The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

Brene Brown was a meandering youth in her 20s, doing more traveling and bartending than she was building a business or focusing on school. As a result, she didn't graduate college until she was 30. Nonetheless, after finishing her bachelor’s in social work, she quickly gained her masters and PhD and started a career as an academic at the University of Houston. But something was rustling beneath the surface for Brown—being a quiet academic and publishing papers wasn’t enough for her. That something was entrepreneurship. Brene Brown started publishing books and doing talks and coaching for executives and successful entrepreneurs. But Brown is best known for her unique message, calling for entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs alike to open their hearts and minds to vulnerability. What many avoid and even look down upon, Brene Brown insists is a key to success, real intimacy, and happiness. Brown is a thought leader of our time. In an entrepreneurship community dominated by masculine values and "tough guy" attitudes, she breaks the noise with her message to accept and even embrace discomfort. And she isn’t just preaching: throughout her works, and her now-famous TEDx talk, Brown exposes her own vulnerability. This refreshing, data-based take on life and success has resonated with millions of people who have watched her TED Talk, and the many successful entrepreneurs she currently works with. It also informs the way she runs her own business and was in full display during her interview with Foundr. In this interview you will learn: Why vulnerability doesn't have to be a weakness and how you can turn it into your strongest weapon Where to find the strength to get back up when you've fallen further than ever before The right way to deal with all the pressures of being an entrepreneur How to take the data you have and turn it into a profitable business What it truly means to be vulnerable & much more!

27 Huhti 201629min

As the son of hardworking immigrants, David Cancel saw his parents working seven days a week to support their family. As an adult, he realized that not all people worked the way his parents did, which sparked in him a desire to make a living without getting a “job.” Cancel always knew that he wanted to be an entrepreneur, even if he wasn’t quite sure what that meant. As a kid, he found that flipping through the pages of Inc. Magazine and other early entrepreneurial publications didn’t offer much insight. He saw ads for get-rich-quick schemes and stories of businessmen who had reached amazing heights. Although he wasn’t quite sure what it meant to be an entrepreneur, he knew he wanted in. The term “serial entrepreneur” gets thrown around a lot, but few have lived a life that defines it as well as David Cancel. Building and selling companies has become a way of life; his obsessions around ideas or problems quickly snowball into companies. He has started and exited five companies in the past 16 years and is currently an advisor, investor, and/or consultant to several more, including BigCommerce, HelpScout, Rapportive, and Yieldbot. In this interview you will learn: What it takes to create a successful product How to listen to your customer and what you can learn from it What kind of feedback you should listen to and what you should ignore The secret to iterating effectively and how you can start improving your own products Where to find the right audience and what it means to serve them & much more!

20 Huhti 201647min

Justin Kan doesn’t come off as the type who lives for the spotlight. Which is funny, because at one point he live-streamed his life, 24/7 for the whole world to see, for months. That may seem like an unlikely path to a billion-dollar sale, but in fact, the early experiment in the world of live video got Kan and his partner Emmett Shear part of the way there. That unconventional level of dedication and curiosity is a testament to how these two have been willing to dive into the opportunities before them, leading them through a flurry of tech business successes. Kan’s CV speaks for itself: He co-founded hit companies Twitch, Justin.tv, Socialcam, Exec, and is now a partner at startup incubator Y Combinator, which invests millions annually into tech companies. A native of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, Kan was not an obvious candidate for someone who would succeed in tech. He has a certain natural charisma, but studied physics and philosophy at Yale, neither of which is necessarily a match for a career in startups. However, he received a crash course in entrepreneurship from an early age by watching his mother run her own real estate business, and it seems to have stuck. From there, Kan experienced his share of losses and ridiculously spectacular wins, developing a series of products that define the chapters of his fascinating career in tech startups. In this interview you will learn: The exact process of coming up with, developing and selling your startup idea When to pivot and the signs to look out for What startup accelerators like Y Combinator are looking out for How to hustle harder than everyone else around you and gain the competitive advantage Why you should bet on the founders and not the startup itself and the wins that come with it & much more!

14 Huhti 201635min

From a very young age, it was clear that selling was encoded in Gary Tramer’s DNA. His aptitude for sales emerged early when he was a scrappy little kid riding his bike around the neighborhood with his friends. He and his gang would steal their neighbors’ plants, re-pot them into yogurt containers, and sell them back to the same neighbors. With the money they made, Tramer and company would indulge in Fizz Wiz, Warheads, and other junk from the candy shop. “We were crafting our humble entrepreneurial beginnings,” Tramer says. From these humble beginnings, Tramer has evolved to start and run several successful sales-focused businesses, up to today’s LeadChat company, where revenues reach over $1 million. He’s become a true master, with roots in face-to-face selling that he adapted and scaled up using cutting-edge digital tools. And he dished all of his secrets for us in this interview. In this interview you will learn: From start to finish, what goes into making and closing leads Dozens of helpful tools you can start using today for your own sales strategy The different ways you can test your ads without breaking the bank The process of utilizing traditional marketing techniques in a digital setting What it takes to train your salespeople with no experience into becoming absolute sales machines & much more!

7 Huhti 201649min

“Lean Startup” has become a popular concept in the world of entrepreneurship. All founders and founders-to-be have phrases like “pivot” and “fail fast” on the tips of their tongues. But for Martin Hosking, lean isn’t just a fashionable trend. He’s lived it. And after applying and experiencing lean methods over decades of launching and running tech startups, the methodology has gained a more sophisticated meaning in Hosking’s mind. It is not just a clever strategy for testing markets, but rather staying nimble to truly fulfill the needs of the customer, something that drives him today. “What I really like about lean is it puts the customer at the center,” Hosking says, adding a caveat. “You need to have lean, but you need to have a good strategic orientation. The customer doesn’t always know what they want." Hosking’s nuanced understanding of lean startup methodology highlights the deep expertise he’s developed over the course his career. And it’s paid off. After experiencing more than his share of 1990s dot-com boom and bust, Hosking is now CEO of Redbubble, an Etsy-like online marketplace for artists that’s become highly successful. But as any successful entrepreneur will tell you, it’s not just smarts and experience that get you there. Passion is the vital ingredient that needs to be present to keep a company going during the hard times and bring it out of the shadows to phenomenal success. It’s a kind of passion that can’t be reeled in or held back. It comes out immediately when you meet a true entrepreneur. Martin Hosking is a prime example; the passion and dedication he has for his work spills out from his fast and excited manner of speaking. In this interview you will learn: What it really means to go lean and how to get there The secrets to developing a passionate group of users How to be prepared when the unexpected arises The processes that Martin goes through in order to make sure that his business is always running in top shape What goes into building a successful online business & much more!

29 Maalis 201645min

As a full time software developer working for a large company, Rob Walling dreamt of becoming an entrepreneur – and more than a decade later he has obtained serial entrepreneur status. Rob Walling is many things…as a serial entrepreneur he has been at the helm of several tech companies including Drip, Micropreneur, HitTail and DotNetNovice. His personal brand is supported by regular posts to his blog which he forayed into a book, Start Small and Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup. In his spare time, he wears the hat of a podcaster, conference host, teacher, angel investor and audio book junkie. When the entrepreneurial itch first infiltrated Rob’s being, he left his full time job and began consulting and freelancing. The move was great at first but he soon found that freelancing and consulting was a lot like working for someone else – which was seriously uncool. His new dream was products – build something that people will buy on his own terms without the watchful gaze of a boss. But, it didn’t work like that…instead; Rob’s second transition came when he acquired a small software application and tasted true freedom. As Rob puts it, “My goal was to cobble together enough of a portfolio so that I could stop consulting.” His acquisitions ran the gamut from a site that sold beach towels (but ranked high on Google) to a book on bonsai trees but eventually, he was able to give up consulting completely. He developed a strategy built on incremental progress - a solid stair stepping approach that has made every acquisition, his biggest acquisition. In this interview you will learn: What to do when you want to bootstrap and how to make it work The secrets to keeping yourself in check and managing expectations The secrets to self-confidence in the startup world How to build yourself a top mastermind group What it takes to ensure that you have a proven product that people will love & much more!

23 Maalis 201648min

It's not easy to admit when you're wrong, but you'll rarely find a better time than when you're filing for personal bankruptcy. That's what Tim Fargo of Tweet Jukebox had to do when he was a young man in 1991 and found himself a little too in over his head. But today he's the founder of one of the most exciting and innovative social media automation engines in the world, right after selling his previous company for $20 million. So how does someone go from bankruptcy to $20 million? Well, you do it by paying attention and learning from your mistakes, which is exactly why Tim is where he is today. He's experienced both the lowest and highest points any entrepreneur can go through and he's walked away from a better businessman and all the wiser for it. We're very lucky to share with you today this episode of the Foundr podcast, in which he talks openly about the lessons he's learned throughout his career and all the different pitfalls and traps you need to avoid. If you ever wanted to learn from someone with over 25 years of highs and lows in the world of entrepreneurship, you don't want to miss this one. In this interview you will learn: What it's like to file for bankruptcy and how to recover from it The do's and dont's of cash flow management How to keep yourself in check and on the right track when starting a business The key steps to growing your business rapidly What you can learn from going broke & much more!

16 Maalis 201650min

Gary Vaynerchuk is a bona fide Internet celebrity. At last count, he was sitting pretty at 1.21 million Twitter followers, and 226,000 Instagram followers. He’s appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, Ellen, CNN, and MSNBC. He’s now the CEO of VaynerMedia, a digital agency with more than 600 staff. Vaynerchuk is an entrepreneur, investor, New York Times best-selling author, speaker, and, hailing from greater New York City, a fervent Jets fan. But his success all started with Wine Library TV, a video blog he started when YouTube was still a 1-year-old Internet debutante. From the start of his career, Vaynerchuk has mastered social media to draw attention to his online persona GaryVee, and since then has leveraged his fame to build success with over a decade of shrewd planning and execution. But there’s one secret to success that Vaynerchuk always comes back to. “The reason that I’m speaking to you is that I’ve worked harder than you.” These brazen words were uttered by Vaynerchuk during one of his many training videos. While it’s impossible to know just how true that is, this is a belief central to Vaynerchuk’s life. Hard work is everything. When discussing his success, the word hustle frequently bobs to the surface. “My hustle is better than everybody else’s,” he says, “so I have to bet on it. I bet on my strengths.” And despite living in an age of lifehacks and shortcuts, Vaynerchuk remains a staunch advocate of simple hard work. Armed with little more than his ball-of-fire personality and a will to succeed, he’s built an attention-hungry business empire worth millions. In this interview you will learn: The best strategies to leverage social media for your business What to look out for when it comes to creating the perfect social media strategy The secrets to creating valuable content and why it works How to take care of your employees and build long-lasting and loyal relationships The secrets behind each social media platform and how to take advantage of each one & much more! This podcast episode was brought to you by FreshBooks. When it comes to finding the perfect service to help you manage and track your invoices, time and expenses then you can't go past FreshBooks. Designed for the small businesses and entrepreneurs who don't need full-blown double-entry programming but still want to keep their finances in check, you can't go back once you start using it! Better yet, FreshBooks is offering a month of unrestricted use to all of Foundr listeners ­ totally free right now and you don’t need a credit card for the trial! To claim your free month, go to FreshBooks.com/FoundrMag and enter FoundrMag in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section to get started today!

9 Maalis 201638min