Venture Voice

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman was one of my first guests on Venture Voice, back in 2006. Even though LinkedIn had 7.2 million users by then, it was still very much a niche platform and had only 56 employees. Putting your resumé online for all the world to see was pretty uncommon at that time. But Reid was driven by a simple goal: to change the world. Revisiting this interview now, you can pick up on some of the clues as to why he would become so successful. He takes an almost philosophical approach to business, putting himself in the user’s shoes and focusing on creating valuable media objects that would have a transformative effect on society. He also discusses the value of PR, something that stuck with me as I later launched Muck Rack. And he talks a lot about his peers — Mark Pincus, Peter Thiel, Stewart Butterfield — fellow entrepreneurs who hadn’t yet made it big but went on to do big things and continue to support each other. I was a fledgling entrepreneur when I spoke with Reid back in 2006, and these

Mark Cuban has built and sold more than one company and invested in plenty of others, but you might be surprised to learn that what he values most is something a lot of entrepreneurs find much more elusive: time. It’s a lesson this natural-born businessman learned from his father and took to heart at an early age. This episode begins with a trip back to Mark’s early years and explores how he made his first million (and then billion) — and why he continues to be driven by the pursuit of freedom that comes with having control over your own schedule. He also talks about some of his productivity habits, including why 40 unread emails is his limit, and how he uses Muck Rack Alerts to keep track of his press mentions. As someone who’s not shy about talking to the press but who also knows how valuable time is, Mark offers this advice for CEOs: “Some of the best time that you can spend is getting to know people that cover and write about your industry.” Listen in to hear Mark’s journey from a self-described “lousy em

Today’s media executives plotting to charge for their content would do well to hear how Larry Kramer beat Jim Cramer’s TheStreet.com by resisting pressure to put most content behind a pay wall while not relying entirely on advertising. To the average consumer, MarketWatch.com…

Any shareholder in a startup can tell you there’s a big difference between paper wealth and cash. Short of an IPO or outright acquisition, there are few options to cash out for the shareholders of even the most thriving private companies.…

“Dial 1 for sales, dial 2 for support…” Ten years ago it cost over $10,000 to get a phone system with the advanced options we’re used to hearing when we call big companies. Having a professional-sounding phone system was a surprisingly big challenge for small businesses short on cash.…

Craigslist seems unbeatable. It’s often blamed (or celebrated) for destroying the classifieds business that helped keep American newspapers afloat. Now second-time Venture Voice guest Fabrice Grinda is seeking to dominate online classifieds with OLX, his latest venture. Unlike Craigslist, OLX is translated into many languages and has a global focus.…

Joel Spolsky first came on Venture Voice over three years ago to discuss his company which he launched in a very different way from most entrepreneurs. Rather than start with the big idea and pay lip service to building a great team, Joel focused on getting great programmers first.…

Graham Hill started the blog TreeHugger to cover green issues in 2003. After a steady climb in traffic and advertising, Graham sold the company to Discovery Communications in 2007 for $10 million. Since launch and even after the acquisition, Graham ran his business virtually.…

It takes only a few seconds to customize a radio station on Pandora. Its founder Tim Westergren has been struggling for almost a decade to make it that way. Pandora was five years in the making before it streamed a single song to a user.…

The title financier conjures images of mahogany desks and million dollar checks for most. But for anyone pitching to David Cohen’s TechStars, the outcome is getting accepted to what’s essentially a summer camp for entrepreneurs in Colorado and being offered a check of $18,000 or less in exchange for 6% of the startup.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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).…