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AP: Why restaurants? They're a tough business. Rancic: We're inspired. My wife was born and raised in Italy until she was about 9 and then she came to America and her mom was a great cook and they have great recipes and whenever her mom would come into town we would have all these friends just randomly showing up at our house and eventually we figured out why. They wanted mama's cooking. So we took some of her mom's recipes and we partnered with an amazing group of people. AP: Tell me about this competition for a Super Bowl spot. Rancic: Essentially what we're doing is calling for small business owners to go to the website to submit their story, they get 600 characters to tell us about their business and then what we do is we turn it over to the 8,000 employees at Intuit and they narrow down the process and eventually we come to the final four and when we get to the final four small business owners we turn it over to America and America gets to vote, and in the end one small business owner will get a fully paid, fully produced commercial that's gonna run in the biggest football game of the year. AP: After winning the first season of "The Apprentice," what experience do you bring to the table? Rancic: Well, I'm a small business owner. Obviously many people may remember me as the first winner of "The Apprentice" but prior to that I was an entrepreneur. I started my first business when I was in college and then getting my lucky break was when Donald Trump hired me on. So it's kind of serendipitous. Now I'm in the position where I'm going to be able to provide a lucky break to a small business owner to showcase their business on the biggest platform in the world with all the big boys, all the automotive companies and the beer companies and all these companies that are on that huge stage. I'm gonna pay my luck forward so it's really kind of come full circle for me.
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