Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs

Imagine leaving your country to go to school and suddenly there’s a revolution that prevents you from going back home. How would you rebuild your life?

That’s what happened to Saeed Amidi after the Iranian revolution. This is the story of how he hustled and built himself up, and how he went on to help hundreds of tech startups grow, including PayPal, which leased office space from him and became one of his first angel investments.

When OrganizedWisdom’s co-founder, Unity Stoakes, launched his business he wrote out his ideal list of advisers, supporters and board members. The list included tech investor and visionary Esther Dyson, and former Time Warner head, Gerald Levin.

This is the story of how he turned his wish list into reality and his advice for others who want to do the same.

Phil LaBoon was the wiz kid who got a lot of press for launching a company that sold breathalyzer keychains. From there he went on to build a real estate company that made millions. But a bad partnership led him to lose it all.

That’s when he…

As a high school student, Ben Milne say on his couch till he wore a deep groove in it and sold speakers online. He says his promotion strategy in the early days was answer audiophiles’ questions on message boards and link them to his online speaker store, Elemental Designs.

Listen to the full interview to hear how he got his first customers, how he celebrated his first million and why he decided to sell the company.

To follow that up, he created Dwolla, which is…

As a developer who worked for other companies, Amy Hoy says she felt like a kept woman. She was earning good (thought not great) money, but didn’t get to see a creative visions to completion.

This is the story of how she won her liberation by…

I was nervous on my trip to Atlanta because I was scheduled to give a keynote at StartupRiot and I didn’t have time to prepare a talk. To figure out a solution (and to prep for this interview) I read Peter Guber’s new book, Tell to Win, about how storytelling can make you more persuasive.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I gave my talk, and…

Using nothing but a phone and his willingness to keep going after repeatedly hearing “no,” Lawrence Watkins built Great Black Speakers into a $60,000 per month speakers’ bureau.

I invited him to hear both the story of how he built his company and how a speaker can go from obscurity to national prominence.

How do you grow your site’s membership without blowing tons of money on marketing?

Josh Walker came up with a clever idea that I think you can learn a lot from. Listen to this interview to see how he used voting (and smart partnerships with well-known media outlets) to make CityVoter into a directory of local businesses that has over 2 million members.

How did Morten Lund go from a net worth that he estimated at $150 million to bankruptcy?

More importantly, how did he build it up in the first place?

The quick answer to both those questions is confidence. It’s something that you’ll notice in..

You wouldn’t think that earning too much money would be a danger for a young business, but as this interview shows, if you let it distract you from product development, your revenue could disappear.

When Seth Lieberman’s Pangea Media racked up over $10 million in annual revenue within 2 years in business, he says…

“We got laughed out of the room of the venture capitalists we talked to,” Mike Olson told me when I asked him why he didn’t raise money for Sleepycat, his open-source embedded database company. “You’re going to make a living selling free [open source] software?” They said. “That ain’t going to work!”

This is the story of how he made it work, and earned “a wonderful profit” until he sold Sleepycat to Oracle in 2006. It’s also the story of how…

How do you build a business with recurring, dependable revenue?

To learn how it’s done, I interviewed David Graff, founder and CEO of Hudl, an online coaching software that 2,300 schools pay a minimum of $800 annually so they could improve their games.

In this interview, you’ll hear the story behind that impressive accomplishment.