Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs

Even though this site’s focus is tech entrepreneurs, I had to make an exception because this story is too good to miss.

Bill Keith and his family sold their home and went into debt create Perfect Foods Bar, a refrigerated whole foods bar. Then they worked tirelessly to make sure the business was a success.

Jose daVeiga did this interview as a way of turning the page on his startup, KlickSports, a mobile game that fans could play while watching live sports. In this interview we covered how things went sideways after roughly 10 years from the birth of an idea, filing of a patent, deciding to build a business, getting traction, raising capital, and its final ramp down.

Alex Mann and his brother were working on a consulting business when they decided to take a software project they were building for a client and turn it into software that other companies could use.

The result of that decision is ClickTime, software that makes tracking time and expenses easy. It generates about $3 million in annual sales. This is the story of how the idea grew into a business.

I wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate to even ask Gary Brooks about his childhood, but he reassured me in our pre-interview that as a member of the open source community he wanted to be open about who he was.

So you’ll hear why he…

What does it take to overturn an industry?

To answer that question, I invited Andy Kessler, frormerly the Co-founder and President of Velocity Capital Management, where he famously turned US$100 million into US$1 billion between 1996 and 2001. In his latest book, Eat People, he talks about…

14 million sounds like just another number. To really understand the size of Care2′s membership base, compare it to the number of members your site has.

Now, if you’re the typical Mixergy fan, you’re probably wondering, how can I make my membership as large as Care2′s? That’s the focus of this interview.

Jonathan Benassaya built Connect’In Advertising as a way for brands to buy ads in video games. Then Microsoft, maker of pretty much the only game console that could run ads at the time, bought his competition and took over his market. He had 3 months of cash in the bank and his business was vaporized. That’s when he made a dramatic move. Within days, he moved his company to China — even though he had zero experience with the country — and rebuilt it. Less than a year later, he sold it to NGI for…

Neil Strauss developed a skill that I bet you’d like.

If you read The Game, you saw him use it to transform himself from an average frustrated chump to a master pickup artist. When you read his upcoming book, Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead, you’ll see how he uses it to get celebrities like Tom Cruise and Madonna to open up.

Neil Strauss can create extreme rapport quickly, and in this interview he’ll show you how he does it.

Getting average internet users to give up their email addresses is easy. You just offer a free ring tone or Brintney Spears computer wallpaper and they hand over their addresses.

With tech founders, on the other hand, you have to earn every ounce of trust and work hard for every single email. Which is why I think it’s so impressive that StartupDigest, an upstart that’s been around for about a year, managed to grow its email list to 100,000 subscriptions.

While other entrepreneurs focus on vanity metrics like number of Twitter followers or blog hits, Dane Maxwell says there are only two metrics that matter to him: leads and profits.

In this interview you’ll learn the process he uses to go from idea, to leads, to product, to profits. You may have noticed in the previous sentence that getting leads comes before building the actual product for Dane. That’s how he ensures success with minimal risk.

Have you ever had an outside force change completely and nearly wipe your business out? How do you regain your balance in a situation like that? How do you even sleep at night?

To find out, I invited Hussein Fazal, co-founder of AdParlor, an ad network built on the Facebook platform. Remember the time Facebook decided it…

TechCrunch leads much of the conversation in the tech/startup world, so aren’t you curious about how it operates behind the scenes?

When my friend Alexia Tsotsis got a job at TechCrunch a few months ago, I gave her some time to settle into the position and then I started peppering her with requests to do a Mixergy interview.

What you’ll hear in this interview is how she…