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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Episodes
Camp Entrepreneur
April 20, 2006 05:11Forget dodgeball, entrepreneurship is now the thing to do in camp according to BusinessWeek. Within a two-week period recently, I had the opportunity to speak at class day to a group of 4th graders and to two MBA classes at one of the top three U.S. business schools. I asked the 4th graders if they knew what an entrepreneur was. None of them did. They all liked the concept when I told them, but I truly won them over when I showed off my iPod. Unfortunately I was then upstaged by the two pr...
Skippin' the Ladder
April 19, 2006 05:17The Wall Street Journal just ran an article by Emily Meehan titled Young Entrepreneurs Aim To Skip Corporate Ladder. It cites a woman who launched a business venture about ten years ago that didn't succeed. Ms. Baker was so absorbed in building her business that she lost track of many friends. "It was a very lonely time because nobody my age was really going through that." While Jenny Baker's experience sounds quite painful overall, that feeling of loneliness seems to stick out in her min...
Entrepreneurial Terror
April 19, 2006 04:11When I read Steve Hindy’s excellent book Beer School in preparation for my interview with him about how he started the Brooklyn Brewery, one small section jumped out at me. Steve remembered his experience reading an editorial in 1987 by Wilson Harrell, the then publisher of Inc. magazine, titled “Entrepreneurial Terror.” Though Steve and I discussed this on the show, I think this topic deserves more exploration. Here’s an excerpt of Steve’s summary in his book of Wilson’s article:
NYU Conference
April 19, 2006 03:45When: April 22, 2006 Where: Tisch Hall, New York University, New York, NY What: Venture Voice is a media sponsor of the NYU Entrepreneurship Conference. Venture Voice staff will be on the prowl for entrepreneurs with interesting stories as always.
VV Show #31 – Steve Hindy of The Brooklyn Brewery
April 12, 2006 23:21 - 49 minutes - 22.5 MBBeing robbed at gun point and being threatened by the mob are not problems the average entrepreneur encounters. Steve Hindy faced these problems and more, but what concerned him most was the fate of his brewery. Steve started the Brooklyn Brewery with Tom Potter. …
VV Show #31 - Steve Hindy of The Brooklyn Brewery
April 12, 2006 05:05Download the MP3. Being robbed at gun point and being threatened by the mob are not problems the average entrepreneur encounters. Steve Hindy faced these problems and more, but what concerned him most was the fate of his brewery. Steve started the Brooklyn Brewery with Tom Potter. Steve was a journalist and foreign correspondent. Tom was a banker. Neither knew a thing about starting, much less running, a brewery. With grit and determination, they stared down bankruptcy and made it work. In ...
Moderating at the Perfect Venture Conference
April 06, 2006 16:13I just moderated a panel on "How to Build a Winning Management Team" at the Perfect Venture Conference that included Adam Farber of IDT Ventures, Don Rose of Global Media Fund, Elizabeth Sigety of Delaware Crossing Investor Group, Jeanne Sullivan of StarVest Partners (by total coincidence, I had interviewed her business partner Deborah Farrington last September) and Jack Bloom of Apex Capital Corporation. It was a great panel because each panelist had very different resumes. It was also an ...
Exclusive: Fabrice Grinda Launches OLX, Says Users Will Challenge eBay and Craigslist
April 05, 2006 06:37Judging by the user comments, Fabrice Grinda has been one of our most popular guests. We interviewed him last December on his last day at work at Zingy, the ringtone company he founded, sold for $80 million, then grew to $130 million in sales. Before Zingy, he started the leading auction sites in Europe and Latin America. We can now break the news of his most ambitious venture yet: An ad-supported auction site to compete with Craigslist and eBay. It's called OLX, and it's already live. We ...
VV Show #30 – Scott Johnson of Ookles
April 03, 2006 16:33 - 59 minutes - 27.3 MBScott Johnson is a long-time entrepreneur on the bleeding edge of technology. He started his first business in 1987 and successfully sold it. Then he rode the dot com wave up and down with Mascot Network, a company that was trying to do what Facebook does now by providing online communities for college students. …
10% Scott
April 03, 2006 16:15We just posted our 30th show! Aaron mentioned Scott to me and I had to ask which one. We've interviewed 3 Scotts so far: Scott Heiferman, Scott Rafer and Scott Johnson. Are Scotts disproportionally entrepreneurial? If they are, it's not because of good luck. Scott Johnson, who we just posted an interview with, reports that Venture Voice has been trumped by tornado concerns around his home in Indiana. Although we might not be hitting the mark on diversity of first names, if our guests are...
VV Show #30 - Scott Johnson of Ookles
April 03, 2006 05:39Download the MP3. Scott Johnson is a long-time entrepreneur on the bleeding edge of technology. He started his first business in 1987 and successfully sold it. Then he rode the dot com wave up and down with Mascot Network, a company that was trying to do what Facebook does now by providing online communities for college students. Most recently, he started Feedster, which after a lot of early traction ousted Scott Johnson and the CEO he recruited. Now he gives us the exclusive on the mission...
Market Shrinkage
April 02, 2006 23:05Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman gives some excellent examples from his career of disruptive entrepreneurial businesses in his blog. He cites his investment in Jingle Networks, the company that runs 1-800-FREE411. We covered Jingle's launch at DEMOfall. Americans spend $8 billion on 411 calls. Jingle simply makes it free and ad-supported. If successful, Americans will spend a lot less on 411 calls but Jingle will prosper at the exponential expense of the phone companies.
Altruistic Disruption
April 02, 2006 02:03The New York Times just published a story called Death by Smiley Face: When Rivals Disdain Profit. It describes what we recently referred to as disruptive businesses -- a company that can grow while shrinking margins in its industry. In other words, a disruptive business can expand by making one dollar for every several dollars it takes from its antiquated competitors. Except The Times attributes the motive behind this business model to be altruistic, while we naively thought it was just a g...
April Fools?
April 01, 2006 20:13CNNMoney.com managing editor Allen Wastler tells us that April Fools' Day can be a dreadful time for anyone trying to cover the news. I'm starting to know how he feels. Here are three news items I wonder about: In-Sleep Advertising: According to eMarketer (via MIT Advertising Lab), the market for advertising in your dreams will grow from under $1 million in 2005 to over $3 billion in 2020. Facebook for Sale for $2 Billion: BusinessWeek started a big stir by reporting that the extremely po...
Invisible and Disruptive Entrepreneurs
March 28, 2006 02:52While the popular mentality has shifted over the past couple of decades to recognise if not admire entrepreneurs, economic theory has largely ignored them according to The Economist's article Searching for the invisible man. And who would know better than The Economist? Many people bicker over the definition of entrepreneurship, but the literal translation The Economist cites is quite satisfying. Translated literally, entrepreneur means one who undertakes—one of life's doers. To start a fi...
Venture Voice to Newsweek in Under Two Months
March 27, 2006 01:37While many of the entrepreneurs we've interviewed on this show have already made it big, we go to conferences like DEMO to scout out the up-and-comers. At the last DEMO conference, we followed Sharpcast through the process of unveiling their technology to the world. Now, not even two months later, Sharpcast has been featured as part of a Newsweek cover story on the "Next Web". That was fast.
Having Too Much Fun in the Valley?
March 25, 2006 20:34David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals, whose co-founder Jason Fried has been a guest on our show, counters a post by Caterina Fake, who started Flickr with her husband and sold it to Yahoo!, titled It's a bad time to start a company. (Disclaimer: I'm a happy paid user of both of their products.) Caterina's central focus is that while entrepreneurship is in vogue as it is now, competition increases for talent, space and venture capital. This both drives up costs to start a business and incre...
Tracking Venture Voice Alumni
March 25, 2006 05:17Soon after stating this blog, I realized I had no consistent and reliable way to track the latest news about our past guests. What have I gotten myself into? Only a few of them have PR people who send me press releases regularly -- and press releases are usually pretty boring reads. So I've decided to try using the tools built by past guests to track them. I first went into Feedster (which used to be CEOed by VV interviewee Scott Rafer) and entered in this short little search phrase: "Dick ...
FundingPost's Perfect Venture Conference
March 23, 2006 03:28When: April 5-7, 2006 Where: New York City What: Venture Voice host Greg Galant will be moderating a panel at the Perfect Venture Conference titled "How to Build a Winning Management Team"
Media Devolution or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog
March 23, 2006 03:20We’ve come a long way since we first started this podcast nine months ago. When I used to go to tech conferences and tell people I had just launched a podcast, the response was usually something along the lines of “Podcast, very cool. How long have you been blogging?” After hearing I’d never had a blog and still don’t (unless you count the text portion of our podcast a blog, which I don’t unless it will get us more press), I’d usually get a strange stare. “No blog, are you really Web 2.0...
VV Show #29 – Shoba Purushothaman of The NewsMarket
March 18, 2006 23:25 - 50 minutes - 23.1 MBShoba Purushothaman’s career has shifted dramatically since she started her first job as a business journalist in Malaysia. After spending several years working for the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, she grew restless just covering how the world was changing. …
VV Show #29 - Shoba Purushothaman of The NewsMarket
March 18, 2006 21:28Download the MP3. Shoba Purushothaman’s career has shifted dramatically since she started her first job as a business journalist in Malaysia. After spending several years working for the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, she grew restless just covering how the world was changing. She wanted to influence it. Shoba co-founded a public relations consultancy that helped corporations ride the wave of change brought on by the rapid expansion of television news. She saw first hand how i...
VV Show #28 - John Bogle of The Vanguard Group
February 24, 2006 03:55Download the MP3. If you’re making lots of money in a fat industry for doing relatively little, then the last thing you want is a competitor like John C. Bogle. He founded The Vanguard Group in 1975 and revolutionized the mutual fund industry by slashing management fees. By creating the world’s first index fund, John showed investors they could invest in the market without giving a large portion of their earnings to fund managers. While it sounds easy in hindsight, it was a difficult path. ...
VV Show #28 – John Bogle of The Vanguard Group
February 23, 2006 16:40 - 1 hour - 28.8 MBIf you’re making lots of money in a fat industry for doing relatively little, then the last thing you want is a competitor like John C. Bogle. He founded The Vanguard Group in 1975 and revolutionized the mutual fund industry by slashing management fees. …
VV Show #27 – Following Entrepreneurs at DEMO 2006
February 15, 2006 23:30 - 49 minutes - 22.7 MBWhen a startup launches its first product, should it expect a lot of fanfare? It should if it launches at DEMO before an audience of hundreds that includes some of the nation’s top journalists and venture capitalists (not to mention Venture Voice). …
VV Show #27 - Following Entrepreneurs at DEMO 2006
February 15, 2006 17:11Download the MP3. When a startup launches its first product, should it expect a lot of fanfare? It should if it launches at DEMO before an audience of hundreds that includes some of the nation’s top journalists and venture capitalists (not to mention Venture Voice). DEMO is a two-day conference, held in Phoenix this time around, that features about 70 never-before-seen technology products. Most of the products come from scrappy startups. We follow two of those startups through the process, ...
VV Show #26 – Kelly Perdew is the Venture Voice 2005 Entrepreneur of the Year
January 30, 2006 16:45 - 25 minutes - 11.7 MBKelly Perdew may have won The Apprentice 2, but the listeners of Venture Voice have given him a new recognition for his entrepreneurial work since then. Kelly got the most votes for the Venture Voice 2005 Entrepreneur of the Year Award. …
VV Show #26 - Kelly Perdew is the Venture Voice 2005 Entrepreneur of the Year
January 30, 2006 05:00Download the MP3. Kelly Perdew may have won The Apprentice 2, but the listeners of Venture Voice have given him a new recognition for his entrepreneurial work since then. Kelly got the most votes for the Venture Voice 2005 Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Since we last had Kelly on the show, he’s started a number of new ventures. He announces on the show that he’s launching a new venture capital shop called Angel-Led Venture Partners. We also play your audio votes and get Kelly’s reaction.
VV Show #25 – Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky Win Venture Voice Entrepreneurial Achievement Awards
January 25, 2006 23:34 - 27 minutes - 12.8 MBThe listeners have spoken. Jason Fried of 37signals and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software have won Venture Voice Entrepreneurial Achievement Awards. They came in second and third place out of a pack of over 20 world-class entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed on the show (we’ll announce the Venture Voice Entrepreneur of the Year Award winner next week). …
VV Show #25 - Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky Win Venture Voice Entrepreneurial Achievement Awards
January 25, 2006 05:30Download the MP3. The listeners have spoken. Jason Fried of 37signals and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software have won Venture Voice Entrepreneurial Achievement Awards. They came in second and third place out of a pack of over 20 world-class entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed on the show (we’ll announce the Venture Voice Entrepreneur of the Year Award winner next week). It was a close race and you gave us some really impassioned votes. In this show, Jason and Joel give us some hints about what ...
VV Show #24 - Bo Peabody of Village Ventures
January 17, 2006 22:22Download the MP3. “Stock lockup” is a term remembered with horror by many entrepreneurs who weren’t allowed to sell their dot com shares before the bubble burst. Bo Peabody founded Tripod, which was sold to Lycos for $58 million in stock. The terms of the sale forced him to hold onto his stock for two years -- while its value happened to increase ten-fold. He also happened to sell his shares just two months before the bubble burst. This lesson in luck was not lost on Bo, who wrote a book ti...
VV Show #24 – Bo Peabody of Village Ventures
January 17, 2006 16:58 - 45 minutes - 20.7 MB“Stock lockup” is a term remembered with horror by many entrepreneurs who weren’t allowed to sell their dot com shares before the bubble burst. Bo Peabody founded Tripod, which was sold to Lycos for $58 million in stock. The terms of the sale forced him to hold onto his stock for two years — while its value happened to increase ten-fold. …
VV Show #23 - Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
December 15, 2005 19:12Download the MP3. It’s not easy to stand out at Kleiner Perkins, one of the most prestigious venture capital shops in Silicon Valley that counts Google in its portfolio. Though Randy Komisar joined the firm just this year, it’s clear he’s not a typical venture capitalist. He once was a lawyer, but openly admits to hating being a lawyer and has been running from the law (well, from the practice of law) for most of his career. He’s played top roles at Claris Corporation, LucasArts Entertainme...
VV Show #23 – Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
December 15, 2005 00:04 - 38 minutes - 20.8 MBIt’s not easy to stand out at Kleiner Perkins, one of the most prestigious venture capital shops in Silicon Valley that counts Google in its portfolio. Though Randy Komisar joined the firm just this year, it’s clear he’s not a typical venture capitalist. …
VV Show #22 - Introducing the Venture Voice Entrepreneur of the Year Award
December 12, 2005 17:21Download the MP3. We’ve interviewed some of the most accomplished and most hungry entrepreneurs on this show, but now the year’s almost over and it’s time to choose the Entrepreneur of the Year. We have no distinguished panel of judges or wise editorial board to make this decision. Rather, we’re leaving it up to you, our listeners, to decide. Listen to this brief show to find out more. Visit www.VentureVoice.com/Entrepreneur2005 to cast your vote.
VV Show #22 – Introducing the Venture Voice Entrepreneur of the Year Award
December 12, 2005 17:04 - 10 minutes - 9.96 MBWe’ve interviewed some of the most accomplished and most hungry entrepreneurs on this show, but now the year’s almost over and it’s time to choose the Entrepreneur of the Year. We have no distinguished panel of judges or wise editorial board to make this decision. …
VV Show #21 - Fabrice Grinda of Zingy
December 08, 2005 17:05Download the MP3. If you think the ringtone business is for kids, then Fabrice Grinda has a $130 million lesson to teach you. After starting the eBays of Europe and Latin America, Fabrice brought the ringtone business concept to America by starting Zingy. We caught up with Fabrice, now 31 and a millionaire several times over, just a couple of hours before he finished his last day at the helm of Zingy. While his possessions were in boxes, he put all of his cards on the table by telling us hi...
VV Show #21 – Fabrice Grinda of Zingy
December 08, 2005 00:08 - 53 minutes - 24.7 MBIf you think the ringtone business is for kids, then Fabrice Grinda has a $130 million lesson to teach you. After starting the eBays of Europe and Latin America, Fabrice brought the ringtone business concept to America by starting Zingy. We caught up with Fabrice, now 31 and a millionaire several times over, just a couple of hours before he finished his last day at the helm of Zingy. …
VV Show #20 – Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software
November 22, 2005 17:07 - 55 minutes - 25.2 MBWhile some entrepreneurs fret over new business ideas, Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software focuses on hiring the best and brightest for his New York City-based software company, and then figures out how to make a profit with the products they create. …
VV Show #20 - Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software
November 22, 2005 05:06Download the MP3. While some entrepreneurs fret over new business ideas, Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software focuses on hiring the best and brightest for his New York City-based software company, and then figures out how to make a profit with the products they create. He bootstrapped his company to profitability and built a loyal following of fans along the way. While Joel developed Fog Creek's first product called FogBugz that tracks bugs, he let his 2005 summer interns develop their own pr...
VV Show #19 - Derek Sivers of CD Baby
November 08, 2005 05:31Download the MP3. Many would-be tech titans dream day and night about how their hot new idea will change the world. Derek Sivers just wanted to have his independent band's CDs sold over the Web. No one would do it, so he built his own music store. CD Baby now generates $25 million a year in revenue and is the single largest digital distributor of music in the world according to Napster. And he did it without a dime in venture capital. Derek holds true to some very basic beliefs in business ...
VV Show #19 – Derek Sivers of CD Baby
November 08, 2005 00:19 - 51 minutes - 23.5 MBMany would-be tech titans dream day and night about how their hot new idea will change the world. Derek Sivers just wanted to have his independent band’s CDs sold over the Web. No one would do it, so he built his own music store. …
VV in the Long Island Business News
October 31, 2005 07:00Venture Voice is featured in the Long Island Business News complete with a photo of host Greg Galant. View a PDF of the article here.
VV Show #18 – Mena Trott of Six Apart
October 25, 2005 16:39 - 37 minutes - 34.7 MBAt age 28, Mena Trott is a veteran blogger and an accomplished company founder. Six Apart, the business she started four years ago with her husband Ben, now has over 100 employees. Its stable of popular blogging products (including Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal) are used by writers of all types — from the most influential bloggers to children who communicate after school. …
VV Show #18 - Mena Trott of Six Apart
October 25, 2005 06:25Download the MP3. At age 28, Mena Trott is a veteran blogger and an accomplished company founder. Six Apart, the business she started four years ago with her husband Ben, now has over 100 employees. Its stable of popular blogging products (including Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal) are used by writers of all types -- from the most influential bloggers to children who communicate after school. She's still pushing her company forward as president and developing some very ambitious new t...
VV Show #17 - Jason Fried of 37signals
October 18, 2005 03:00Download the MP3. The business world seems to keep getting more complicated, but Jason Fried is all about keeping things simple. When founding 37signals, Jason and his two partners staked their careers on simplicity. They wrote a manifesto to convince others of their philosophy of keeping design on the Web simple. Their project management software, Basecamp, has become a hit for its ease of use. Their blog is intently followed by thousands of (mostly) admiring readers, and has led to a book...
VV in the New York Times
October 17, 2005 15:55Thanks to our supportive listeners and top-notch guests, Venture Voice has received a great write-up in the New York Times. Thanks to everyone who has listened so far. Keep your ears and eyes open -- it only gets better.
VV Show #17 – Jason Fried of 37signals
October 17, 2005 00:27 - 51 minutes - 23.5 MBThe business world seems to keep getting more complicated, but Jason Fried is all about keeping things simple. When founding 37signals, Jason and his two partners staked their careers on simplicity. They wrote a manifesto to convince others of their philosophy of keeping design on the Web simple. …
VV Show #16 – Tom Szaky of TerraCycle
October 04, 2005 16:42 - 40 minutes - 37.3 MBDropping out of college to start a technology company is almost a cliché. But is technology the only industry that can seduce an ambitious student into entrepreneurship? Tom Szaky dropped out of Princeton because he saw an opportunity in trash. At 19, he started developing an alternative to Miracle-Gro by using the excrement of worms that eat compost. …
VV Show #16 - Tom Szaky of TerraCycle
October 04, 2005 05:15Download the MP3. Dropping out of college to start a technology company is almost a cliché. But is technology the only industry that can seduce an ambitious student into entrepreneurship? Tom Szaky dropped out of Princeton because he saw an opportunity in trash. At 19, he started developing an alternative to Miracle-Gro by using the excrement of worms that eat compost. To keep costs down, he reused soda bottles to package his product and located his business in Trenton, New Jersey. He's now...