THE KIM KOMANDO SHOW
America’s Digital Goddess
Saturdays 10a-1p
komando.com | Kim's weekly three-hour call-in talk radio show is heard on over 450 stations. In addition, she does a Digital Minute radio feature five days a week; has written nine books about life in the digital age; sends out 5 million e-mail newsletters weekly; and authors a widely syndicated newspaper column, which also runs in USA Today.com. She does all of this, while raising a son and operating a growing media empire, with her husband and associate, Barry Young.
A pioneer in marketing and training for home computers, Kim won the 2007 Gracie Award and was voted by Talker's Magazine "Woman of the Year." She has built a media legacy driven by her passion for "all things digital." Born and raised in New Jersey, her father was a successful businessman. Her mother was part of the team that developed the UNIX operating system. Business and computer technology were a staple at home.
She graduated from high school at 16 and Arizona State University when she was 20. By then, she had set up a successful business, training people to use their computers. “I’ll never forget one of my first classes. It had about 20 people in it, and in the front row was the president of a bank and next to him was an 8-year-old. I told the class to turn on their computers, and the kid leaned over to the bank president and said, ‘It’s that switch over there…’”
That business made Kim realize just how universal the computer age had become. She began envisioning her empire, which would come in less than 10 years. After stints at IBM and AT&T in sales, Kim joined Unisys, selling mainframe systems to big clients, including Motorola, Hughes and, in particular, Honeywell.
Later, Kim decided to focus on a column about computers for the Arizona Business Gazette. “I called this gal at that paper every day for a year,” she remembers. “I knew there was a need for a regular column on computers. No one was doing this.
"Eventually, I was given a small column to write, and soon after, I tried to syndicate it to other papers.” The newspaper column led to a call-in talk show about computers, which aired late at night on KFYI in Phoenix. It was small beginnings, but the bug had bitten her. On Jan. 1, 1992, only seven years after graduating from college, she made a big career change: dishing out advice to consumers via print and radio outlets.
When she told her folks, she said, they were convinced she was out of her mind. The column and radio show combined earned her only $60 a week. Today, it has over 450 radio outlets and close to 10 million weekly listeners. The show receives 50,000 calls per hour. |
