Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs

My aim with this program is to cover the basics of venture capital, including questions like “How does a VC earn money?” and “What are the different roles inside a VC firm?”

Joining me is Jeffrey Bussgang, a VC with Flybridge Capital Partners and the author of Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on Your Terms. Previously, Jeff was an entrepreneur whose accomplishments include co-founding Upromise, which was acquired by Sallie Mae.

What do successful online companies have in common? That’s the question that I addressed in this interview with Bryan Zmijewski, the Founder of ZURB. ZURB, has helped over 100 startups use design and strategy to solve business problems.

Maybe I open up too much in this one. In this program you’re going to find out why being a teenage loser helped drive me to outwork other people, and how I forced myself to build a hit company.

Because I don’t have a guest scheduled for today, instead of my usual program where I interview others, I am posting an interview with a viewer named Owen McGab Enaohwo, who asked to interview me for his site, which helps people who want to hire a virtual assistant.

How do you build a community that people are willing to get on a plane and fly out to be a part of? Every March, over 14,000 smartphone-carrying, web-site building hipsters (like me) flood Austin Texas for SXSW Interactive.

They come to to talk business, to hear about the future of tech from people who help shape it, and to drink. Hugh Forrest is the event director for sxsw interactive. I invited him here to find how the event grew to be so big and influential.

If you’re ready to give up on your web app after a year, there’s a good chance Neil Patel wants to make a deal to buy it from you. That’s because, after building CrazyEgg, his visual web site analytics package, he knows that it can take a long time — and some creative marketing — for a product to build revenue. Most people don’t have that kind of patience, so he can buy their sites on the cheap.

This is the story of how…

I recently got an email from a Mixergy viewer who told me that he’s running a profitable online store which sells ammunition. You know, bullets. And it’s not a small business. He said his company, LuckyGunner, profitably booked $3.2 million in revenue within 12 months. Apparently, Obama’s victory and the recession helped him.

I invited him to Mixergy to talk about how he did it and to teach online sales. He said, “No.” But…

When Ryan Abood noticed gift basket sales at his parents’ flower store grow, even though they weren’t being promoted, he launched GourmetGiftBaskets.com. Last year his revenue was $8.7 million.

This is the story of how growing up in an entrepreneurial family taught him to build a business by working long after his competitors went home for the night. And, as you’ll see, what he learned from his parents helped him to perceiver when Google cut off his access to customers at a critical time and to compete against much bigger players in the gift basket space.

Jeff Butterworth is a founder who dropped out of school and started his company. He didn’t have much money, so he decided to make what he thought would be a simple product, a plug-in. As you’ll hear, it was more complicated than he expected, but he kept working on his business and, even as other companies raised venture capital to compete with him, he remained self-funded. His company, Alien Skin Software, broke a million dollars in revenue three years after launching and stayed above a million dollars and profitable ever since.

As you’ll hear in this program, Ross Williams bootstrapped his company using credit cards and slowly built it to where it is today, a $31 million per year business whose pool of over 4 million daters gives an instant community to thousands of online dating sites.

Avinash Kaushik is the man many of the entrepreneurs I interviewed turn to when they want to use analytics to uncover ways to increase conversions, decide what to build next or figure out why sales aren’t growing. He’s Google’s Analytics Evangelist and the author of two best-selling books on analytics.

I know this will be one of your favorite programs because…

My goal with this interview was to find out how an entrepreneur can market and raise money for a new product in a category that never existed before.

Jennifer Michelsen got the idea for her business when her husband’s migraines were traced to all the time he spent staring at his computer monitor. After researching the problem, she discovered….

A shocking thing happened when I pre-interviewed Bryan Zmijewski. He talked openly about some mistakes he made with a product he built which failed. It’s shocking because most entrepreneurs only want to brag about what’s gone well, and it’s very rare to find one who’s willing to teach us what he learned from setbacks.

Bryan is the founder of ZURB, which helped over a hundred start-ups use design and strategy to solve business problems…