Finding Founders

Today I talk with Joanna Vargas about the book Growth Hacker Marketing. We analyze Uber's strategies, talk about Joanna's business ventures, and explore the importance of a customer avatar. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the last episode in our series on Puerto Rican Entrepreneurs and today, we sit down with Sebastian Vidal. Sebastian is the founder of Parallel 18, a start-up accelerator that provides mentors and resources for aspiring Puerto Rican and international entrepreneurs. At Parallel 18, Sebastian has served as a judge and participant for many start-up focused events, including SXSW, Stanford Igni...

Today I talk to a member of the Finding Founders design team, Shruti Ramanand, about how we can be more productive with less work. We discuss the concept of the Pomodoro and how we can apply it to our lives to instantly become more productive! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the second installment of our Puerto Rico series where we are trying to explore how destruction sews the seeds of opportunity and growth. And Carlos embodies this idea perfectly. Today, we sit down with Carlos Goyco, founder of Libros787, an online bookstore focused on selling books by Puerto Rican authors.  Rather than letting the winds of disaster pin him to the ground, Carlos’ love for...

Today we talk to Mark Fidelman, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer at Fanatics media. I was reading a book called "Growth Hacker Marketing" by Ryan Holiday, and as I was browsing the footnotes I saw Mark's name. I knew I had to talk to him, so we scheduled a call to discuss how to market a product and steal your competitors customers.  --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/su...

When all is smooth sailing, community is something that we often take for granted. But when the waves get rocky, there’s truth in the saying “it takes a village” -- after all, difficult times are made easier when we know we have others to lean on. Today, we sit down with Nelson Colón , CEO of the Fundación Comunitaria de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Community Foundation) and Honorary Recipient of the...

Today we cover conformational and contradictory evidence and why you should try to prove yourself wrong. Joyce Mok, our scriptwriting team lead, and I do a test, analyze the results and see where these results apply in our own lives.  --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're back for part 2 of the Mac Davis' quest for immortality! (If you haven't listened to part 1 there are links below). In the second half of the episode we'll cover a near death explosion, revolutionary discoveries, mysterious deaths, incredible experiments, and the founding of a successful company: Minicircle. I hope you have a great Thanksgiving! Listen to Part 1 Apple Podcasts Spotify Anchor...

On today's episode, FF's own Adrian Tapia (editing team lead) and Samuel Donner talk about the issue with second hand information. We delve into why you can't trust any conversation that starts with "My friend did [this]." --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When was the last time you skimmed over a book or article and realized that by the time you finished, absolutely nothing stuck? Well, it turns out speed-reading isn’t as easy as 1-2-3; like any superpower , it needs to be trained. Today we sit down to talk with Jim Kwik , author of Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, & Unlock Your Exceptional Life and founder of online brain-...

Storytelling is an essential part of any business whether you are trying to sell a product, raise money, or get your team on board with a mission. And so it's essential that you know how to tell interesting stories. At Finding Founders we have a motto: "No story is boring, it's just too long." Through a method of contracting and expanding certain parts of the story we are able to make almost anyon...

Today we talk to Andrew Warner and we start with Andrew describing the impossibly fast pace of his first business’s success. Shortly out of college, Andrew was handling millions of dollars and taking on massive risk. Only a few years later, he’d give up that frantic lifestyle, jump ship and head for a respite in the Caribbean. Andrew’s life with all the peaks and valleys of the entrepreneurial jou...

What are questions you can ask to get people more vulnerable? How can you get someone to open up to you in a short amount of time? These are questions that can help us in our personal and professional relationships. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we talk to Brad Lea and he starts with his first few weeks in LA. Not long before he was at the mercy of a crack pipe, he got kicked out of his home in Oregon at 16, convinced a friend to quit his job, and drove to California to pursue his dream of becoming a movie star. And while this dream didn’t exactly pan out, that same charisma he hoped would end up on the silver screen, has helped him...

What is the formula for interesting storytelling? Today we discuss the essential components of a great story and how to craft narratives that matter. It's enough to just have a subject that is of consequence, you have create an interesting and unique take on that subject. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adcho...

Today we talk to Cory Allen, meditation teacher, author, podcast host, musician, and today’s featured Founder. Cory’s story begins in Austin, TX, with a choice to live a markedly different life from that of his gun-toting, Republican, cynical, and distrustful father. He tells me about his moment of awakening, and teaches me that enlightenment can happen anywhere, even in a urinal. He speaks about...

Why can't you lie in a podcast? Today we talk about authenticity, otherizing, presidential debates, and why podcasts are better lie detectors than videos. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are talking to James Altucher and we start just after James went broke. This wouldn’t be the last time he lost money, and we’ll learn that James has an interesting relationship with risk, in fact we’ll talk a lot about risk in this episode. Regardless, James has been incredibly successful. He’s published 25 books and founded over 20 companies, many of which failed. But it seems that failu...

How can great work be a curse? Today we look at exceptional work, how to deal with it, how to avoid the Sports Illustrated jinx, and how statistical regression can help us make sense of it all. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We start with Dan Pashman's his live event to promote his food podcast, Sporkful. After seemingly endless hard work and sacrifice, Dan finally felt the excitement, the palpable energy his audience invested into his work. He’s been able to create such an enlivened community around his podcast due to the passion he has for food and high-quality audio storytelling. Today, Sporkful has evolved into so...

Does success breed success and does failure breed failure?  We asked Barry Ritholtz what book he recommends to understand the stock market and he recommended the book 'How We Know What Isn't So' by Thomas Gilovich.  We talk about the clustering illusion, coin tosses, basketball, hot hands, and attaching emotion to success and failure. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/su...

Today we talk to  Travis Chappell who starts by describing to us just one of the many rules he was taught to abide by in the small, religious town of Lancaster. Growing up in a structured environment where your appearance, your music, your profession are monitored, it seemed that Travis was destined for a life of rigidity and conformity. However, Travis didn’t follow the path his community paved f...

How can you persuade people and your team more effectively? Persuasiveness essentially boils down to two things: expertise and trustworthiness. Expertise describes whether someone is worth listening to; that is how intelligent and knowledgeable the person is about the subject at hand. Trustworthiness describes whether someone should be listened to; that is whether the person has your best interest...

Today we are talking to John Lee Dumas, and much of John’s life, centers around impact. From joining ROTC, to serving in the military, to going to law school, and ultimately to pursuing podcasting, impact is something that John has successfully curated. Now, with the Entrepreneurs on Fire Podcast, John releases interviews with inspirational entrepreneurs and impacts the lives of millions of his li...

How can we easily categorize people’s personality? This is the Founder Wisdom. Where we’ll answer that question by distilling advice from our founders and the books they recommend. Then we’ll show you how we are applying that knowledge ourselves! Last week we talked about how we could categorize emotions into four categories. Interestingly enough we can also do the same thing with personalities. -...