I pride myself on the fact that Mixergy doesn’t just study successful businesses. We also look at the ones that failed. I think it’s the only way to get the complete picture of what it takes to build a thriving business.

I invited Vahid Razavi to Mixergy because he raised…

You’ll hear how Chris MacAskill took on Amazon when he launched the company that became Fatbrain. How he took on the free photo-sharing sites when he built SmugMug. How he worked with Steve Jobs. And more.

Howard Lindzon is a mensch. He felt bad that the connection in his Mixergy interview wasn’t clear, so he offered to do a second interview.

In this interview, you’ll hear how he finds the entrepreneurs he backs, how he thinks about the companies he invests in, what size investments he likes to make, and more.

The online gaming network he launched was losing money. “I made a lot of mistakes,” Cheni Yerushalmi said in this interview. If you listen to it (or watch it, or read it), you’ll hear what they were and what he learned from them.

But in the setback, he and his partner found an opportunity. They…

Ed’s story is one that any entrepreneur (or aspiring entrepreneur) can relate to and learn from. He spent most of his life working for other people and felt “boxed in.” His wife was tired of hearing him complain about it and pushed him to start a business.

If you listen to us go through the biography of 37signals, I think you’ll understand Jason’s minimalist approach to business and see how it helps a company grow. Along the way, even diehard fans of 37signals will learn some things that I don’t think have been revealed before, like what the company does with all those profits they make.

- Eventbrite, which he launched and still runs, did over $100 mil in gross ticket sales last year.
- Xoom, the previous company he launched, will process nearly $1 billion in money transfers this year.
- Connect Group, his first company, was sold for over $9.5 million within months of launching.
- Then there’s his investments in startups, including PayPal, Yammer, Trulia, and Lookout.

She’s a scrappy entrepreneur who sold a previous business for $366 million, a few months after launching it.

Later, she founded OfferPal, which powers much of the growing virtual currency ecosystem.

This interview is about how she did it.

Venrock is the pioneering venture capital firm that backed Apple, Intel, DoubleClick and other well-known success stories. I invited one of its newer partners, David Pakman, to find out how he went from working for Apple, to launching and running his own companies to becoming an investor.

I also wanted to hear how a new venture capitalist gets to know people like you, the entrepreneurs and investors who read Mixergy.

We covered a lot in this program with Aaron Wall, founder of SEO Book. The big areas are:

1. How Aaron built a profitable business selling content to his readers.
2. Why Aaron keeps urging Google to police big sites like Mahalo, and why he thinks they have an unfair advantage over unfunded competitors.
3. How you can get more traffic from Google search results.

Here’s an example of what they’ve done. “We started working with Us Weekly, the popular gossip magazine, in April 2009,” he said in this program. “And they used the Involver product, and its suite of applications, to grow their Facebook Fan Page in about six months, from 2,700 fans to over 250,000.”

Why does growing fans even matter to a business? And more importantly, how can you go from building your business’s fan-base to monetizing? Those are the two big questions that this program answers.

Know who I thought about as I recorded this program? You. You, the ambitious entrepreneur who’s taking risks so big that I bet you can sometimes hear your heart pound. You do it so you can give life to a vision so important that anything less than all you’ve got isn’t worthy of the goal.

Meanwhile, as you work to make just ONE business take off, David Cohen’s TechStars launches THIRTY companies per year…