The problem Eskil Nordhaug wanted to solve for people was simple. Videos taken with smartphones or small cameras are notoriously shaky. So he simply looked at the needs. He asked himself what it would take to build a company selling a mechanical video stabilizer that exceeded expectations—the kind of product consumers needed, the amount of money he would need, the coverage help press outlets needed, the info his project page would need. The result was StayblCam, and it was precisely this needs-f...
Nov 02, 2016•48 min
There's a common thread in a lot of entrepreneurs' stories: They were facing a problem, couldn't find the solution they were looking for, so went ahead and built it themselves. That's exactly what Derek Flanzraich did when he started Greatist , a digital media startup that's all about health and fitness, without all the fluff and in-your-face marketing. As someone who has struggled with his weight his entire life, Flanzraich wanted to find a brand that would talk to him on a personal level and n...
Oct 26, 2016•1 hr
When you think about wine, you most likely imagine stern-faced sommeliers, or parties where tuxedos and hors d'oeuvres on silver platters are the norm. Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey do not fit the stereotype. You probably wouldn't even expect them to be wine-lovers, let alone the co-founders of Barefoot Wine , the largest wine brand in the world. But according to them, the reason they're so successful is precisely because they knew nothing about the industry going in. Houlihan and Harvey ne...
Oct 19, 2016•1 hr 1 min
When Zipcar first started it was nothing more than a green Volkswagen beetle named "Betsy." It was parked outside of Robin Chase's house and the key was hidden underneath a pillow on her porch. Inside the glove box was a piece of paper where you would write down the time you rented the car and the time you brought it back. That was it. These days, Zipcar is the largest car sharing service in the world, with more than 13,000 cars spread across almost every major city in the world. The first time ...
Oct 12, 2016•35 min
Casey Fenton, like many of us in our 20s, wasn't entirely sure where he would go in life. Growing up in a small town in Maine, he started to think about this entire world that existed beyond the borders of his hometown, and all the experiences he had yet to have. One thing he knew for sure was that his small hometown wasn't going to be offering him any of the new experiences he was looking for. "That got me to start buying random plane tickets to anywhere in the world," he says. From there it wa...
Oct 05, 2016•49 min
For most entrepreneurs, the real test isn't whether or not you can grow a successful business, but how well you can bounce back from failure. For some, this will prove to be too much and they'll hang up the gloves and never try again. For the true entrepreneurs, though, they'll find a way to jump back into the ring no matter what. That is exactly what Eugene Woo, co-founder of Venngage , did. “I had like a taste of failure, but I still went ahead anyway and did it again,” Woo says. After his fir...
Sep 29, 2016•1 hr
Every morning of every day, Sujan Patel starts his day by getting out all of his creative energy onto paper. The process is relatively simple. He starts by recording himself talking about whatever topic he wants to write about as a way to order his thoughts. He'll then send this recording to a transcriptionist and when he gets it back he'll spend around an hour cranking out a 1,500-2,000 word blog post. For Sujan, this is the secret to being one of the world's best and most prolific content mark...
Sep 21, 2016•53 min
During a creative career filled with awards and recognition, it took Alex Bogusky a while to realize that none of it mattered unless he loved the work. “You could win the Grand Prix at Cannes—the next day you’re going to go into your office and look at the same dude across the office and try to think of something. It doesn’t feel any better; it didn’t make you any smarter; it doesn’t make anything any easier,” Bogusky says. He did, in fact, win the most prestigious award at Cannes Advertising. A...
Sep 14, 2016•45 min
The future of media, if not the present, probably looks a lot like The Next Web , which is odd considering co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten says it’s not even really a media company. The Next Web instead thinks of itself as a tech company, firing on multiple cylinders at once, including international conferences, ecommerce, online courses, and of course, one of the most influential and trafficked news sites on the web. Soon they’re even opening up a brick and mortar space in Amsterdam tha...
Sep 08, 2016•45 min
No one ever "gives" an entrepreneur a job, they make one for themselves. Entrepreneurs don't ask for permission, they just do. And no one exemplifies this better than Ryan Holiday who has made an entire career out of refusing to play by the rules. As a writer he started off by dropping out of college to apprentice under Robert Greene as a research assistant. To date he's published 5 bestselling books, his first book now being taught in colleges around the world. As a marketer he got his first jo...
Aug 31, 2016•51 min
In 2012 James Beshara and his co-founder officially launched Tilt , a platform that aimed to make crowdfunding not only more personal but to make the process as easy as possible. But if you ask the Y-Combinator alum himself, he'll say that Tilt was created years before it even launched. Originally starting off as an offshoot of an earlier startup that he was working on, he soon found himself working on Tilt more and more. It was then he realised he was onto something. "For every young entreprene...
Aug 25, 2016•38 min
Something that most entrepreneurs struggle with the most is coming up with an idea for a startup. They'll study business forecasts and look at unique trends trying to find the next big thing. What most entrepreneurs forget though is that the most disruptive startups in the world were created to solve a single problem. Which is what exactly Polina Raygorodskaya was looking to do when she founded Wanderu , a platform that allows you to find, compare and book bus and train tickets anywhere within t...
Aug 18, 2016•31 min
There are no shortcuts when it comes to good online marketing, something that Dave Hobson knows all too well. As the resident expert on all things marketing at Foundr we give you a very special episode today about Dave from how he came to be at Foundr to his thoughts on successful online marketing. Funnily enough, it is entirely possible that Foundr would not be around if Dave had not cold-called Nathan nearly four years ago. At the time Nathan had only just started Foundr and Dave was at a job ...
Aug 10, 2016•57 min
The term "unicorn company" describes a startup valued at over $1 billion that managed to get there in a relatively short period of time. Usually when we talk about unicorn companies, we're dealing with Silicon Valley and the cutting edge of the tech scene. Companies that are disruptive in the sense that they've created something totally new. Rarely, however, do we find a unicorn company that started out in an overcrowded and declining market. Yet somehow, despite the odds, Tom Bilyeu, co-founder...
Aug 03, 2016•44 min
When Hal Elrod was 19 he was involved in a car accident with a drunk driver that left him with brain damage, 11 broken bones, and doctors telling him that he'd never walk again. While many people would understandably give into grief or anger or any other whirlwind of emotions that come after such a traumatic event, Elrod instead made the conscious choice to be at peace with himself. He knew there was nothing he could control about his situation, but he could control how the situation affected hi...
Jul 27, 2016•1 hr 1 min
Brian Scudamore of O2E brands knew all along that he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Relying on that sense of determination, he's built up a sprawling multimillion-dollar business empire, with franchises all over the world. But it all began with junk. To be specific, it all started in a McDonalds drive-thru, with Scudamore sitting in his car trying to figure out how he would pay for college. What he saw was an old pick-up truck filled to the brim with junk, and he immediately knew that this would ...
Jul 20, 2016•45 min
On November 9, 2013, I released the first episode of the Foundr Podcast. It was with Fabio Rosati, then-CEO of Elance. To be completely honest, I wasn't quite sure what I was trying to achieve by releasing a podcast. At the time, it was just another way for us to give to our community, by releasing the audio of our interviews for free. Fast-forward to today and I can't believe we're at our 100th episode! It's flown by and so much has changed since. But the entire time I've kept in mind this piec...
Jul 13, 2016•56 min
As much as entrepreneurs can go on extolling the virtues of a great marketing strategy or knowing your target customer, at the end of the day, it's all about having something worth selling. No matter how great your advertising campaign may be, if you don't have something that people want to buy then you simply don't have a business. And yet, entrepreneurs all too often tend to gloss over this fact. They'll focus on everything else, but somehow forget to question whether or not their product is a...
Jul 05, 2016•48 min
Today you might recognize Robert Herjavec as "the nice shark" on ABC's Shark Tank . With a pleasant smile and a reassuring tone of voice, he may seem like an odd fit in the highly competitive world of business and investing. But don't let that fool you, because behind those kind eyes lies a strength of character and iron will that every great entrepreneur needs to achieve success. When Herjavec was a young man, he actually wanted to be a filmmaker. In fact, he was a producer for the Winter Olymp...
Jun 28, 2016•41 min
When you think of the word "entrepreneur," the image you're likely to conjure up in your head is one of a fast-talking, brash millennial with personality and ego to spare. That's exactly the kind of entrepreneur Nathan Latka is. At only 26 years old, Latka has managed to do more in five years as an entrepreneur than most people double his age! While there may be entrepreneurs out there who wring their hands and refuse to make a move until everything is perfect, Latka instead drives forward like ...
Jun 21, 2016•52 min
In the late 1960s, when Kenneth "Hap" Klopp traded in his corporate aspirations for the life of an entrepreneur, the support network for such endeavors was not nearly what it is today. But Klopp knew he had what it took to run a successful company, and he was right. After taking over from co-founders Douglas and Susie Tompkins in 1968, Klopp spent the following 20 years as CEO using pre-Internet disruption and brand-building wizardry to turn The North Face into a global outdoor gear brand. Under...
Jun 14, 2016•41 min
Dubbed "the world's most powerful startup incubator" by Fast Company , Y Combinator (YC) has been plucking startups from garages, dorm rooms, coffee shops, and assorted founder hangouts for over a decade. With a combined valuation of more than $65 billion among its alumni, a list that reads like a who’s who of startup fame—think AirBNB, Reddit, Dropbox, Instacart, Scribd, Weebly—YC has become a Silicon Valley institution. It is described as an elite founders boot camp, a place where ideas are in...
Jun 08, 2016•43 min
All entrepreneurs and startups are underdogs in one way or another. After all, in order to be an entrepreneur you're already going against the grain, and in order to be successful you must be willing to challenge the status quo no matter how large or small. But it's not everyday you find someone who manages to completely disrupt a billion-dollar industry with nothing more than a blog, some hustle, and a keen sense for marketing. In this modern day tale of David and Goliath, we speak with Alborz ...
Jun 01, 2016•43 min
To be a great entrepreneur, you need to have a great vision. Case in point: Back in the 80s, we were just entering the internet age. At the time, it didn't really exist beyond a few government think tanks and laboratories, and we were only just beginning to understand what was possible. It was during that time that massive companies like IBM, Sears, Microsoft and Citigroup began investing millions of dollars into figuring out this internet business. Despite all of the competition, in 1985, Steve...
May 25, 2016•35 min
One of the greatest misconceptions you'll encounter in the startup world is the one about age. You'll hear would-be entrepreneurs constantly telling themselves that they're too young, or that they're too old, or that they're just waiting for that right moment to finally become an entrepreneur. That's ridiculous. There is no perfect moment waiting around the corner for you, because the perfect moment only comes to those who actually go out there and create it. Ben Chaib, founder of Sell and Succe...
May 18, 2016•59 min
As the dominance of technology keeps on gaining steam, some non-techy, would-be entrepreneurs are made to feel discouraged. How can they compete with all the slick coders starting businesses in this virtual world? That didn’t stop non-coder Brian Moran from making serious money online, and ultimately making it big in the competitive niche of Software as a Service (SaaS). No programming geek, Moran was a marketing major, but primarily a baseball player, in college. He had hoped to continue his ba...
May 10, 2016•58 min
The closest thing Ankur Nagpal has ever had to a job was a summer internship at Amazon when he was 18. Ever since then, he's been his own boss at companies that he's built. Outside of that brief fling as an employee, Nagpal has wholly dedicated his life to being a serial entrepreneur. In his early years as an entrepreneur, he entered the highly competitive startup scene in Silicon Valley as a very successful Facebook app developer. Only he didn't make individual apps. Instead what he was selling...
May 03, 2016•56 min
Brene Brown was a meandering youth in her 20s, doing more traveling and bartending than she was building a business or focusing on school. As a result, she didn't graduate college until she was 30. Nonetheless, after finishing her bachelor’s in social work, she quickly gained her masters and PhD and started a career as an academic at the University of Houston. But something was rustling beneath the surface for Brown—being a quiet academic and publishing papers wasn’t enough for her. That somethi...
Apr 27, 2016•29 min
As the son of hardworking immigrants, David Cancel saw his parents working seven days a week to support their family. As an adult, he realized that not all people worked the way his parents did, which sparked in him a desire to make a living without getting a “job.” Cancel always knew that he wanted to be an entrepreneur, even if he wasn’t quite sure what that meant. As a kid, he found that flipping through the pages of Inc. Magazine and other early entrepreneurial publications didn’t offer much...
Apr 20, 2016•47 min
Justin Kan doesn’t come off as the type who lives for the spotlight. Which is funny, because at one point he live-streamed his life, 24/7 for the whole world to see, for months. That may seem like an unlikely path to a billion-dollar sale, but in fact, the early experiment in the world of live video got Kan and his partner Emmett Shear part of the way there. That unconventional level of dedication and curiosity is a testament to how these two have been willing to dive into the opportunities befo...
Apr 14, 2016•35 min
