Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. You know, this is a place where I decided years ago I wanted to interview the top entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. I want to dissect their process. I want to learn as much as a can and have you, the person who’s listening to me, learn along with me.
Today I’ve got a legendary entrepreneur with me. In 1982 he pioneered the book superstore when he founded Bookstop. Barnes & Noble later acquired it in 1989 and it’s said to have gotten the know-how and infrastructure to create the bookselling goliath from what it learned from Bookstop.
He followed that up by creating Hoover’s, whose database of millions of companies, well, frankly, I remember reading when I was in school. It was one of the first things I was asked to check out when I went to business classes at NYU. Hoover’s went public...