Journey from Hip-Hop to Entrepreneurship: The Story of Nico Perez

Nico Perez and the Mixcloud team have managed to get to 17M monthly visitors with zero outside investment. We talk about how they bootstrapped their way to a unique and profitable business. Listen out for when they lived in a 60k square foot warehouse.

We go deep in this conversation, so 5 things to listen out for:

1) Living in a warehouse and having no internet connection – many people say they “had no money” when they started, but Mixcloud really had to live that mantra when they failed to raise any investment. We go into how they paid their rent every month with limited income after Nico quit his job to go full time.

2) Getting rejected by Y Combinator and other investors – how they turned that into positive momentum and became revenue generating early on.

3) How he found a technical co-founder – in today’s digital world, a common question that comes up time and time again is “how do I find someone to help me build this” – we go into how Nico approached this problem with a “skill share”.

4) How they got the head of growth at Facebook to be on their advisory board – Building a great team isn’t just about the employees and founders of an organization. There are mentors, board members and in many cases: “advisory boards”. Nico tells us how they organically made relationships to convince smart people to be a part of their advisory board.

5) Other Topics – We had a free-flowing discussion with a few other topics we touched on: getting more women on their advisory board, artificial intelligence, building an MVP (minimum viable product), splitting up equity amongst co-founders, benefits of having 3 co-founders, books that have impacted him & what success means to him