The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

The closest thing Ankur Nagpal has ever had to a job was a summer internship at Amazon when he was 18. Ever since then, he's been his own boss at companies that he's built. Outside of that brief fling as an employee, Nagpal has wholly dedicated his life to being a serial entrepreneur.In his early years as an entrepreneur, he entered the highly competitive startup scene in Silicon Valley as a very successful Facebook app developer. Only he didn't make individual apps. Instead what he was selling was the platform that everyone used to create their own apps. From there, he bowed out with a cool seven figures to his name when that company had run its course.Just as the real winners of the gold rush weren't those who found gold but the entrepreneurs who sold the tools, Nagpal has made a living as the one people turn to when they're looking for development tools.Fast-forward to today and he is now the founder and CEO of Teachable, a business that teaches and trains other entrepreneurs on how to create their own online courses with his easy-to-use platform and teaching methods. What once started as a fun side project has now turned into a multimillion-dollar business with more than a million students!With years of experience in the startup capital of the world, Ankur lets us in on how he became the powerhouse entrepreneur he is today.In this interview you will learn: What to do to turn your side project into business succcess The things you need to know about creating a successful online course How to create a successful business based on empowering others Tips to finding paying customers if you've just launched Where to go to find the best investor for you and what that means & much more!

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!

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!

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!

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!

Experienced entrepreneur Martin Hosking shares insights on lean startup methodology and customer-centric approach. Discusses the creation of Redbubble, challenges in marketplace empowerment, and importance of perseverance and passion in entrepreneurship. Highlights lessons from tech industry leaders, building strong company culture, and strategies for marketplace success.

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!

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!

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!

Every day there’s an entrepreneur out there who believes that they’ve found the golden ticket. The one idea that is so revolutionary that it’s going to change the landscape of their niche and bring them a huge success.Unfortunately, no matter how great of an idea it may be, nothing happens unless you have a brilliant plan to execute it.So where to start in this crazy startup world?Well, according to Gretta Rose Van Riel, it starts off with finding not just the right product idea but the perfect one. By using a bit of research, and a little bit more patience, she was able to find the type of product that took her to over 600k in revenue in just under a year!By utilizing Instagram she managed to spread her brand’s message and exposure, growing to over 15 million followers in just a few years! It is very rare you’ll find anyone else as savvy as the founder of SkinnyMe Tea when it comes to the world of e-commerce.In this interview with Foundr Gretta breaks down for us the nitty gritty details of the e-commerce world and shows us just what it takes to make it as a 21st-century entrepreneur.In this interview you will learn: Learn the easiest and cheapest way to build a website for your business Important Insights on how to use Instagram to help start, grow and build up your brand account Learn how to identify trends and physical products that you can successfully sell online How to get your perfect funnel for you to start selling immediately The do's and don'ts of E-commerce & much more!