Not to be called a one trick pony, Sam Wyly’s turned himself into a billionaire by starting and growing companies in technology, oil, retail and even in the restaurant industry. Coming from a modest upbringing, Sam worked in sales at IBM and Honeywell before founding University Computing in 1963 at age 29 with just “$1,000 and an idea” as he puts it in his book of that title. …...
Dec 03, 2008•1 hr 4 min
Jeff Stewart needed that done yesterday. Jeff became an entrepreneur when he founded the web consultancy Square Earth in 1995. Only three years later he became a serial entrepreneur by starting Mimeo, a service that lets you send a file directly from your computer to be printed, bound and shipped overnight. …...
Nov 10, 2008•1 hr 8 min
Last time Derek Sivers was on Venture Voice three years ago he told us he had to “whack ’em [investors] off with a stick”. Now we know why. Derek announces on our show for the first time the amount he sold his company for this past summer: $22 million. …...
Oct 23, 2008•49 min
Attention entrepreneurs dealing with the current economic downturn: This interview is for you. After working as a journalist for Jason Calacanis at Silicon Alley Reporter, Rafat Ali ended up broke in a market with a dearth of employment opportunities. To try to find a new job, Rafat created paidContent.org …...
Jul 23, 2008•1 hr 9 min
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. …...
Apr 07, 2008•50 min
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. …...
Dec 12, 2007•48 min
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. …...
Jun 24, 2007•49 min
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. …...
Apr 27, 2007•49 min
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. …...
Mar 09, 2007•34 min
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). …...
Jan 29, 2007•1 hr 26 min
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? …...
Jan 12, 2007•58 min
Premal Shah believes your last name doesn’t need to be Gates or Rockefeller in order to make a real dent in global poverty. After leaving his job as a Principal Product Manager at PayPal, it has taken Premal less then a year to make good on Kiva’s pledge that all it takes to become a micro lender is a credit card and access to a computer. …...
Nov 27, 2006•37 min
Real business networking takes place in the country club, at the chamber of commerce and on the golf course. After all, the Internet is just for friending strangers on MySpace and poking friends on Facebook. If you said all that to Reid Hoffman, he might think twice about adding you as a contact in LinkedIn, the business networking site he started that connects over seven million professionals. …...
Nov 03, 2006•46 min
If technology entrepreneurs have a guru, it surely must be Guy Kawasaki. For about two decades, Guy’s been advising entrepreneurs in one way or another. First as an evangelist for Apple, he courted software entrepreneurs and developers to write code for the Macintosh. …...
Oct 16, 2006•40 min
There are not many entrepreneurs who have spent their entire 10-year careers starting new ventures in online media, but Jason Calacanis just can’t help himself. Jason rode the dot com wave in New York by starting Silicon Alley Reporter. His publishing company Rising Tide Media grew to $12 million in sales. …...
Aug 25, 2006•1 hr 11 min
Digg, the news website that uses its own readers rather than editors to decide what stories are most important, has been growing with a fury. While founder Kevin Rose has gotten a lot of attention including a recent cover of BusinessWeek, CEO Jay Adelson has been guiding Digg toward business success. …...
Aug 11, 2006•1 hr 15 min
If there are best practices in entrepreneurship, you’ll hear the secrets to them in this coverage of the first half of the recent Venture Voice Startup Workshop in New York City. If there are in fact no best practices for entrepreneurs, then you’ll at least enjoy the heated discussion about how entrepreneurs should navigate the startup seas. …...
Jul 26, 2006•48 min
While many restaurants offer dozens of wines, beers and mixed drinks, there are few non-alcoholic options on the menu. Former dot-com entrepreneur and self-described foodie Sharelle Klaus was fed up with her lack of beverage options during the time she was pregnant with her four children. …...
Jun 14, 2006•50 min
What do you do after building and selling a business for $1.5 billion in the course of only a few years? That’s the question David O. Sacks, one of the co-founders of PayPal, faced after eBay bought his company. It didn’t take him long to find the answer: Go to Hollywood and make movies. …...
May 25, 2006•48 min
Venture Voice has been illuminating entrepreneurship through the podcast for just short of a year. Now, at the Venture Voice Startup Workshop on June 26 in New York, you can interact with top entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to find out how to start and grow innovative businesses. …...
May 11, 2006•9 min
Starting a service aimed at the blogging community is like jumping into a pressure cooker – all of the users are critics and have bullhorns. Good thing David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, has a thick skin he’s built after founding four businesses. …...
Apr 27, 2006•48 min
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. …...
Apr 12, 2006•49 min
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. …...
Apr 03, 2006•1 hr
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. …...
Mar 18, 2006•50 min
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. …...
Feb 23, 2006•1 hr 3 min
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). …...
Feb 15, 2006•50 min
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. …...
Jan 30, 2006•25 min
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). …...
Jan 25, 2006•28 min
“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. …...
Jan 17, 2006•45 min
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. …...
Dec 15, 2005•39 min
