If you've been to Mixergy before and I've earned your trust, then don't waste your time reading anything I wrote on this post. Just listen to my interview with Mark Suster and get fired up by his stories and his lessons for entrepreneurs. Then go out for a good run so you can burn off some of the excess energy you'll get from listening to this interview.

For everyone else, I excerpted the story about the time Mark had to shower with construction workers to save a few bucks so he could turn around a struggling company he founded. It'll give you a taste of the pragmatic discussion we had and why I think this interview is so important to anyone who considers business a calling.

Today, Mark is a venture capitalist who works with passionate entrepreneurs who will probably see a bit of their own determination as they listen to some of the stories Mark told.

The FULL program

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About Mark Suster

Mark Suster is an entrepreneur who turned venture capitalist. He's currently a Partner with GRP Partners. Before that he founded Koral, which was sold to Salesforce.com, where he stayed on as Vice President, Product Management following the sale. Prior to Koral, he founded BuildOnline, the largest independent global content collaboration company focused on the engineering and construction sectors, which was acquired by SWORD Group.

You should read and comment on his blog and say hi to him on Twitter.

Text excerpt: showering with construction workers

In this section, Mark talks about BuildOnline, the company he founded in 1999.

We were a really big deal until we weren’t, you know?  Goldman Sachs was an investor.  We were going to IPO within 12 months for north of a billion dollars.

I know it sounds crazy, but a comparable company out there had an eight billion dollar market cap on less than two million dollars of revenue, so anything seemed achievable.

I had a company approach me about acquiring our company for a hundred and fifty million dollars a year into our company, and I thought, “A hundred and fifty million between friends is chump change.”  I know it sounds dumb, but this was 2000.

And then in 2001, I had very humbling experiences.  I had 122 staff.  Thirty of them were contractors, 92 were full-time employees.  I had recruited people out of Goldman Sachs, GE Equity, Anderson Consulting (Accenture, now), Morgan Stanley, you name it, and a lot of them were Harvard MBA’s, Stanford MBA’s.

I had to go from 122 total staff, 92 employees, down to 38 in one day, and then within a month, I took it down to 33 -- one of the most humbling experiences of my life.  And I laid off nearly all of my friends.  It was awful.  And I’d say in 2001, we really had to build a real company, and that’s when I realized that I maybe hadn’t done the right thing, but having taken that kind of money from investors, I felt a huge sense of responsibility.

And just one quick aside…I remember traveling through Germany, and I didn’t want to spend money on hotels, because we had pledged to build a capital-efficient company, so I used to sleep in Neu-Isenburg, which is south of Frankfurt, in a pizzeria.  They had three rooms above the pizzeria, and they used to rent me rooms for thirty euros a night, and that’s what my life became in 2001.

They actually then decided not to offer those as rooms anymore.  So, we’d gotten a taste of cheap rooms, so I went down the street in Neu-Isenburg and just stayed at the cheapest place I could find.  It was 35 euros a night, so I was wasting five euros.

But then I found out they didn’t have bathrooms in the room, and I had to take a shower down the hall, no joke, walking down the hall to take a shower in the morning next to Turkish construction workers wearing leopard-print underwear.  That was about the low point, and that’s a true story.

And, you know, had I built my company from a foundation of that in the first place, I think I would have set off in a much better trajectory.  And it’s in those down years – 2001, 2002, 2003 – when no one would return my phone calls, that I built a real company, and everything I ever learned bout being an entrepreneur was in those three years.

The transcript

As always, this transcript is edited by people like you. If you see an error, edit it. I trust you.

Full program includes

- How the real world requires entrepreneurs to do things that wouldn't look good on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, including a revelation from Mark.

- How Mark turned a troubled company around. You'll even hear a detailed example of what you should be willing to say to your customers if you want to turn around your business. (And if you think it's beneath you to have this conversation, this interview will show you why you might not be ready for entrepreneurship.)

- Why your elementary school teacher was wrong and how having a chip on your shoulder might make you a better entrepreneur.

Suggested comments

- I was clearly enthusiastic about what we talked about. Did the value of the content live up to the passion?

- What did you think of the example I gave about Bloomberg? Do you think entrepreneurs need to take risks like that in the early days?

- I need to interview more entrepreneurs & investors like Mark. If you know anyone, tell me.

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