promote the other venue and so on, which ultimately increases the happiness of their shared customer base.

The Sunset Strip almost died, but now people travel across town to experience a night of fun at these venues and we have Nic Adler’s determination and faith in Twitter, Facebook, Groupon and Topspin to thank. He put 3 years of continuous effort into using these tools, even when early signs didn’t pay off and eventually reached a tipping point that saved his business. Pretty cool and I think you’ll enjoy the interview with Nic Adler and Kyra Reed below:

My special guest on this week’s Speaking Of is actress Cindy Morgan. Cindy is known in the film world for two iconic roles: as Lacey Underall in Caddyshack and as Lora/Yori in the original TRON.

I didn’t mention this in my original overview of TRON Legacy, because I didn’t want to spoil much of the movie for everyone, but I was very saddened by the fact that two of my favorite characters (Bit and Yori) from the original TRON didn’t make an appearance in the sequel, when so many other main actors did, including Bruce Boxleitner (shown holding Yori in the original TRON poster).

When I asked about this, Cindy admitted that she’d only seen the sequel two days prior to our interview, and that it was like going to the prom without a date. She made a small cameo in Sam Flynn’s room on his poster and that was about it. Cindy is incredibly gracious though, understanding that movie producers have to make difficult decisions. She hopes she’ll appear in the next sequel – and I’d love to see that happen too.

Prior to acting, Cindy was on a path to become a mechanical engineer when she ended up working in a newsroom, editing film reels and operating sound boards. She made the jump into Hollywood shortly after and had her face on a billboard in less than a year.

In the video below, Cindy shares her favorite gadgets and applications,  and talks about her latest project – a book called, “From Catholic School to Caddyshack” that’s set to be published this spring. The book will contain unseen behind the scenes footage and previously untold stories about the making of Caddyshack.

Cindy closes the interview with some very wise advice for TechCrunch readers; advice I think you will all enjoy. Finally she turns the interview around on me, to my surprise, asking me a few questions about being a woman involved in technology.

I don’t know about you, but I think Cindy needs her own consumer tech show. She’s amazing – I really hope you enjoy our interview as much as I did:

It is 25 degrees here in NY and I feel like a wuss. We California people aren’t cut out for the weather out here. I’ve got thermal underwear (top & bottom), another shirt on top, pants, sweater, jacket, long coat, gloves and a hat on. So, the next time I bitch about it being 50 degrees and windy in San Francisco, I need to remind myself to STFU. These people endure some serious cold. Look at that photo to the left of Nick Gillespie. I think that’s what he wears when it is this cold.

So, what would draw me out of San Francisco weather to NY this time of year? The celebration of John Stagliano‘s acquittal presented by the Reason Foundation and hosted by this week’s TCTV guest Nick Gillespie. John Stagliano’s federal obscenity charges, his acquittal and this celebration warrants an entirely different post, so I’m not going to get into it too much here. The event was held at the famous NY’s sexy and edgy “The Box” and the attendees were incredible. We all came out to celebrate something we hold near and dear to our hearts: free speech.

Here’s a quote from a piece he wrote with Matt Welch that Gillespie read to us last night:

Our right to free speech is built upon the sacrifices of people who risked a hell of a lot — their livelihoods, their social standing, their freedom — to make it easier to speak freely. From colonial printer John Peter Zenger, who helped establish freedom of the press against the British crown, to Allen Ginsberg, whose generation-defining poem Howl endured countless censorship attempts, to Molly Norris, the cartoonist who has been driven into hiding after suggesting “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” as a response to death threats leveled against the creators of South Park for poking fun at religion, free speech is always endangered, always under siege.

Nick was the voice of Alyssa Milano for a few years. Even though he was a ghost writer for her, he’s yet to meet her, so if you know someone who knows someone, we should create a meeting between the two. I think it needs to happen.

Nick Gillespie is the Editor-in-Chief of Reason.com/tv which he co-created with Drew Carey. Reason.tv is the online video component of Reason magazine and reason.com. Gillespie dedicates much of his life to our liberty, and regardless of what political side you are on, he has some awesome advice on how to use your medium to get your message out. So, this is a special interview for all of you aspiring writers out there.

Listen to Nick’s views on net neutrality, being connected, who to write for and more here:

Greetings programs! I have the ultimate TRON interview for you: Jeff Bridges. I had 3 minutes with Bridges, so I asked him this question from TechCrunch fan “itbedave”:

I’m curious as to what Jeff Bridges thinks of blue screen acting then (original TRON) vs. now (TRON Legacy) – and if it’s “advancement” has enhanced or ruined acting in big Hollywood films?

Jeff, who plays Kevin Flynn, loved this question and went into detail about his feelings around motion capture. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to ask him if Flynn abides or if he drinks White Russians, but I think you’ll love his response. He’s not a TechCrunch reader yet, but maybe we can convert him. I’d love to see some Bridges in the comments, wouldn’t you?

Jeff’s interview takes place in the beginning of part 3 and he’s followed by Olivia Wilde who has some awesome advice for women who want to get into technology. I asked Olivia if she was aware of quora.com and she was not, but I’m sure that the folks over at Quora are stoked. Her name in the movie is spelled Quorra, but I imagine there will be a lot of people typing it in with one R. Regardless, it is always nice to have a super sexy, smart and kick-ass woman have a similar name to yours. That’s the kind of brand confusion we can all get down with.

Part 4 includes interviews with the director, co-producer, vehicle designer and the VFX team. TRON: Legacy is the first released feature length film that Joseph Kosinski has directed, which is a huge break from making commercials (Halo & Gears of War). Kosinski is also working on a remake of the 1976 science fiction film Logan’s Run. The original TRON light cycles were designed by Syd Mead who was also responsible for the city backgrounds and vehicle designs in Blade Runner. The light cycles got an upgrade and we got a few minutes with a member of the design team to discuss if light cycles could exist as real motorcycles in the real world. After the interview, Parker Brothers Choppers announced it had made functional replicas and for 55K, you can have your very own. Unfortunately, it looks like they aren’t the best at turning and they lack light trails, but hey, as long as you drive straight where ever you are going, you are good to go!

In case you missed Part 1 and 2 of our TRON Legacy coverage, those interviews with cast and crew can be seen in this post.

Interviews below:
Part 3

Part 4

Ok TRON fans, have I got a treat for you!

I just returned from a two day TRON press event with some awesome interviews from the creators, cast and crew of TRON: Legacy and the original TRON. I asked many of the questions I solicited from TechCrunch commenters  and everyone seemed to love them — especially Jeff Bridges. I mean, maybe they say this to everyone, but his handlers said they had not seen him that animated until our question came along.

Bridges was also pretty excited to talk about the tech involved in the making of TRON: Legacy. He took on the project of making the movie with enthusiasm when he realized he could do much of the acting without cameras by using motion capture.  Keep a look out for his interview in part 3&4 along with the super sexy and awesome Olivia Wilde!

Part one (video below) includes interviews with Steven Lisberger, the original writer and director of TRON and co-producer of TRON: Legacy. I asked Steven this question from TechCrunch reader “hmbguy”:

“[I] watched the original while in high school. It was a BIG reason I went into computing, the other being Tracy Kidder’s “Soul of a new machine”. I’m curious to know if the original cast thought their movie would have such a huge impact. From what I’ve heard that’s where we get cron on Unix as well.”

The second half of part one includes interviews with Bruce Boxleitner, who is well known for his roles as Alan Bradley and title role Tron in the original TRON movie as well as Bruce Sheridan in Babylon 5; and James Frain who plays Thomas Cromwell in Showtime’s The Tudors as well as Clu’s evil sidekick in TRON: Legacy. I loved all of my interviews, but I would have to honestly say that I loved theirs the most. They were super animated and Bruce even got into character for a moment, which was really cool. Boxleitner was genuinely stoked that TRON has inspired a lot of people to get into technology.

The first half of part 2 features Beau Garrett (House, former Guess model, Fantastic Four), Michael Sheen (Underworld, Frost/Nixon) and costume designer Christine Bieselin Clark who also designed costumes for Watchmen (she is an avid TechCrunch reader — go Christine!!)

My focus on the 2nd half is around the glamor of the TRON fashion world. Beau Garrett plays a role as one of the sirens (I’ll explain what these beautiful women do later..) in TRON and Michael Sheen is in charge of the End Of Line club. Christine led the team that put together the amazing outfits featured in the movie and she’s a true geek and was excited that we were actually interested in how everyone fit into those suits and still looked amazing; let’s put it this way — there’s a LOT of compression. She doesn’t advise that any of us try this at home and suggests that we become familiar with Home Depot and some reflective tape for our own suits. If you decide to take her advice, just be careful that you don’t end up looking like TRON Guy….

Picture this:

A hotel party thrown by Tony Hsieh of Zappos. A group of people, crowded around a laptop, laughing at a video of a doctor rapping and singing about ulcers. Suddenly one of the group starts rapping out loud to the video. Now people are laughing so hard that they are crying….

This is how I came to know ZDoggMD, a rare – and virtually undiscovered – talent that I would now like to gift to the TechCrunch community.

ZDogg is a genuine doctor who uses YouTube as a creativity outlet to teach people about things like safe sex, delivering bad news, stayin’ healthy on vacation and hemorrhoids. When Hsieh asked how the world of being a doctor was going for him, ZDogg answered that he loved it but was frustrated with the fact that he couldn’t be himself. He told Tony that he’d love an outlet to share the raps he composes with a wider audience, hopefully to give people a good laugh but also to teach them a medical thing or two. Tony, being the zen like guy that he is, responded, “Why don’t you do it then?”. And so he did. The results are in the links above.

And, as an added bonus, the special song he made for our entrepreneurs and VCs kicks off my interview with ZDoggMD below.

Simple decisions like these are sometimes the most important choices we can make in our lives. They often seem meaningless at the time, and yet each choice we make leads us down different forks in our life. Sometime they intersect with, and change, the lives of others as well.

For Jen McCabe, a small decision that changed her life forever was deciding to drive tired, a decision that could have cost her life, not to mention those of others. Fortunately, Jen’s decision – and the accident which followed – wasn’t fatal, but it did destroy her car and shatter her knee. It also made her an entrepreneur.

When I met Jen, I was taken back by her direct and real nature. When I pick guests for “Speaking Of…” I look for character and, more important, a story that defines who they are and which might benefit our community if shared.

Following Jen’s small decision to keep driving and not pull over, she had to learn how to walk again and lost her ability to do things for herself for nearly a year. She realized there are thousands of things you take for granted and that you can often feel alone. Those realizations inspired her to co-found a company called Contagion Health that produced imoveyou.com, a exercise challenge site for helping those that you love get the motivation they need to get their health on track again.

Jen won’t drive tired again, but she wouldn’t change what happened to her. It helped to define who she is and what she wants to do with her life.

Video below (with some awesome advice for entrepreneurs towards the end).

In a way, Ready, Set Bag is tied into the competitive gardening thing too, but you’ll have to watch the video (below) to find out why. Sufficed to say, sometimes life presents you with very interesting opportunities if you are willing to see them and act on them.

Along their journey, the filmmakers discovered an innovative way to change how independent films are distributed while raising money for charities. Not only are they the first independent filmmakers to distribute their film using Groupon to sell tickets but they also give $1.00 for each ticket sold to the local food bank where the Groupon offer was redeemed.

For the first time, a filmmaker doesn’t have to wait until the day of the screening to figure out how many people are going to show up. Thanks to Groupon, they will know two weeks  in advance if their theater will sell out. In Ready Set Bag’s case, they also knew exactly how many food bank meals their ticket sales would create.

After this initial screening, they’ve made giving to local food banks an integral part of marketing their movie. With a portion of their ticket sale going to feeding someone locally, movie-goers can feel good about donating to something very close to home, as opposed to contributing to a nationwide or worldwide organization and wondering what happened to it. If you want to know where your contribution went, you can drive to your local food bank and just ask.

I’d love to see more businesses figure out ways to attach social change to their business models. Ready Set Bag could have been marketed the old fashioned way with tons of marketing dollars spent, but instead they decided to focus on local deals and local charities to promote their film, creating meals for those in need as a bi-product. The business wins, the theater wins, hungry people win and the viewers win.

In addition to film distribution, imagine if we started doing this more with virtual goods. Zynga experimented with this idea and its community of players raised 1.5 millionin relief funds for Haiti over five days. I don’t have insight into what Zynga made as a by-product of running that promotion, but I imagine the business benefited as well. If the benefit wasn’t profits, certainly it was a huge community and retention win.

Social giving doesn’t always make sense for a business and can be quite distracting, but if it can work, I urge entrepreneurs to explore it as an option. You might find that it cuts down on marketing costs like Ready Set Bag discovered and as Oren says, that’s a good day at the office.

First some background. Micah’s company, Graphic.ly (a really cool digital comic book community), is based in Boulder, Colorado – a town that’s starting to get a serious reputation as a hotbed of startups…

There are numerous interesting venture-backed companies that have emerged from Boulder, including SimpleGeo (multi-homed in SF as well), OneRiot, Lijit, Sendgrid and now graphic.ly. Meanwhile cool companies like Kid Robot and Threadless have opened up Boulder offices. When I asked him what makes the town so special, Micah responded, “Boulder is amazing. I think something like 1 in 10 people are involved in a startup.”

I originally met Micah at a Twiistup retreat, where we bonded over an extremely large game of Werewolf (a game based on human dynamics around the truth, lies, problem solving and irrational thinking) that lasted until 7am (yes, this really is how some CEOs and VCs bond). Micah’s apparent unwillingness to lie during the game really struck me – while his Wonder Woman’s lasso confused many of the other players at the table. Micah was a hard one to figure out, but in the end, he was indeed telling the truth and never once lied during the game. Luckily for him, he never drew a Werewolf card so was never forced into dishonesty: my guess is that he would have stood up and said, “I’m the wolf!” and would have been immediately lynched by the villagers. I’ll have to play a few more games with him to figure out what his wolf game (wolf face?) looks like, but that’s my hunch.

Micah wears his story on his sleeves, almost literally. I was immediately fascinated by his tattoos, because it is something that maybe some entrepreneurs have, but they must hide them under long sleeve shirts, because I rarely see them. All of Micah’s tats are really great, but two of the tattoos, a bag of money and a MRI scan really hit a chord in my heart.

We all read Star magazine (of course I carefully hide it behind Scientific American on airplanes) and are so fascinated with so-called sex and drug “scandals” that it’s interesting when someone confronts the issues head-on. Admitting to everyone that you were once an addict takes away the intrigue and the power.

Micah was once an addict and he wears the fact proudly on his human sleeves. That’s the reason Micah has vowed to always try to tell the truth. I’ve asked him at least one dozen times if he was ok with me telling this story and he’s always responded with a strong yes.

To Micah, it’s important that people realize entrepreneurs are human. Just like those celebrities you see in Star magazine, they fall — and sometimes they fall hard. But then they have the ability to pick up the pieces and try again and that’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s not giving up. I’m blown away by Micah’s willingness to share such a personal story with us and I’m sure it is going to hit home for a lot of TechCrunch readers who may have once had a problem or are even still working through drug or alcohol related issues.

I hope that Micah’s stories – and his tattoos – are as inspirational to you as they were to me.

One of the greatest things about TechCrunch is that they celebrate and reward each writer’s own voice rather than forcing every writer to sing from the same hymn-sheet. They encourage differences of opinion. While deviantART isn’t Erick Schonfeld’s cup of tea, I’m definitely a huge fan. I have five pictures up on my wall that I’ve purchased from the site, and they’re absolutely beautiful.

Deviant recently passed the milestone of their 100 millionth submission or “Deviation” as they’re called. I think that’s pretty cool, but what I think is even cooler, is that they just celebrated their 10th year of being in business. I don’t know how old Angelo is, but I imagine that’s about 1/3rd of his life. For a startup entrepreneur, that’s a very long time.

DeviantArt was bootstrapped with 15k in cash, was profitable immediately and the company ran without any additional investment for 7 years. That too is pretty damn cool.  Today on Alexa it has a US traffic rank of 104, making it one of the country’s highest trafficked sites. And yet what’s interesting is that people think of them as being small. Maybe that’s the charm and what’s so special about their site for artists – it doesn’t feel large.

During my interview with Sotira, we traveled back to the site’s roots. DevaintART was originally formed during an era where there was no such thing as a social network. Their artist profile pages, ability to add friendships and commenting system was new and filled an amazing market need for people to connect, share and sell their works. Sotira’s inspiration came from the early days of creating a site for Winamp skins. Their artists made other forms of art such as paintings and were looking for a digital home. Ten years later, you have one of the largest and most vibrant community-driven art sites online.

What advice does Sotira have for new entrepreneurs? For one thing, don’t be weak. He feels that the new crop of entrepreneurs has it a lot easier than he did and needs to do more with very little. He also feels that his generation built platforms while the new generation will be all about marketing, creating the most powerful generation of marketers the world has ever seen.

The title of the episode is Speaking Of… Flying, because of Angelo’s love for flying RC helicopters and the fact that our interview takes place in a cockpit of a plane. How cool is that?

This week’s episode of Speaking Of… is with the originator of the modern Batman movies and creator of the Batman franchise, Michael Uslan.

I’ve found that you never know where or when you’re going to receive amazing entrepreneurial advice. You have to keep your eyes, ears and heart open and then you’ll stumble into some amazing people who have extraordinary stories to tell that you can learn from. Entrepreneurial advice for tech companies doesn’t need to come from someone who’s been in our trenches. Businesses are businesses and we can all learn from each other, no matter what industry we’re in.

Michael Uslan’s story is the typical story of success. From the outside, it seems like an obvious win, but from the inside there was a long and painful struggle to get to the other side. It took Michael 10 years of pitching a dark and serious Batman in order to get it made into the first movie. It was written up as an “overnight success”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Here is one of my favorite parts of our interview:

“I’m a blue collar kid from New Jersey. My Dad was a mason, my mom was a bookkeeper. I couldn’t buy my way into Hollywood. I didn’t know anyone in Hollywood, didn’t have any relatives in Hollywood. My last name isn’t Warner. I only have one brother and for me its the story of how I, at every opportunity, tried to put my foot in the door and tried to make a path – carve a path. If I had said when I was a kid, “Oh, I’m going to produce the greatest Batman movie ever – dark and serious”, might have well as said I was going to jump across the Grand Canyon. You can’t do it. But, if you keep taking steps that lead you on a certain path, and don’t let anyone – friends or anyone else veer you off course, you can, if you have the passion. If you have a high level for frustration, you can do it. That’s how I did it. These dark serious Batman movies, the Batman franchise, was built on my bloody knuckles.”

Michael tours colleges and universities to share his story and is releasing his autobiography, “The Boy Who Loved Batman” on Chronicle Books in fall of 2011.

Andregg grew up in Arizona. There’s a song by The Orb called Little Fluffy Clouds that describes the light-pollution-free Arizonan sky quite perfectly, with amazing clouds, sunsets and stars. Most Arizonans – at some point in their lives – will lay on the hood of their car and gaze towards the grandness of those fluffy clouds and the Milky Way, but most probably won’t come to the same conclusions that William did about it all.

William yearned to travel beyond the clouds to the stars, but become perplexed by the fact that he most likely wouldn’t make it due to an unfortunate condition that plagues us all — mortality. He knew that in order to reach the stars, which he so desperately wanted to do, he must dedicate most of his life to prolonging and increasing human lifespans so that he or others like him might have a chance to go where no man has truly gone before. In order to go big, he went very small. Our DNA.

Halcyon Molecular has come out of stealth mode, letting William tell his story in order to encourage a few good business women and men to join their plight to end aging. They’ve discovered an inexpensive and most importantly, fast way to sequence the entire human genome. If commercialized successfully, their discovery will change the world of medicine as we know it and increase our chances of living even longer.

Biotech startups are rare now, but we’re going to start seeing more and more of them pop up over the next decade. Technology that was once incredibly expensive is now becoming obtainable and the next wave of tech startups will delve into the largest market of all, human health. William is the only person I know with one of the world’s most powerful electron microscopes operating out of his garage, which is pretty damn cool.

What about frogs? Well, the dissection of frogs in high school almost led to William avoiding an entire career in biotech, which struck me as one of many things we should consider revising in our public education system. We need more Williams, not fewer.

(Exciting Note! Speaking Of… is now available via RSS/iTunes Podcast: )

What I find fascinating about Brian’s journey is the cross over from being an engineer (There.com and creator of iGoogle) to being involved in advising and investing in businesses.

There are a few VCs with engineering backgrounds, but Brian’s from a new wave of social.com engineers crossing over into the business world. Just like the various investment and entrepreneurial “mafias” from PayPal, etc., we’re going to start seeing more ex-Google, Facebook, Zynga and Twitter business success stories in the years to come, and I think Brian is living the dream of many engineers who are toiling away at their investment egg as we speak. I believe Brian can provide inspiration for all of them, giving them ideas for a few options as to what to do next.

Brian has a passion for all types of gaming, especially strategy board games. Games such as The Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride and Through the Ages are starting to penetrate the entrepreneurial world due to people like Singerman, Reid Hoffman and David Hornick. I have some theories forming about gaming and business, but the most common theme I’ve seen is the love for the common framework that everyone shares with these games. Perhaps, in a world of subjectivity, there’s comfort in determining winners by purely objective standards.

There’s only one thing Brian loves more than gaming and that’s discovering and funding companies focused on health. He believes the only market bigger than the Internet is our longevity and that tech entrepreneurs should do more in this space. And he’s not the only one – as Steven Levy explains in Wired Magazine:

‘If [Bill Gates] were a teenager today, he says, he’d be hacking biology. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to develop his own expertise in disease and immunology. “If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start — biological molecules.” Which is why the hacker spirit will endure, he says, even in an era when computers are so ubiquitous and easy to control. “There are more opportunities now,” he says. “But they’re different opportunities. They need the same type of crazy fanaticism of youthful genius and naivetè that drove the PC industry — and can have the same impact on the human condition.’

As for Gandhi, well, you’ll have to watch the video to see what he has to do with all of this.

(Previous episodes of Speaking Of… here)

Guest post by Cyan Banister…

I’ve met a lot of engineers and entrepreneurs from Detroit and there’s an underlying vibe that resonates from all of them: a specific attitude or work ethic – possibly left over from the automotive industry – that either causes them to try to work harder than their fathers or go against the grain trying to figure out how they can live life to its fullest.

As Jay Adelson takes his first break from work in 20 years, we get to time travel with him go back to the land of Henry Ford (the ultimate Detroit entrepreneur) to see where people like Jay come from.

Interviewing Jay (founder of Equinix, Revision3 and CEO of Digg for five years) with his brother Scott was a real treat, because we don’t often get to see the family that surrounds the entrepreneur. With the exception of Ron Conway, who works with his sons, family is often under represented in the entrepreneurial story.

One point Jay makes in the extended version of the interview (which we’ll publish later) is that there are amazing entrepreneurs coming from the midwest that lack the same support structure you see in cities like San Francisco, New York, etc. Although, there’s no solution offered quite yet, he proposes that instead of people yearning to get away, some of these companies may start sprouting up. As Jay says, there is a bouquet of Kevin Roses in the Midwest waiting to get funded.

(Watch Episode One of Speaking Of… With Cyan Banister – featuring RockJazz pianist Eric Lewis – here.)

I’m extremely excited to bring the TechCrunch community a new show that features the human side of business.  Speaking Of… explores the side of entrepreneurs you’ve never seen before. It’s an organic show that will grow from episode to episode and build on concepts throughout the year: one guest will inspire the invitation of another guest and theme, which will in turn inspire the next… and so on.

The first episode of Speaking Of… was shot at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York and features the disruptive jazz musician, Eric Lewis (aka ELEW). Eric’s an amazing musician: he’s played at TED, won the Thelonious Monk competition, toured with Wynton Marsalis and played at the Whitehouse for the First Lady and President Obama. He tells us the story behind how chess hustling helped him become a better business person in the music world.

In the spirit of building on each episode, ELEW has created the ongoing theme music for this show and you’ll see it in future episodes during the pre- and post- credits.

The first episode is embedded below, and future episodes will be posted every Thursday over at http://www.techcrunch.tv