When he was 16, Ryan Allis wrote and framed a big goal: to build a company with $1 million sales by the time he was 21 years old. “I missed it by 18 days,” he says. “But I sure as heck would have missed it by 18 years had I not written down that goal and [...]

Lloyd Ernst introduced Australians to the internet by getting the country’s most tech savvy into hotel ballrooms and blowing them away by showing off how email worked. He was introducing them to the future. That’s what he does.

It started when he hooked up a computer in his garage to a phone and created a bulletin board called PowerUp….

“The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur” is what Forbes called Zoho’s co-founder, Sridhar Vembu. He’s become a little less unknown since that article came out, but when it bubbled to the top of Hacker News recently I read it I wanted more details about how he bootstrapped Zoho into a profitable online application provider.

So I invited him to Mixergy to tell us the story of how he built his company.

In this program, I want to show you how doing interviews the way I do on Mixergy will help you raise your profile AND draw an audience AND make incredible contacts AND learn more AND grow your business. Plus, I’ll teach you HOW to do interviews and WHICH tools you’ll need.

Oprah showed how dramatic his transformation for internet entrepreneur, Gurbaksh Chahal. In the before pictures, she showed a tiny Indian kid with a turban, who was picked on by other kids and how’s family struggled financially. In the after shots, she showed an adult with a stunning penthouse, hot car and confidence to spare.

I invited Gurbaksh to Mixergy to talk about how he did it.

In 1998, he joined a test prep company that did $100,000 in sales. By 2005, sales grew to $25 million. And he owned the whole company. That’s when he sold it.

This is the story of how he did it — and of why he decided to cap that achievement by launching University of the People, the revolutionary institution that’s democratizing education.

After hearing some great negotiating stories on Mixergy from angel investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders, a few people emailed to ask for more specific negotiating techniques. So I invited Jim Camp, whose “Start with No” negotiating methods have been trusted by over 500 multinationals and have been taught to over 100,000 students, to teach us.

When I asked Howard Lindzon to go back in time and tell us how he came to own stakes in companies like Bit.ly, StockTwits, and Rent.com, he showed me a ball called “The Grip.” It’s a balloon full of seeds that users squeeze to relieve tension.

How does that lead to a portfolio of internet companies? Read on.

I tried something new in this program. To help me understand how the seed venture firm Y Combinator helps entrepreneurs launch and grow their startups, I invited not one guest as I usually do, but three founders of three different companies. Each entrepreneur talked about how he got into Y Combinator, how the program helped launch his startup and what it did for him after he left the program.

I invited Mark Magnacca to Mixergy for a second time so he could go into more depth about the ideas behind his book “So What?” and show us they’d apply to web sites.

To help illustrate his message, he…

There’s a reason why I started this program by asking Simon Sinek to tell you a story about a man you probably never heard of, Samuel Pierpont Langley. It’s because if you understand how two unfunded upstarts beat him to a major technology achievement, you might be able to beat your better-funded rivals.
I’ll let Simon [...]

Before I tell you about Boris Wertz’s successful startup and how he’s investing in other startups, I want to point you to a spot in the interview that starts around minute 18. That’s when he talks about how he always wanted to be an entrepreneur and even launched small businesses as a kid — like the one where he sold snails.

Watch that spot and you’ll see why…