Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

This week's podcast is inspired by a blog post that we published back in 2014. That post was titled "What is the Real Cost of the Permanent Travel Lifestyle?" and many of the points we touched on in that article are still being discussed by people in our community today. One of those people is Jesse Schoberg. Jesse is the co-founder and CEO of DropInBlog.com, and he is all too familiar with the ch...

We've seen a lot of great conversations take place in our private community The Dynamite Circle as of late. One of our favorites came in the form of a thread titled "Is Digital Nomadism Possible to Combine With Having a Family?" While there were many insightful responses in that thread, one member, in particular, caught our attention. Steven Ladek is the Principal of E-Learning Advocacy for a comp...

We are once again reaching into the mailbag this week to answer some pressing questions from the Tropical MBA audience. This is a somewhat unorthodox episode, as we are "shooting from the hip" on a variety of items that have come across our desk in the past few months. We'll be discussing how to structure your teams (specifically in an agency), tips for staying focused on what's important in your...

Today's guest has been on an incredible journey that touches on so many of our favorite entrepreneurial milestones. Derek Pankaew is the co-founder of Mythia, a financial startup that has partnered with banks to create a debit card aimed exclusively at gamers. He has experienced just about every entrepreneurial path, from running a "4-Hour Workweek" business built on passive income, to seeking out...

Today's episode is particularly insightful for entrepreneurs who are looking to improve their social media or content marketing game, and for those of us who are interested in the property investment space. Moses Kagan is the co-founder of Adaptive Realty, a boutique real estate private equity firm based in Los Angeles, which has about $200 Million in assets under management. He is also an extreme...

This week, we are once again diving into the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Gerbz is a regular contributor to this podcast and our go-to guy for all things crypto. He is the founder of BitLift.com, and the host of the brand new BitLift podcast, which aims to guide people down the crypto rabbit hole. Gerbz joins us this week to discuss the world of "Decentralized Finance", or "D...

The term "Digital Nomad" has been beaten to death over the years, but it still means a lot to those of us who have identified with that label. James Clark is certainly one of those people. He's been a full-time nomad since the early 2000s, and we've shared many great memories with him around the world. James is also the author of a brilliant blog called Nomad Notes, where he recently published an...

Longtime listeners know that Dan and Ian have been business partners for many years, and sometimes it's hard for us to imagine what it would be like to run a business on our own. So many entrepreneurs do choose this path, though, and the quest of a "Solopreneur" can be a long and arduous one. Darren Joe is the director of TouchMBA, a service that matches prospective students with MBA programs. He...

We aren't usually the type for navel-gazing, but this summer marks an important milestone for us. 10 years ago, our desire to "find our tribe" led us to form the Dynamite Circle, a private membership community of location-independent entrepreneurs. Since then, there have been dozens of DC events all over the globe, and it has truly become a life-changing adventure for so many of the people involve...

This week's episode was inspired by a question from a listener. Katie recently graduated with her master's degree, and while she appreciated the insight that we've shared in the past about how to get a remote job, she wanted to know more about what it takes to succeed at a remote position once you get it. This got our wheels spinning, and we put together a list of five important factors that can h...

Nick Huber has been on a wild ride since we last spoke to him in 2019. Nick is the host of a podcast called The Sweaty Startup, and at the time he was running a business called Storage Squad, a storage company that helped students store their belongings at universities all across America. Covid threw that business for a loop, but Nick was able to make some fast decisions that allowed him to sell t...

Summer is here, and it's starting to feel like things are returning to "normal." For many of us in the community, that means that we're finally going to have the opportunity to pick up our backpacks and return to nomadic life. Jesse Schoberg is the co-founder and CEO of DropInBlog.com, a Software as a Service platform that helps users add blogs to their websites. Jesse has been a full-time nomad f...

A few weeks ago we said something on this podcast in jest, but one of our more attentive listeners latched onto it. "I find myself some days waking up and saying 'are we going to make it?'" Our good friend John Ainsworth heard this and he reached out to us with a little bit of concern, hoping to find out more. What exactly does it mean when we ask that question, "are we going to make it?" We'll be...

We've learned over the years that being a part of a community of like-minded people is one of the most valuable experiences that you can have as an entrepreneur. This was our core motivation for forming The Dynamite Circle, our own online community of location-independent entrepreneurs, back in 2011. We originally built that community on a platform called Ning, largely because it was the best opti...

This week's episode is full of so many recurring themes that we've seen over the years on this podcast, from the unique struggles that SaaS businesses face, to the decision between bootstrapping and funding, and much more. Derrick Reimer has had a long and storied career as a software entrepreneur, but he is perhaps best known as the technical co-founder of Drip, which he built alongside our good...

We've shared a lot of stories on this podcast from entrepreneurs who have started their own businesses, but one strategy we've increasingly seen to accelerate the path to wealth is to purchase a business that already exists and to leverage debt to do so. Today's guest is an expert at that. Shakil Prasla has been acquiring businesses through his company SZ Ventures for nearly a decade. He started w...

Today's episode is all about creating content, in particular, how to create written content that people actually want to read. David Perell is the co-founder of an online writing school called Write of Passage, and he is an expert at teaching people how to cultivate ideas and distill them into writing. He's also an extremely savvy marketer, with tons of important insights into the future of social...

This week's podcast is a little bit out of the ordinary. While we have been busier than ever this month over at Dynamite Jobs, we still can't help but find things on the internet to get worked up about. We thought it would be fun to take a look at five specific news items and ideas that have recently come across our desk that we just can't stop thinking about. These topics range from how to deal w...

Welcome back to another episode in our long-running series The Re-Readables, where we revisit some of our favorite business books to find out if they stand the test of time. How to Get Rich was written in 2009 by author and entrepreneur Felix Dennis. Felix was the founder of Maxim magazine, and he aimed to create a book about getting rich from "someone who didn't need to write it". The result is i...

This week's episode features insider knowledge on the processes behind hiring and recruiting remote talent from someone who has been deeply involved in the industry for over a decade. Greg is the Senior Recruiter at Dynamite Jobs, as well as one of The Bossman's closest friends. Avid listeners might remember his name from the "ferret story" that we've shared on this podcast in the past. (We'll tou...

This week's episode is another installment of "The Re-Readables", a series in which we revisit some of our favorite business books to find out if they stand the test of time. Greg Gerber has become something of a regular contributor here on the Podcast. Greg is the founder of BitLift, and he is our go-to guy for all things blockchain and cryptocurrency. Greg joins us this week to talk about a book...

We've been seeing some truly explosive growth at Dynamite Jobs since the start of 2021, and we've been helping more businesses than ever find great remote talent for their teams. When our friend Brendan Tully reached out to us on Twitter recently with some suggestions on how we could help candidates find better jobs, we knew we had to talk to him. Brendan is the CEO and founder of Robotmedia, whic...

What if your knowledge as an entrepreneur could benefit you as an investor? We've talked about cryptocurrency and unorthodox investments in the past on this show, but the traditional financial system is still something of a mystery to a lot of entrepreneurs. Enter Simon Stock. Simon is a longtime friend of ours, who cut his teeth as an entrepreneur running eCommerce businesses. These days, Simon i...

Our good friend Noah Kagan recently published a video that caught our attention. Noah is the founder of AppSumo.com, and his YouTube channel has been one of our favorite destinations as of late for thoughtful content about entrepreneurship and creating wealth. That video was called 10 Surprising Things About My Richest Friends, and in it, Noah outlined some specific habits that he has seen time an...

We always love receiving thoughtful questions from Tropical MBA listeners around the world. A few weeks ago, a winter storm in Texas forced us to re-run one of our favorite episodes of this show called 7 Things to Consider When Selling Your Business, in which Dan and Ian describe the process of selling their eCommerce business back in 2015. Our decision to revisit that particular story elicited a...