Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs

Seth Godin ranted about the problems with college textbooks, but isn’t the problem bigger than the books? Aren’t we really looking at a 4-year time and money drain?

I think, for many students, a better solution is to invest in them the way incubators like Y Combinator invest in entrepreneurs. I’ll show you my reasoning in this post, but I’d like to hear what you think.

Mixergy fan, Lisa Bruckner saw me interview other entrepreneurs here and asked, “Where’s YOUR interview Andrew?” She wanted to know how I bootstrapped that $30+ MM/year business and a few other things about me.

So I invited her to interview me. In the interview we talked about business concepts like “must marketing,” which takes viral marketing and adds urgency to it, but Lisa also asked some personal questions about my fiance, childhood and clothing.

An aspiring entrepreneur recently asked, “I want to start a startup, but have no ideas. What should I do?”

Here are 12 suggestions based on my interviews with entrepreneurs here on Mixergy. What are your suggestions?

Jason Cosper helped make Mixergy run smoother.

Read on to see how his work will impact the site.

I’ve found that if I ask the right questions at a private lunch, what I learn in an hour is more valuable than all the business classes I took at NYU.

So I invited investigative reporter John Sawatsky on Mixergy to teach us how to ask questions that give people room to open up.

These books aren’t meant to just fire you up. I wanted to pick stories that will embed themselves in your mind and help shape the way you think about business.

Forget the classics, these are the books that should be taught to kids in school.

This is the full transcript, but it’s not edited–so it’s full of mistakes.

I paid a few bucks to have it transcribed, and Patrick, a Mixergy reader thought I should post it here in case someone wants to read it.

It took Reddit’s founders less than 2 years to launch the company, make it into a top social news site and sell it to Conde Nast Publications, owner of Wired.

I invited Alexis Ohanian, the company’s co-founder, to come to Mixergy and talk about how he did it.

As you can see in my interviews, I love reading books. When I saw TechCrunch’s upcoming tablet computer, the CrunchPad, I instantly knew that it could be the mainstream reading device that the Kindle still hasn’t become.

Here’s why I think it could kill the Kindle.
#1 The CrunchPad makes piracy easy

This is the story of an idea that started out as a series of conversations on message boards and became a marketplace that facilitated $5 million in design work.

What I’m most eager for you to see are the steps the founders took to ensure that their new business proved itself and earned money right from inception.

The business, 99designs, was co-founded by Matt Mickiewicz…

The issue What do you think Pallian Creative should put in the right margin of the site? Pallian Creative is the company that remade Mixergy.com and got this site respect from designers and friends. It’s hurting that company’s founder to see me neglect a section of the site. What’s your suggestion? What do you think [...]

In the vast majority of cases where I get a non-disclosure agreement, it makes absolutely no sense for me to sign it. Instead of writing out my reasons to each one individually, I’ll post them here and link to this as the issue comes up. Reason #1: It puts all the obligation on me and [...]