Venture Voice – interviews with entrepreneurs
231 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 23 ratingsMuck Rack & Shorty Awards cofounder/CEO Greg Galant interviews the world's best entrepreneurs and creators, including the founders of LinkedIn, The Vanguard Group, Yelp, Brooklyn Brewery, Trello, Twitter and Stack Overflow.
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New York Venture Summit
June 04, 2008 22:01When: June 24-25, 2008 Where: The New Yorker in New York City What: Venture Voice is a media sponsor of the 8th Annual New York Venture Summit that will feature over 25 Venture Capital Speakers, 3 Venture Capital Panels with open discussions and 40 of the most promising Emerging Companies seeking funding. For more information and a list of VC’s confirmed to speak: http://www.vcsummit.com/ (for $100 off current registration price enter code: venturevoice2008)
Next Question?
June 01, 2008 21:32In our last round of questions on this blog, we asked each former guest about his or her first time (raising money). What should our next question be? Give us your ideas in the comments or via our contact page. We've got a number of new audio interviews scheduled. To support the show, please consider becoming a Venture Voice member by clicking here. (Just like NPR, but for entrepreneurs and without the tote bags.) More members = more interviews.
David Sacks' First Time (Raising Money)
April 24, 2008 19:56This is part of a series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers. How'd you raise your very first round of financing? David Sacks: I asked Peter, Max and Elon to finance "Thank You For Smoking" with me. I didn't have to do too much selling since I had worked with them at PayPal and was putting in my own money.
Kelly Perdew's First Time (Raising Money)
April 22, 2008 19:29This is part of a series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers. How'd you raise your very first round of financing? Kelly Perdew: I raised my first round of financing ($500K in equity) from friends and family while I was still in business school. Be very careful about taking money from friends and family... while it is easier to access, if things don't go well, you tend to stay in the deal much longer than is good for you to tr...
Evan Williams's First Time (Raising Money)
April 21, 2008 22:20This is part of a series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers. How'd you raise your very first round of financing? Ev Williams: I asked my mom for $10,000. She gave it to me.
Jay Adelson's First Time (Raising Money)
April 18, 2008 13:49This is part of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers. How'd you raise your very first round of financing? Jay Adelson: The first round of financing I ever raised was from angels. I was working with Al Avery, who co-founded Equinix with me in 1998. A good friend of mine, who had founded a company in Silicon Valley in the mid-nineties and sold it to Cisco, was mentoring me to avoid going initially to the VCs. From...
Joel Spolsky's First Time (Raising Money)
April 17, 2008 17:12This is part of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers. How'd you raise your very first round of financing? Joel Spolsky: I put in a very small amount of money (I think it was about $50,000) from my own savings. That carried us to profitability.
Fabrice Grinda's First Time (Raising Money)
April 16, 2008 18:27This is part of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers. How'd you raise your very first round of financing? Fabrice Grinda: The first time I had to raise money was for Aucland, a copy of eBay for Southern Europe which was my first Internet startup. I was lucky not to have to raise seed money. While in college at Princeton, I built a company exporting high end computer equipment to Europe (motherboards, memory, CPUs, ...
Scott Rafer's First Time (Raising Money)
April 15, 2008 15:54This is the first of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers. How'd you raise your very first round of financing? Scott Rafer: The first money I raised was for Fotonation in 1996. We just had a cashflow issue, so borrowed $25k off a friend of mine in NY, paying him back the principal plus interest and warrants. It was the right thing for the situation. My mistakes were later.
VV Show #48 – Frank Addante of The Rubicon Project
April 07, 2008 22:22 - 50 minutes - 23.1 MBWhether working with market trends or against them, Frank Addante has found entrepreneurial success. Before he was 29 years old, one of Frank’s companies went public and two were acquired. At his worse, he returned capital to investors. Suffering from serial entrepreneurship, Frank left the Illinois Institute of Technology just four classes shy of his degree. …
VV Show #48 - Frank Addante of The Rubicon Project
April 07, 2008 12:00Download the MP3. Whether working with market trends or against them, Frank Addante has found entrepreneurial success. Before he was 29 years old, one of Frank's companies went public and two were acquired. At his worse, he returned capital to investors. Suffering from serial entrepreneurship, Frank left the Illinois Institute of Technology just four classes shy of his degree. His companies range from an early search engine to a Sequoia Capital-backed enterprise email solution. Now Frank as...
Google is Making the Web Free. Will DoubleClick be its Next Free Service?
April 05, 2008 00:55Over at Silicon Alley Insider, Hank Williams is arguing that VCs are supporting free services that ought to be paid for on the hope advertisers will foot the bill down the road -- thereby eliminating the opportunity for noble paid services to make a couple honest bucks by charging users. It's a dubious argument, as pointed our by the site's own editor (ouch). If we accept the argument that free is a bad thing, then wouldn't Google be to blame? It's acquired several companies such as Urchin ...
VV Show #47 - Tom Perkins of Kleiner Perkins
December 12, 2007 21:44Download the MP3. The name Tom Perkins is now almost synonymous with venture capital, but it's clear that he cut his teeth as an entrepreneur. Educated at MIT and Harvard, Perkins first made his mark by managing the initial growth of Hewlett-Packard’s computer business while simultaneously inventing the first cheap and reliable laser. The company he built around the laser, University Laboratories, made him independently wealthy and allowed for the creation of Kleiner Perkins, one of the mos...
VV Show #47 – Tom Perkins of Kleiner Perkins
December 12, 2007 20:03 - 48 minutes - 11 MBThe name Tom Perkins is now almost synonymous with venture capital, but it’s clear that he cut his teeth as an entrepreneur. Educated at MIT and Harvard, Perkins first made his mark by managing the initial growth of Hewlett-Packard’s computer business while simultaneously inventing the first cheap and reliable laser. …
Entrepreneurship in South Africa
December 12, 2007 02:35We just received this e-mail from Sydney Mfuniselwa who gave us permission to post it: My name is Sydney from South Africa, I am really moved by the interviews on show. I wish we had something like this here in South Africa because I think my country needs stuff like Venture Voice as it still developing. My point is I am 25 young black man as software developer, trying to go on entrepreneurship but its hard in this part of the world because most of the people cannot even use a computers a...
Silicon Valley Postcard
October 02, 2007 21:01Silicon Alley Insider asked me to write about my trip to the West Coast (DEMO in San Diego, Podcast Expo in LA, meetings in Silicon Valley). Enjoy!
Venture Voice Rebooted
September 19, 2007 02:31We took off for the summer from Venture Voice. E-mails like these from loyal fans made it a painful experence: Great show, have you taken the summer of? I hope to hear you back on the pods soon. Cheers! pb Penticton, BC ---- I talked with Joel Spolsky recently and he said that you are no longer doing Venture Voice! I have learned so much from your podcasts and was disheartened to hear this news. I do hope that you continue VV. I wish you the best in what you are now doing. Diwant ...
Facebook: Crossing the Chasm in Reverse
July 08, 2007 00:08I had the pleasure of being in the very first Facebook generation. My college was one of the first 13 to be added to Facebook, and we were all jazzed just to see photos of each other and occasionally get a "poke" -- the implications of which are not clear to this day. I only have a couple of friends from college who are not on Facebook. The rest are. And I went to a college without a computer science department. Generally the way new technologies spread, according to Geoffrey Moore's Cross...
Teaser for Next Episode: iContact
June 29, 2007 14:48I usually don't like to give hints about who's coming up on Venture Voice, but I can't resist breaking news: Ryan Allis -- who left college early to start his business iContact -- just raised a $5.35 million for his already profitable company. Stay tuned to hear the story.
Immigration
June 25, 2007 21:50I was reminded of how immigration policy affects all parts of the economy while reading Fare is Fair, one of my favorite columns in The L Magazine that's a collection of quotes from those most in the know in NYC: the cabbies. A number of our past guests on Venture Voice are immigrants. How does the immigration policy affect entrepreneurship in the US?
VV Show #46 - Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp
June 25, 2007 00:23Download the MP3. Jeremy Stoppelman is the co-founder and CEO of Yelp, a site where users can write and share reviews of local businesses. Everyone's now a restaurant critic. However, local reviews were not the original focus, but just one of several features in the earlier versions of the site. Noticing the growth of this buried feature, Yelp re-tooled the site around reviews and hasn't looked back since. Does this story sound familiar? Jeremy's the former VP of Engineering at PayPal, whic...
VV Show #46 – Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp
June 24, 2007 22:28 - 49 minutes - 11.3 MBJeremy Stoppelman is the co-founder and CEO of Yelp, a site where users can write and share reviews of local businesses. Everyone’s now a restaurant critic. However, local reviews were not the original focus, but just one of several features in the earlier versions of the site. …
Bad Influence
June 12, 2007 22:57Bill Gates gave a very provocative Harvard Commencement speech. I was struck by this passage: But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. While he said it jokingly, it's a great reminder that one of the entrepreneur's biggest jobs is team building and convincing others to take risks.
(Un)fair Advantage
May 08, 2007 15:00Anyone who's worked with venture capitalists knows that they have a language of their own -- and for the most part it's quite fun. Terms like "burn rate", "first-mover advantage", "monetization" and "defensibility" never get old. But I've noticed that many VCs I respect are using the term "unfair advantage" to simply describe an advantage. Jeremy Liew describes having the best news coverage as an "unfair advantage". Susan Wu calls having a community and leveraging network effects an (outdate...
Good Angry Customers and The Death of Sucks Sites
May 04, 2007 16:40The social news site Digg (whose CEO is a past Venture Voice guest) recently had a user revolt after it gave in to the demand of a cease and desist letter and blocked a posting. The users voted stories up to the main page of Digg that criticized Digg. It was viewed as a big negative at the time, and journalists are still reveling in the site's supposed hardship with headlines like Digg Flap Exposes Cracks.
Worthwhile Reading
April 29, 2007 20:48After mistaking me for an expert, people often ask me what I read. Sure, as you can tell from numerous past posts, I read all the sites you must read to keep up with the industry, including paidContent, Techcrunch and Techmeme (the founder of which, who I recently met, is both a fan of Venture Voice and an adept impersonator of my voice). I also read blogs from past Venture Voice guests, such as Fabrice's, Dick's and Jason's, which always offer interesting thoughts. But if entrepreneurship...
VV Show #45 – Kevin Ryan of Panther Express, ShopWiki and Music Nation
April 27, 2007 20:34 - 48 minutes - 22.2 MBNot many entrepreneurs have a motor like Kevin Ryan’s. Kevin is best known for his work as CEO at the on-line advertising firm DoubleClick, which he grew from a 20 person start-up to the largest Internet company in New York at the height of the dot-com boom. …
VV Show #45 - Kevin Ryan of Panther Express, ShopWiki and Music Nation
April 27, 2007 17:56Download the MP3. Not many entrepreneurs have a motor like Kevin Ryan's. Kevin is best known for his work as CEO at the on-line advertising firm DoubleClick, which he grew from a 20 person start-up to the largest Internet company in New York at the height of the dot-com boom. After escaping the ensuing bust in an arguably improved strategic position, the company has since changed hands twice. In June 2005, the company was sold to the private equity firm of Hellman and Friedman for $1.1 bill...
Join the Venture Voice Team
April 22, 2007 23:30How would you like to be the first person to hear the next episode of Venture Voice and even make a couple of bucks for listening? We're hiring listeners to write show notes for new episodes (just check out past shows for an example). Great writers will even get to take a shot are writing the intro paragraph. If you're interested, please contact us.
West Coasting
April 11, 2007 19:50As I mentioned in my last post, we do our best to cover how business gets done on both coasts, and everywhere else. I'm headed out to San Francisco for the first time in a few months for the Web 2.0 Expo. If you're out there too or you know of anyone we should be talking to, drop us a line.
NYC Entrepreneur Panel
April 09, 2007 18:32I had the pleasure of moderating a panel of excellent entrepreneurs for MBAs at NYU's Stern School of Business. The panel included Thrillist co-founder Adam Rich, Daily Candy's Eve Epstein, Sean Pfitzenmaier of stealth startup Social Sauce, Music Nation founder Daniel Klaus and Jonah Beretti who's a founder of The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed.
VV Show #44 – Venture Voice Startup Workshop Coverage (part 2)
March 09, 2007 18:28 - 34 minutes - 15.6 MBMarketing a startup is tricky business. Every entrepreneur faces the dilemma between allocating time to improving the product and marketing the product. If the two can be mixed just right, then perhaps sterile marketing can go viral. We tackle that issue in part 2 of 3 of our very own Venture Voice Startup Workshop coverage in New York City. …
VV Show #44 - Venture Voice Startup Workshop Coverage (part 2)
March 09, 2007 07:39Download the MP3. Marketing a startup is tricky business. Every entrepreneur faces the dilemma between allocating time to improving the product and marketing the product. If the two can be mixed just right, then perhaps sterile marketing can go viral. We tackle that issue in part 2 of 3 of our very own Venture Voice Startup Workshop coverage in New York City. David Hornik of August Capital leads the session, but he doesn’t finish uninterrupted as the entrepreneurs on the panel jump in.
Run Your Startup in the 2008 Election
March 02, 2007 05:02On the cover it would seem entrepreneurs and politicians have little in common. One creates value in the economy, the other, um, I'll refrain from any bashing of politicians. But both entrepreneurs and politicians have a lot to potentially gain in the drawn-out election season leading up to November 2008.
The Sincerest Form of Flattery
February 27, 2007 00:22If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then we must have been dead on in our list of the Top Five Venture Capital Firm Web Pages. In a very bizarre case documented by Dan Primack of peHUB, Sequoia Capital is suing ComVentures for copyright infringement of its website:
Online Social Network Entrepreneurs Social Network Offline
February 14, 2007 19:50Last Saturday, Venture Voice show producer Koshlan Mayer-Blackwell dropped in on the Community Next: The Present and Future of Online Communities conference held at Stanford University. Here are some of his musings on day:
Talking Back to Your iPod
February 14, 2007 16:06Ever listen to Venture Voice and wish you could say something back to our guests? You can. Pop onto our site and leave a message in the comments -- most of the guests read them. Our most recent guest, Fred Seibert, just highlighted a provocative comment from a Venture Voice listener in his blog. One blogger mischaracterized some data Guy Kawasaki shared with us, and Guy corrected him in a comment on his blog. If you feel text can't do justice to the passion in your comment, remember you can...
Community Next
February 09, 2007 01:48When: February 10, 2007 Where: Stanford University What: Venture Voice producer Kosh Mayer-Blackwell will be at Community Next looking for social network entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs who use social networks. The conference is organized by the always-entertaining Noah Kagan and features some past Venture Voice guests as speakers including Premal Shah and Guy Kawasaki.
VV Show #43 – Fred Seibert of Frederator Studios and Next New Networks
January 29, 2007 21:03 - 1 hour - 39.4 MBBefore the rise of the Internet, cable TV was the new form of distribution remaking the entertainment business. Life-long entrepreneur and former jazz producer Fred Seibert pioneered that field, and is known in the industry for branding MTV (remember their ever-changing animated logo) and Nickelodeon (remember Nick-at-Nite). …
VV Show #43 - Fred Seibert of Frederator Studios and Next New Networks
January 29, 2007 06:50Download the MP3. Before the rise of the Internet, cable TV was the new form of distribution remaking the entertainment business. Life-long entrepreneur and former jazz producer Fred Seibert pioneered that field, and is known in the industry for branding MTV (remember their ever-changing animated logo) and Nickelodeon (remember Nick-at-Nite). While he was figuring out what to do next, Ted Turner hired him to be president of the then-struggling Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio. Fred turned the f...
David Sacks Launches Geni
January 17, 2007 00:01Past Venture Voice guest David O. Sacks launched Geni today, as TechCrunch reports, which aims to be the ultimate family tree. Many have tried in this area before, none have achieved dominance. I've tried about 5 of these types of services in the past (including one from Joe Kraus's Jot) and none have caught on with my family no matter how many e-mails I've sent out. Geni's got one of the fastest registrations I've ever seen, so I couldn't resist pestering my family members yet again. As ...
VV Show #42 – Simon Daniel of USBcell
January 12, 2007 18:39 - 57 minutes - 26.6 MBThe battery is an afterthought for most inventors. All the fun seems to be in developing a device, not in powering it. But when was the last time you cursed your phone, camera or podcast player because it ran out of batteries? …
VV Show #42 - Simon Daniel of USBcell
January 12, 2007 07:31Download the MP3. The battery is an afterthought for most inventors. All the fun seems to be in developing a device, not in powering it. But when was the last time you cursed your phone, camera or podcast player because it ran out of batteries? Simon Daniel got fed up with his batteries, and decided to do something about it. He invented the USBcell, a standard sized battery (yes, it comes in AA) that can recharge using any USB port. This isn’t his first invention. Previously, he invented th...
Jazz
January 08, 2007 03:07Jazz has undergone the ultimate irony. Born in New Orleans, Jazz was once deplored by the music establishment and academia as modern day rap is now considered offensive by ears accustomed to Beethoven. It was the devil's music. Now it's hard to find an article about it in anything other than media outlets aimed at upscale audiences. The New York Times just printed an article titled Jazz Is Alive and Well. In the Classroom, Anyway.
Confusing Comfort with Happiness
January 05, 2007 22:10I'm not sure that there's any correlation between entrepreneurship and fitness, but there seems to be a lot in common among people at the top of their game -- be them entrepreneurs or athletes. Outside magazine ran an interview with "ultrarunner" Dean Karnazes (thanks to Michael Hyatt for the link) in which he said:
Bah, Humbug!
December 22, 2006 18:32Nothing like A Podcast Carol to change one's outlook on podcasting for 2007. How are you keeping in touch with your clients before the new year? What does your vacation look like? Happy Holidays!
Taxing Entrepreneurship
December 19, 2006 23:03The government pays a lot of lip service risk-taking, entrepreneurship and small business. In fact, many believe that it can be advantageous for tax purposes to be an entrepreneur (write-offs, SBA loans, hiring family members, etc.). In a fascinating blog post titled Should We Worry about the Rising Inequality in Income and Wealth?, Judge Richard Posner considers how a high marginal taxes effects entrepreneurs and other risk takers: What are the causes, and what are the effects, of this tre...
The Irony of You
December 18, 2006 23:51Setting off a barrage of cutesy opening lines by bloggers, Time Magazine designated "You" as the person of the year. Bloggers responded with begrudging thanks, collective self-congratulations, lessons in semantics and more musings. Triumph! Citizen media has finally overtaken professional journalism in influence. However, what does it say that a silly magazine award (published by the "M.S.M." no less) can still set the blogosphere a flutter? People have always placed too much authority in t...
Frenemy
December 06, 2006 18:45With so much change going on in media, it's hard to tell who's your friend or your enemy. Having a good strategy for dealing with others who could either be a great partner or a fierce competitor is crucial for many startups, as we saw with PayPal and Zingy. A few weeks ago at an event put on by The Week, I heard WPP chairman and CEO Sir Martin Sorrell use the perfect term to describe such a relation (in this case referring to Google): frenemy. If Sun-tzu was right that you should keep your...
Wharton: "Where Entrepreneurship Comes to Die"
December 05, 2006 18:08We've covered the ongoing debate over "teaching" entrepreneurship. Now we have a report from the front lines. Ravi Mishra, a University of Pennsylvania junior double majoring in engineering and business who still describes his location as "Silicon Valley, California", writes a blog post titled Where Entrepreneurship Comes to Die. He tears apart his fellow b-schoolers' business ideas with an entertaining vengeance usually only seen in a venture capitalist (I wonder what he scored on the V...