Venture Voice – interviews with entrepreneurs-logo

Venture Voice – interviews with entrepreneurs

Talk

Muck Rack & Shorty Awards cofounder/CEO Greg Galant interviews the world's best entrepreneurs and creators, including the founders of LinkedIn, The Vanguard Group, Yelp, Brooklyn Brewery, Trello, Twitter and Stack Overflow.

Location:

United States

Description:

Muck Rack & Shorty Awards cofounder/CEO Greg Galant interviews the world's best entrepreneurs and creators, including the founders of LinkedIn, The Vanguard Group, Yelp, Brooklyn Brewery, Trello, Twitter and Stack Overflow.

Language:

English


Episodes

Matt Mullenweg built Automattic into a $7.5B company

11/22/2021
Matt Mullengweg was a high school student looking for a better way to customize his blog when he discovered the open source software community and created the WordPress platform. A few years later, after dropping out of the University of Houston for a brief stint at CNET Networks, he founded Automattic, which he describes as a holding company for products such as WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Simplenote, Longreads and The Atavist. And just like over 40% of the web today, they all run...

Duration:01:08:46

David Cohen’s Techstars

7/19/2021
As Co-Founder and Chairman of Techstars, David Cohen has spent nearly his entire career focused on helping entrepreneurs succeed. Aspiring founders and early-stage entrepreneurs from around the world apply to Techstars’ startup accelerators to get three months of hands-on mentorship, access to a worldwide network and a check for $20,000 in exchange for 6% of the startup. When I spoke with David for this episode back in 2008, the program was just two years old, part of a trend of structured...

Duration:00:45:03

Henrik Werdelin’s Bark fetches $1.6 billion valuation

7/5/2021
Originally from Denmark and now living in the US, Henrik Werdelin has been recognized as one of the “Top 100 Most Creative People In Business” by Fast Company and named to the “Silicon Alley 100” by Business Insider. His path to entrepreneurship took him through the BBC, MTV and Joost before he ended up creating Prehype, a “halfway house” for entrepreneurs like him, who didn’t know what to do next. Not only has Prehype incubated new ventures from scratch and in collaboration with Fortune 500...

Duration:01:08:45

Fabrice Grinda on growing Zingy into a $200 million business

6/22/2021
Fabrice Grinda is one of the world’s leading Internet entrepreneurs and investors, with over 150 exits on 500 angel investments. When I first interviewed him for this podcast, way back in 2005, the then-31-year-old French native was in the process of packing up his office at Zingy, the mobile media start-up he’d founded in 2000. After growing Zingy to $200 million in revenue, Fabrice had sold the company for $80 million in 2004. Eighteen months later, he was stepping down as CEO and looking...

Duration:01:03:33

Guy Kawasaki’s evangelizing Canva

6/7/2021
Guy Kawasaki’s name has become almost synonymous with tech entrepreneurship and evangelism. Over the past 25 years, he’s had a hand in advising a generation of tech start-ups and innovators, either directly, through stints at Apple and Google, or through his writings, speaking engagements, podcast and numerous books. Guy has started up a few of his own companies as well, and the venture capital fund he launched, Garage Technology Ventures, has invested in a variety of early-stage technology...

Duration:00:44:50

How Derek Sivers decided to sell CD Baby

5/24/2021
CD Baby founder Derek Sivers made two appearances on Venture Voice in the early days of this podcast. In our first conversation, he described the process of growing the company into one of the largest sellers and distributors of independent music online, with $25 million in revenue and 50 employees at the time. This week we’re revisiting our second conversation, which happened three years later. What a difference three years makes. In August 2008, Derek, who owned 100% of the equity, sold...

Duration:00:43:07

LivePerson’s Robert LoCascio got in mental shape to build a $3.5 billion business

5/10/2021
Born into a family of entrepreneurs, LivePerson founder and CEO Robert LoCascio always had the entrepreneurial spirit, going back to his teens when he and a friend started an auto detailing business. After graduating college, he had a brief stint in a “real” job, but that experience — he ended up getting fired via fax — convinced him that he never wanted to work for someone else again. Determined to control his own destiny, he took out $50,000 on credit cards to fund his first business,...

Duration:01:05:22

How Tom Perkins pioneered venture capital in 1972

4/26/2021
This week we’re revisiting my 2007 interview with Tom Perkins, who was one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists. The firm Tom co-founded, Kleiner Perkins, is responsible for funding some of the most well-known companies of the past four decades, including Google, AOL, Genentech, Sun Microsystems, Compaq and Tandem Computers. With that track record, Tom’s name is now almost synonymous with venture capital. But he actually cut his teeth as an entrepreneur. Educated at MIT...

Duration:00:41:02

Shutterstock’s Jon Oringer Turned His Amateur Photos Into a $3 Billion Business

4/12/2021
Jon Oringer is not a professional photographer. But when he needed images to market his growing internet business, the traditional stock agencies were still stuck in the world of print, so he took the DIY approach. What started as a way to fill a need for his own company turned into a side business that quickly gained traction. So quickly, in fact, that he turned his attention to it full time. Jon built Shutterstock on a “two-sided marketplace” subscription model that has its roots in Pop-Up...

Duration:00:59:11

Curative founder Fred Turner’s fast pivot into COVID-19 testing

3/29/2021
Fred Turner was only 16 when he built his first PCR machine, a tool used to amplify small segments of DNA or RNA. He was interested in sequencing his own genome, but he soon discovered there were others who had a need for these kinds of cheaper, faster testing capabilities. When English pedigree farmers came calling, he pivoted his attention to agriculture, but soon found himself in need of funding to be able to scale to meet demand. That led him to the US, where he went through Y...

Duration:01:02:34

How DRY Soda founder Sharelle Klaus pioneered the culinary soda category

3/15/2021
How do you start a whole new category of beverage — without any experience in the beverage industry? This week, we dip back into the archives for my 2005 interview with Sharelle Klaus, founder and CEO of DRY Soda. A former dot-com entrepreneur with a passion for food and wine, Sharelle was fed up with the lack of sophisticated beverage options available to her when she went out to eat while pregnant with each of her four children. She channeled that frustration into the launch of a startup...

Duration:00:48:47

How Amanda Hesser cooked up success with Food52

3/1/2021
It was a real treat to interview Food52 CEO and co-founder Amanda Hesser, who’s an old friend going back to my early days in the New York startup community. Listening to her tell the story of her entrepreneurial journey, you get the sense that she’s lived many lives — from studying food history alongside classmates like Corby Kummer and Sheryl Julian to apprenticing in a bakery in Germany (where she was the only woman in the kitchen) to sharpening her cooking and writing skills at a Chateau...

Duration:00:55:04

How Mike McDerment grew FreshBooks

2/15/2021
Sometimes, a big mistake can trigger a big idea. In 2003, Mike McDerment was running a small web design agency when he accidentally saved over an old invoice. Frustrated and looking for a better way to bill clients, he decided to build the better way himself. The solution he came up with would become the foundation for FreshBooks, a cloud-based accounting software for freelancers and service-business owners, which is now the #2 small business accounting software in America, with around 500...

Duration:01:10:17

How journalist Steve Hindy started Brooklyn Brewery

2/1/2021
We’re heading back to the archives, this time revisiting my 2006 interview with Steve Hindy, co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery. Steve’s career journey, both as a foreign correspondent before he took the entrepreneurial leap, and as a brewery owner, is the stuff of blockbuster movie fare. After all, being robbed at gunpoint and being threatened by the mob are not problems the average entrepreneur encounters (thankfully!). Steve and his co-founder Tom Potter forged ahead through the ups and downs...

Duration:00:45:26

How Mark Wilson built his success by building up others’

1/18/2021
Like most successful entrepreneurs, Mark Wilson, CEO of Chime Solutions, is an ambitious and savvy business person who’s driven by a strong work ethic and desire to make an impact. But when Mark founded his first company, Ryla, he was inspired by more than just the opportunity to build a business. Throughout his life, he had seen how talented people from minority communities often didn’t get the same chances as others who had more advantages. First with Ryla, which he ultimately sold for $80...

Duration:00:55:31

How Evan Williams turned side projects like Twitter into huge successes

1/4/2021
Today, Evan Williams is most well-known for being the billionaire co-founder of Twitter, as well as Blogger and Medium. But back in 2005 when this episode was recorded, Twitter hadn’t even been conceived of yet. When we spoke, Ev had just raised about $2 million in venture capital money for a hot new podcasting company he was about to launch called Odeo. Spoiler alert: Odeo didn’t make it. But a little side project had promise, and about a year after this interview was conducted, he and his...

Duration:00:39:37

Dan O’Keefe on the founding of Festivus and secrets of HBO’s Silicon Valley

12/21/2020
It’s a special holiday edition of Venture Voice, and the holiday we’re celebrating is Festivus. You may know it from the hit TV series Seinfeld, where the holiday “for the rest of us” is featured in the episode “The Strike” as an invention of George’s dad, Frank. Festivus was, in fact, invented by someone’s dad, but as you’ll hear in this episode, it wasn’t George Costanza’s; it was Seinfeld writer Dan O’Keefe’s. Dan shares how he reluctantly turned a family holiday memory he’d long tried to...

Duration:00:49:08

Jessica Lessin of The Information turned her journalism beat into a business

12/7/2020
Jessica Lessin is founder, CEO, editor-in-chief and sole owner of The Information, the influential subscription-only tech publication that was launched on a simple idea: write deeply reported articles about the technology industry that people won't find elsewhere. As she shares in this episode, like many who work in the news business, she got the journalism bug early on, working on school papers and enjoying the permission it gives you to “be a little bit nosy.” While at Harvard, she...

Duration:00:52:24

How John Bogle started Vanguard Group and invented index funds

11/23/2020
To an entrepreneur, a corrupt industry with a lot of inefficiencies means one thing: There’s a huge opportunity to innovate. When he founded The Vanguard Group in 1975, John Clifton “Jack” Bogle created the first index mutual fund, an idea that was innovative in its simplicity. By keeping management costs low, he was able to pass the savings on to investors. It sounds like common sense, but it goes against the grain of how most mutual fund managers think and operate. In fact, at the time,...

Duration:00:55:09

Todd McKinnon's journey taking Okta from $0 to a $25+ billion public company

11/9/2020
I can still remember logging in to PeopleSoft at my first job to see what deductions had come out of my paycheck. Now, all these years later, I’m interviewing the man who wrote that very code. Todd McKinnon, my guest on this episode of Venture Voice, began his career at PeopleSoft before moving on to Salesforce and ultimately founding Okta. Todd’s company is now worth over $25 billion. This episode takes you on Todd’s entrepreneurial journey, from the Powerpoint deck he presented to his...

Duration:01:06:51