 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 MarketWatchDownload 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 #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 #33 – Announcing the Venture Voice Startup Workshop
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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 #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 #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 #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 #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 #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 #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
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