The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

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 thousa...

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...

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...

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...

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 goin...

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 $...

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 bu...

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 ho...

“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 t...

“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 himsel...

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.   Mari...

  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 La...

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...