Reece Pacheco

Reece Pacheco is the founder and CEO of Shelby.TV, a browser-based service that provides a new way to discover and enjoy web videos. Shelby takes all the videos your friends share across Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr and pulls it into one personally curated channel of videos just for you.
 
Shelby.TV was born out of our passion for video. My co-founder and I have been working on video projects since college and have always been bullish for online video. At the time of its inception, we were actually building a different company: TeamHomeField.com, an online video platform for sports, which is still running today. We were seeing crazy growth in video, traction in tablet computing, the future of connected TV's, and the power of social networking. It ended up manifesting itself in Shelby, a simple way to discover great video.
 
We don't spend too much energy worrying about how to be different from our competitors. Instead, we aim for truly original thought as we build Shelby and that tends to be the best way to stand out - just having a strong thesis from the get go and pursuing it relentlessly. While YouTube is competitive, it is also complimentary. It is a tremendous platform and feeds tons of content to Shelby.TV. That being said, YouTube can't harness the same data we can as a third party and they can't incorporate all the different video players we accept into one experience.
 
The Internet is going to continue to be deeply integrated into everything we do. Our devices - phones, tablets etc. - will be the remote controls of our lives, whether they're used to start the oven or control your TV, the devices will be there. These devices collect our data, store it in the cloud and give us our experiences wherever we go.
 
The literal definition of "Innovate" is 1. Make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products. 2. Introduce something new, especially a product."
 
I tend to take it as such, but apply it to everything we do at Shelby. Changing the way we think. Changing the way we work. Changing the way we build, in an effort to introduce something new to the world.
 
The most important thing that the government can do is to maintain a free and open Internet. It is the most revolutionary innovation of our lifetimes by far and its power is in its openness. The government could also do more for small businesses by focusing on building their companies, creating jobs and building businesses.