Foundr Magazine Podcast | Learn From Successful Founders & Proven Entrepreneurs, The Ultimate Startup Podcast For Business

Employed by Mercedes-Benz, pulling in $300,000 a year … By a lot of standards, James Schramko was doing pretty well for himself. Yet he felt stifled. He was relying on one source of income, which although high, he felt was capped, and didn't have creative control. As he tells Foundr, he wanted to be the primary beneficiary of his own efforts, rather than have his employer reap the rewards.    The upside was that it prepared him well to strike out on his own, as he did six years ago. “Running a multimillion dollar business for someone else … really gave me the solid training to be able to run a business,” he says.   He admits it was grueling juggling his job with a budding business to the tune of an extra four hours every day, but now he works about the same amount, minus the 9-5, that is. He aims for a 25-hour week with time for at least one surf session a day – fitting work around the tide charts.   Schramko's thing is internet marketing and coaching. It's a field littered with snake oil and empty promises b

Becoming one of the world’s most influential people on social media is no small feat. Author and entrepreneur Mari Smith explains that it comes down to a love of technology, and above all, a love of people.   Challenging traditional notions of marketing, author and entrepreneur Mari Smith explains that relationship marketing is based around creating trusting associations with customers that last a lifetime.   It’d be an understatement to say that social media has fundamentally changed how we communicate and ultimately do business around the world. Some people have a natural flair for it, others have to be trained. Mari Smith is one of the former. Widely recognized as the top Facebook marketing expert in the world, Mari Smith is the coauthor of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day and lead author of The Relationship Age, a collection of strategies from leading social media experts to help users navigate the world of social media. Smith is a relationship marketing specialist among the world’s foremost experts on u

Fists clenched, hidden iPhone filming from his shirt pocket, Jia Jiang stands in a glossy-tiled shopping mall in east Texas. And, as if tugged by a magnet, he ambles towards a seated security guard. With beads of sweat gathering at his temples, Jia plants his feet. The guard glances up. Jia swallows. “Can I have a hundred dollars?” This is Jia Jiang’s first foray into the world of deliberate rejection. And he will continue deliberately seeking rejection for one hundred days.    Have you ever walked up to ask someone for something, and been terrified of the response? Maybe it was asking for a raise. Maybe a bank loan. Maybe it was asking someone on a date. You feel your chest tighten, heart rate increase. And all of a sudden your little request starts looking more like Everest the closer you get. The fact is, the fear of rejection paralyzes us all.   In this interview you will learn:   - Jia's inspiring story of how he overcame the fear of rejection - Tactics and strategies of how you can overcome rejection to

Adi Tatarko, co-founder of online home design platform Houzz, began her journey by purchasing her dream home built in 1955 – a fixer-upper – and then setting about renovating it. “Unfortunately the process itself wasn't so dreamy… it was pretty much a nightmare,” Tatarko says. “So we ended up building Houzz in order to make the whole process better.”    The cliché holds – a picture paints a thousand words – and in order to best communicate the vision of their dream home to their architect, Tatarko and her husband Alon Cohen started a humble website displaying images of home interiors.    It was Silicon Valley, 2009. In that environment, the journey from personal project to company is a natural progression. They created an online platform to showcase the work of architects, so home renovators could access endless images to inspire the vision of their own dream home.   The couple then asked local Bay Area architects to upload their portfolios. Their initial community was made up from “twenty local homeowners, m

David Brim never meant to get into the car manufacturing business. He initially planned to import and sell the Tomcar Australia — an Israeli military vehicle — in Australia, but as things snowballed he found himself running a full-fledged business selling highly customized ATVs to defense, agriculture, mining, emergency services and the odd individual.   “Once we’d started we loved it. Nine years later we’re selling cars across Australia and people are loving it.”   Speaking to Foundr along with Tomcar Australia CMO Steve Sammartino, he says they were just a couple of car fans who stumbled into a staid industry. The pair met at a startup event — a “profitability party” of all things — where Sammartino was suitably impressed by the fact that Brim’s startup made real tangible products, and one thing led to another.   “Sammartino here gives a fantastic talk … To start a car company in Australia you need two things. You need no idea what you’re doing, ‘cause if you did you wouldn't do it. You need no money, ‘caus

Growth Hacker TV launched on May 1st of last year and has taken the entrepreneurial world by storm. Co-founder Bronson Taylor has suddenly provided a place where experts on startup growth reveal their secrets and we are eating it up! But Bronson, ever humble, shares his remarkable success as the tale of two brothers with a dream: “About four years ago, I guess, my brother and I decided to start a company. So we started a company called Dumb Punk and it was a web development shop,” he says. “But we were a couple of nobodies with no track record. Nobody knew about us.” Bronson and his brother began their initial business driving around, visiting local businesses with poorly-made websites, selling web development services completely cold. “That’s how we started,” admits Bronson, “which is kind of ridiculous, but we finally got enough clients that we were able to create a little business out of that and then we got more and more into products and then eventually some of the stuff that you see now with Growth Hack

Nine hundred million people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water. Globally, consumers spend $60 billion on bottled water each year. In the face of these stark mathematics, most might give a resigned shrug and consider it someone else’s problem. Thank you Water Founder Daniel Flynn was 19 when he discovered the alarming facts about the world’s water. His response? Make it his business to change the world.    In this interview you are going to learn:   -What it takes to create a social enterprise -How to do work that truly matters -The interesting struggles that an entrepreneur has when starting -How to build momentum -How to create movement -& Much more   I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

Obstacles, opportunities, and the ability to operate amid them: that's the business of business. Dave Goldberg knows. He does it every day. After post-college stints in management consulting and the music industry, Goldberg wanted to lead. He had one problem — his young age. But he turned that obstacle into an opportunity. “I needed to try running something, and no one, at [my] age of 26, was going to let me run anything,” he says. “So I decided to start my own company.” That company, LAUNCH Media, was such a success that Goldberg ultimately sold it to Yahoo. He went on to become the CEO of a small company called SurveyMonkey, which has grown in size and profit under his leadership. With more than 20 million users, the company is reportedly worth more than $1 billion. In his personal life, Goldberg has two kids and is married to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.   In this interview you will learn:   - Leadership 101 - A key secret that Dave applies to his life that has held him in very good stead - How to build a

Neil Patel is the cofounder of two well-known and highly successful analytics companies: Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. He is based in Seattle, Washington and wears many hats including that of an entrepreneur, analytics expert, blogger (www.quicksprout.com) and angel investor.   Neil’s story is interesting with lots of takeaways because of how he attained his success. For example, he started selling $1,600 vacuums at the age of 16. From the outside looking in, this venture was a failure. Of all the doors he knocked on, only one person said yes. However, that person would later return their $1,600 vacuum and ask for a refund. He did learn some key lessons from this venture that would serve him well in the future. Namely, be aggressive, be persistent and never give up.   In this interview you will learn:   -Neil's secrets to driving traffic -What good marketing is, and how to do it -Thoughts on content marketing and the future -Start up tactics for growing and scaling -Key entrepreneurship lessons that Neil learnt

In this episode of the Foundr Podcast gears are reversed and Nathan invites his good friend Yaro Starak to interview him for the show.   Yaro Starak is an entrepreneur, blogger and internet marketer from Entrepreneur’s Journey (www.entrepreneurs-journey.com). Yaro is a well-known internet marketer and entrepreneur that has grown several ventures and has a pretty popular blog on how to grow your business.   In this interview Yaro and Nathan Discuss:   - Nathan's Journey and how he started Foundr - Nathan's Key lessons learnt from a first time entrepreneur - How Nathan interviewed Richard Branson and got in touch with him - Nathan's vision for the magazine and the digital publishing space - & Much more!   I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

Well before sunrise each day, Ari Meisel wakes up.   The 30-year-old serial entrepreneur, husband, and father rises at 5:30 each morning to get started on the day's work. Along with business and blogging, he helps to take care of his three young children.   Ari has a lot to juggle. But that doesn't faze him – after starting a series of successful businesses and even battling Crohn's disease, he holds a perspective of relentless optimism and a drive to help others. In an interview, Foundr publisher Nathan Chan asked him, “Do you ever feel overwhelmed?”   “No,” Ari replied. “No, I never feel overwhelmed – ever.”   Balancing his personal and professional lives, Ari is a productivity expert and writes on the subject at his blog, The Art of Less Doing.   “The Art of Less Doing was born of this desire to help people free up as much time as they could possibly free up in order to reclaim their own minds and do the things that they want to do,” Ari says. “So I basically have been helping people optimize, automate, an

“Writer. Traveler. Fighter of the status-quo.” This is how Chris Guillebeau describes himself on his website. Besides that, he is also a practical and logical guy. He couldn’t have otherwise accomplished his dream of traveling to every country in the world, 193 in total, by the time he turned 35. Mind you, he didn’t wander aimlessly. Fascinated by discovery and exploration, the travel hacker had thoroughly planned his adventure step by step to make it feasible.  He analyzed the challenges of traveling to certain countries, costs, visa issues and such. Speaking of costs, one would think he was filthy rich to be able to afford his trips, but he only spent an achievable amount of money - $30,000. When asked to define his “job” Guillebeau recalls: “I discovered when I was about 19-20 years old that I was unemployable.” For 10 years he started different entrepreneurial ventures to support and allow himself to do what he loved doing. That included travelling, playing music, and volunteering. He spent four years in

“My company fell apart. My relationships fell apart. My health fell apart,” Kamal Ravikant says. It was one of the darkest times in his life. “I was just locked in my bedroom, miserable out of my mind.” As a tech entrepreneur, Ravikant had his share of success. He also failed. In fact, the failure of his last company struck him down. But he got up. His embrace of one simple concept — loving himself — ended up saving him emotionally and then financially, as his writing on the subject allowed him to bounce back and become a venture capital investor. He's eager to share his experience through two books he wrote about his own epiphanies: Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It and Live Your Truth.   In this interview we go through with Kamal:   -How to find an investor -How to find purpose in life and your startup -Why persistence doesn't always pay off -His best selling books (Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on it, and Live Your Truth) - & much more! “If you come from a place where you're just giving, an

Ever wondered how you ended up working the job you’re doing? Ever felt like you sort of just, fell in to it? Ever wondered how to escape ‘the corporate cage’? Finding out what you are good at, what drives you as a person, and then finding suitable work based upon that should be a keystone of our society, but unfortunately, it is not.   Entrepreneur Marianne Cantwell aims to change all that.   Marianne Cantwell works in helping people find their driving passion, breaking free from the corporate cage and creating “free-range” careers. She runs a successful business called free-range-humans and explains that your interests should be a key driver behind your actions, not the blind pursuit of riches.   Marianne Cantwell explains that living a dream is simple, it’s possible, and takes guts. As a woman who has thrown away the security of the 9 to 5 quite early in her career to chase down projects she loves, she is an authority on the subject. Put simply, she broke away from the corporate life and has succeeded doing

  Let’s say that through some miscarriage of justice, you find yourself locked in prison tomorrow. Browsing through the prison library, you find there is one book that is constantly requested, but hard to get your hands on. What would you think that book was? Legal case studies? Lock-picking manuals? The Bible perhaps? Close, but no cigar. It’s none other than Robert Greene’s bestselling The 48 Laws of Power, which has sold over 1.2 million copies worldwide. Greene’s books are famously the most requested in correctional facilities across the United States, an achievement he bears with pride. (The author has a folder dedicated to the fan mail he receives from inmates). However, it’s not just convicts who have taken to Greene’s works. His books are a favourite of Wall Street executives, movie moguls and hip hop superstars. Some of his more notable fans include rappers Busta Rhymes, 50 Cent, Jay Z, and Kanye West.    With five international bestsellers on strategy power and seduction, Greene is the hero of schem

How to Disrupt an Industry - The Age of working Differently.  The Elance Story with Fabio Rosati    It’s not every day you change the way the world works. But with Elance, Fabio Rosati did just this, altering the way global labor markets operate for the foreseeable future. It’s no small task, but by providing an easy and secure way for businesses to find, hire, manage and pay freelancers, Elance’s online staffing platform has revolutionized the freelancing economy. And it’s one of the fastest growing companies in the industry, expanding at a rate of 50% per year. As of 2013, Elance has over 3 million users, with 800,000 businesses hiring from a pool of 2.8 million registered freelancers, earning over $300 million yearly.    Today's Guest - Fabio Rosati   Hailing from Florence, Italy, Elance CEO Fabio Rosati is polite and softly-spoken. Conversing with him, you wouldn’t pick that in the last five years he had become one of the most influential individuals in the entrepreneurial space globally. A thought leader