 What does it take to start a successful business? We’re working the phone to find the answers by calling entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and their friends and foes. This podcast features our conversations.Primary Format :
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VV Show #60 - Larry Kramer of MarketWatch Download the MP3.
Today's media executives plotting to charge for their content would do well to hear how Larry Kramer beat Jim Cramer's TheStreet.com by resisting pressure to put most content behind a pay wall while not relying entirely on advertising. To the average consumer, MarketWatch.com seemed to have come out of nowhere during the late 1990s to quickly establish itself as one of the leading sources of online financial information. For MarketWatch founder Larry Kramer, it repres ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #59 - Barry Silbert of SecondMarketDownload the MP3.
Any shareholder in a startup can tell you there's a big difference between paper wealth and cash. Short of an IPO or outright acquisition, there are few options to cash out for the shareholders of even the most thriving private companies. Barry Silbert is determined to change that with his company SecondMarket -- an exchange like the NASDAQ for private stock and other illiquid assets. He founded the company in 2004 focused on restricted stock, and quickly reached prof ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #58 - Siamak Taghaddos and David Hauser of GrasshopperDownload the MP3.
"Dial 1 for sales, dial 2 for support..." Ten years ago it cost over $10,000 to get a phone system with the advanced options we're used to hearing when we call big companies. Having a professional-sounding phone system was a surprisingly big challenge for small businesses short on cash. Enter Siamak Taghaddos and David Hauser who launched GotVMail to offer that service at rates starting at only $10 per month in 2003 as they were graduating college. They launched thei ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #57 - Fabrice Grinda of OLXDownload the MP3.Craigslist seems unbeatable. It's often blamed (or celebrated) for destroying the classifieds business that helped keep American newspapers afloat. Now second-time Venture Voice guest Fabrice Grinda is seeking to dominate online classifieds with OLX, his latest venture. Unlike Craigslist, OLX is translated into many languages and has a global focus. OLX is completely ad supported so there are no fees for job or real estate listings as there are on Craigslist. Still, it soun ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #56 - Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek SoftwareDownload the MP3.
Joel Spolsky first came on Venture Voice over three years ago to discuss his company which he launched in a very different way from most entrepreneurs. Rather than start with the big idea and pay lip service to building a great team, Joel focused on getting great programmers first. The ideas came second. Good thing because his big idea, a content management system called City Desk, never took off. Instead it was his small idea, software to track bugs in other software ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #55 - Graham Hill of TreeHuggerDownload the MP3.
Graham Hill started the blog TreeHugger to cover green issues in 2003. After a steady climb in traffic and advertising, Graham sold the company to Discovery Communications in 2007 for $10 million. Since launch and even after the acquisition, Graham ran his business virtually. Graham lived in different cities from New York to Barcelona while working many hours to grow his company. His team of writers, ad sales people and developers chatted over Skype, got paid through ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #54 - Tim Westergren of PandoraDownload the MP3.
It takes only a few seconds to customize a radio station on Pandora. Its founder Tim Westergren has been struggling for almost a decade to make it that way. Pandora was five years in the making before it streamed a single song to a user. For over two of those years the company was completely broke. While Tim convinced employees to defer over $1 million in salaries, Pandora underwent several changes in name, product and revenue models. Now Pandora is a leading online r ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #53 - David Cohen of TechStarsDownload the MP3.
The title financier conjures images of mahogany desks and million dollar checks for most. But for anyone pitching to David Cohen's TechStars, the outcome is getting accepted to what's essentially a summer camp for entrepreneurs in Colorado and being offered a check of $18,000 or less in exchange for 6% of the startup. This two year old program is part of a new trend in structured angel investing and mentoring that was started by Paul Graham's Y Combinator. Two compani ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #52 - Sam Wyly of Maverick Capital, Green Mountain Energy, Michaels Stores and Sterling Software Download the MP3.
Not to be called a one trick pony, Sam Wyly's turned himself into a billionaire by starting and growing companies in technology, oil, retail and even in the restaurant industry. Coming from a modest upbringing, Sam worked in sales at IBM and Honeywell before founding University Computing in 1963 at age 29 with just "$1,000 and an idea" as he puts it in his book of that title. The company IPOed and grew to over 5,000 people. Sam hired CEOs and stayed an entrepreneur. H ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #51 - Jeff Stewart of Mimeo, Monitor110 and Urgent CareerDownload the MP3.
Jeff Stewart needed that done yesterday. Jeff became an entrepreneur when he founded the web consultancy Square Earth in 1995. Only three years later he became a serial entrepreneur by starting Mimeo, a service that lets you send a file directly from your computer to be printed, bound and shipped overnight. Mimeo struggled in the dot com crash of 2000-2001 just as it was getting off the ground. Jeff was able to pull Mimeo though the downturn despite almost running out ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #50 - Derek Sivers of CD Baby and MuckworkDownload the MP3.
Last time Derek Sivers was on Venture Voice three years ago he told us he had to "whack 'em [investors] off with a stick". Now we know why. Derek announces on our show for the first time the amount he sold his company for this past summer: $22 million. Derek owned 100% of the equity. Though he might have made more money than most of his fellow music entrepreneurs, Derek's no Gordon Gekko. In this interview, Derek tells us how he put all of his money from the sale into ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #49 - Rafat Ali of paidContent and contentNextDownload the MP3.
Attention entrepreneurs dealing with the current economic downturn: This interview is for you. After working as a journalist for Jason Calacanis at Silicon Alley Reporter, Rafat Ali ended up broke in a market with a dearth of employment opportunities. To try to find a new job, Rafat created paidContent.org as an "interactive resume." Luckily, no one hired him. From these humble beginnings, Rafat bootstrapped his blog holding company, ContentNext Media, for four years ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #48 - Frank Addante of The Rubicon ProjectDownload the MP3.
Whether working with market trends or against them, Frank Addante has found entrepreneurial success. Before he was 29 years old, one of Frank's companies went public and two were acquired. At his worse, he returned capital to investors. Suffering from serial entrepreneurship, Frank left the Illinois Institute of Technology just four classes shy of his degree. His companies range from an early search engine to a Sequoia Capital-backed enterprise email solution. Now Fra ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #47 - Tom Perkins of Kleiner PerkinsDownload the MP3.
The name Tom Perkins is now almost synonymous with venture capital, but it's clear that he cut his teeth as an entrepreneur. Educated at MIT and Harvard, Perkins first made his mark by managing the initial growth of Hewlett-Packard’s computer business while simultaneously inventing the first cheap and reliable laser. The company he built around the laser, University Laboratories, made him independently wealthy and allowed for the creation of Kleiner Perkins, one of th ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #46 - Jeremy Stoppelman of YelpDownload the MP3.
Jeremy Stoppelman is the co-founder and CEO of Yelp, a site where users can write and share reviews of local businesses. Everyone's now a restaurant critic. However, local reviews were not the original focus, but just one of several features in the earlier versions of the site. Noticing the growth of this buried feature, Yelp re-tooled the site around reviews and hasn't looked back since. Does this story sound familiar? Jeremy's the former VP of Engineering at PayPal, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #45 - Kevin Ryan of Panther Express, ShopWiki and Music NationDownload the MP3.
Not many entrepreneurs have a motor like Kevin Ryan's. Kevin is best known for his work as CEO at the on-line advertising firm DoubleClick, which he grew from a 20 person start-up to the largest Internet company in New York at the height of the dot-com boom. After escaping the ensuing bust in an arguably improved strategic position, the company has since changed hands twice. In June 2005, the company was sold to the private equity firm of Hellman and Friedman for $1.1 ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #44 - Venture Voice Startup Workshop Coverage (part 2)Download the MP3.Marketing a startup is tricky business. Every entrepreneur faces the dilemma between allocating time to improving the product and marketing the product. If the two can be mixed just right, then perhaps sterile marketing can go viral. We tackle that issue in part 2 of 3 of our very own Venture Voice Startup Workshop coverage in New York City. David Hornik of August Capital leads the session, but he doesn’t finish uninterrupted as the entrepreneurs on the panel jump in.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #43 - Fred Seibert of Frederator Studios and Next New NetworksDownload the MP3.
Before the rise of the Internet, cable TV was the new form of distribution remaking the entertainment business. Life-long entrepreneur and former jazz producer Fred Seibert pioneered that field, and is known in the industry for branding MTV (remember their ever-changing animated logo) and Nickelodeon (remember Nick-at-Nite). While he was figuring out what to do next, Ted Turner hired him to be president of the then-struggling Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio. Fred turned ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #42 - Simon Daniel of USBcellDownload the MP3.
The battery is an afterthought for most inventors. All the fun seems to be in developing a device, not in powering it. But when was the last time you cursed your phone, camera or podcast player because it ran out of batteries? Simon Daniel got fed up with his batteries, and decided to do something about it. He invented the USBcell, a standard sized battery (yes, it comes in AA) that can recharge using any USB port. This isn’t his first invention. Previously, he invent ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #41 - Premal Shah of KivaDownload the MP3.Premal Shah believes your last name doesn't need to be Gates or Rockefeller in order to make a real dent in global poverty. After leaving his job as a Principal Product Manager at PayPal, it has taken Premal less then a year to make good on Kiva's pledge that all it takes to become a micro lender is a credit card and access to a computer. Raising money "Howard Dean Style" from over 13,000 online lenders, Kiva has provided more than a million dollars in low-cost working capi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #40 - Reid Hoffman of LinkedInDownload the MP3.
Real business networking takes place in the country club, at the chamber of commerce and on the golf course. After all, the Internet is just for friending strangers on MySpace and poking friends on Facebook. If you said all that to Reid Hoffman, he might think twice about adding you as a contact in LinkedIn, the business networking site he started that connects over seven million professionals. Although his Palo Alto-based company is now profitable and growing rapidly ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #39 - Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology VenturesDownload the MP3.
If technology entrepreneurs have a guru, it surely must be Guy Kawasaki. For about two decades, Guy’s been advising entrepreneurs in one way or another. First as an evangelist for Apple, he courted software entrepreneurs and developers to write code for the Macintosh. Guy later tried his own hand at entrepreneurship, and eventually returned to Cupertino as an Apple Fellow. In the late 90’s, Guy jumped ship from Apple again to launch Garage Technology Ventures. Garage ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #38 - Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc., Netscape and AOLDownload the MP3.
There are not many entrepreneurs who have spent their entire 10-year careers starting new ventures in online media, but Jason Calacanis just can’t help himself. Jason rode the dot com wave in New York by starting Silicon Alley Reporter. His publishing company Rising Tide Media grew to $12 million in sales. Unfortunately Jason also rode that wave down after the bubble burst. He ended up selling his first business to Dow Jones for a lot less money than he could have got ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #37 - Jay Adelson of DiggDownload the MP3.
Digg, the news website that uses its own readers rather than editors to decide what stories are most important, has been growing with a fury. While founder Kevin Rose has gotten a lot of attention including a recent cover of BusinessWeek, CEO Jay Adelson has been guiding Digg toward business success. This isn’t Jay’s first time though the throes of entrepreneurship. He started Equinix, a company that now has a market capitalization of $1.5 billion. Despite its success ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #36 - Venture Voice Startup Workshop Coverage (part 1)Download the MP3.
If there are best practices in entrepreneurship, you’ll hear the secrets to them in this coverage of the first half of the recent Venture Voice Startup Workshop in New York City. If there are in fact no best practices for entrepreneurs, then you’ll at least enjoy the heated discussion about how entrepreneurs should navigate the startup seas. These passionate speakers fielded a day’s worth of questions and opinions from Venture Voice, each other and the spirited audien ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #35 - Sharelle Klaus of Dry SodaDownload the MP3.
While many restaurants offer dozens of wines, beers and mixed drinks, there are few non-alcoholic options on the menu. Former dot-com entrepreneur and self-described foodie Sharelle Klaus was fed up with her lack of beverage options during the time she was pregnant with her four children. She decided to create the first line of “culinary sodas,” which are less sweet and more sophisticated than sodas like Coke or Pepsi. Based in Seattle, Sharelle’s now peddling her sod ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #34 - David O. Sacks, Co-Founder of PayPal and Producer of Thank You For SmokingDownload the MP3.
What do you do after building and selling a business for $1.5 billion in the course of only a few years? That’s the question David O. Sacks, one of the co-founders of PayPal, faced after eBay bought his company. It didn’t take him long to find the answer: Go to Hollywood and make movies. David didn’t waste much time. He recently produced Thank You For Smoking which won critical and audience acclaim. Now you can hear about his journey and get his unique perspective on ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #33 – Announcing the Venture Voice Startup Workshop
Download the MP3.
Venture Voice has been illuminating entrepreneurship through the podcast for just short of a year. Now, at the Venture Voice Startup Workshop on June 26 in New York, you can interact with top entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to find out how to start and grow innovative businesses. Venture Voice, a podcast known for asking the hard questions about entrepreneurship, brings together highly successful speakers who’ve gotten their hands dirty growing businesses. This fu ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #32 - David Sifry of TechnoratiDownload the MP3.
Starting a service aimed at the blogging community is like jumping into a pressure cooker – all of the users are critics and have bullhorns. Good thing David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, has a thick skin he’s built after founding four businesses. He’s not one to go on the defensive. Dave, a first time CEO after serving as CTO at his prior ventures, simply wants to “be of service.” Technorati is now of service to many people. It tracks 2.3 billion links and is, in ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #21 - Fabrice Grinda of ZingyDownload the MP3. If you think the ringtone business is for kids, then Fabrice Grinda has a $130 million lesson to teach you. After starting the eBays of Europe and Latin America, Fabrice brought the ringtone business concept to America by starting Zingy. We caught up with Fabrice, now 31 and a millionaire several times over, just a couple of hours before he finished his last day at the helm of Zingy. While his possessions were in boxes, he put all of his cards on the table by telling us ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show #17 - Jason Fried of 37signalsDownload the MP3. The business world seems to keep getting more complicated, but Jason Fried is all about keeping things simple. When founding 37signals, Jason and his two partners staked their careers on simplicity. They wrote a manifesto to convince others of their philosophy of keeping design on the Web simple. Their project management software, Basecamp, has become a hit for its ease of use. Their blog is intently followed by thousands of (mostly) admiring readers, and has led to a b ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
VV Show # 6 - Scott Heiferman of MeetupDownload the MP3. Entrepreneurs need community. This entrepreneur makes communities. An Illinois native, Scott Heiferman came to New York while working for Sony in 1994. He quickly joined the avant-garde of the Silicon Alley community while growing his new media ad agency, i-traffic. After selling i-traffic to Agency.com (capitalized companies apparently acquire non-capitalized ones), Scott worked the counter at McDonald’s. Scott left both the food services industry and the advertising b ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
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