Mixergy

At 13, Ephren Taylor read a book about how to make video games. A few months later, he made and sold 30 copies of his own game at $30 each.

This is the story of where those entrepreneurial instincts took him.

Andy Kessler co-founded Velocity Capital Management where he turned $100 million into $1 billion by investing in cutting edge internet companies. Then he did something unusual, he moved on. He sold his shares. Gave his investors their money. And made himself into bestselling author.

In this interview you’ll get…

Short story: he created a quick and dirty web page to collect email addresses of people who wanted to hear about discounted Mac software. Then he sent email to software developers and found some who let him bundle their software and sell it at a discount. Then he sold thousands of dollars of software. He keeps repeating that process and plowing back a share of his profits into marketing so he could grow his customer base.

Want to hear the step-by-step details?

I asked Todd Smith, a RE/MAX Hall of Famer and blogger at Little Things Matter, about what drove him. You can see (or read) his answer here.

Before he launched Wild Apricot, the membership platform that now generates $160,000 in monthly sales, Dmitry Buterin tried building another product, which failed. It failed, he says, because it was side-business, which meant couldn’t get the attention it deserved.

So he did something drastic….

What I admire about Andrew Hyde is that he doesn’t just complain that crowd-sourced design takes advantage of people who create without getting paid, he launched a business to create an alternative. pick.im, the marketplace he started, lets clients can find and hire freelancers.

It’s one of many startups that he launched, including…

I asked Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals, if he was closing off options by being so opinionated. Watch (or read) his answer here.

The short answer to the headline’s question is that Farbood Nivi was obsessively committed.

Listen to the interview to hear details of how he did it, including: How he worked on Grockit in the hospital while recovering from a terrible accident. What he did to win over an early investor who felt is presentation wasn’t strong enough. And how his passion was so contagious that top investors wanted to help him reach his goal of remaking education.

It started out as a side-business, built on a couple of used servers in a closet. Haroon Mokhtarzada didn’t even own the cool domain, Webs.com. As a bootstrapper, the best he could afford was FreeWebz.com — with a Z!

This is the story of how he slowly grew his company until it…

Today Peter Sisson is the founder of Line2, one of the hottest apps in the iPhone app store because it lets users skip AT&T, reduce their phone bills, and get incredible reception. The business seems to be the latest in a string of successes in Peter’s career, including one business that he sold to Microsoft a few months after helping to co-found it.

But his first startup suffered the…

Gary Kremen got Jobs.com, Autos.com, housing.com, Sex.com and other domains for free by recognizing that the internet would be a powerful business platform long before there was even a fee for acquiring domain names.

In the interview, you’ll hear how this visionary turned his ideas into businesses, and how he fought relentlessly when one of his properties — Sex.com — was taken from him. What I think you’ll especially appreciate about this interview is Gary’s…

A past Mixergy interviewee told me that customers were confused every time he said his company’s name. So he went to Brandstack and bought a brand package that included a new name, with logo and domain name.

A few viewers who saw that interview told me that Brandstack was a profitable company and asked me interview the founder about how he did it. That’s why I invited Wes Wilson to do this interview. Listen to the full program to hear…