Entrepreneur Interviews list

Little did I know back in 2007 when I’ve started the Entrepreneurship-interviews.com blog (back then was named Entrepreneur Interviews, but that’s another story). With each interview I learn that some people are just made for that, finding business opportunities, get to work and grow a business. To understand how interesting this journey has been so far, I think the youngest entrepreneur I interviewed was 16 and I’m not even talking yet about my perpetual amazement seeing that even the most un-likely businesses have the chance to become successful in the hands of the right entrepreneur. As Bob Parsons (GoDaddy’s Founder and CEO) says: “Almost nothing works the first time it’s attempted.  Just because what you’re doing does not seem to be working, doesn’t mean it won’t work.  It just means that it might not work the way you’re doing it.  If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn’t have an opportunity.”

Small Business Entrepreneurs Interviews

  1. Interview with Small Business Entrepreneur Becky McCray
  2. Interview with UK entrepreneur Darren Nicholls – 2007/07/03
  3. Interview with Dean Hua from Sachi Studio – 2007/07/12
  4. Interview with Simon Carter from DataMystic2007/07/24
  5. Interview with entrepreneur Jared Reitzin from mobileStorm, a Web-based marketing company – 2007/08/09
  6. Interview with a successful Momrepreneur Jamie Lentzner2007/09/20
  7. Interview with serial entrepreneurs Adam and Matthew Toren – 2007/10/13
  8. Interview with a shark guy: Patric Douglas2008/01/03
  9. Interview with Ellen Craw from Ilium Software2008/01/10
  10. Interview with Wei Yang from EasyAutoSales2008/05/09
  11. Interview with Scott Law from Zotec Partners2008/08/06
  12. Interview with French Entrepreneur Mathieu Maréchal – 2008/09/16
  13. Interview with Mike Michalowicz, Author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur – 2008/09/30
  14. Interview with Dale Cook from 11SquareFeet – 2008/10/28
  15. Interview with Faith Simpson from Bags of Change – 2008/11/11
  16. Interview with Ami Kassar about “Pitch George” competition – 2008/11/19
  17. Interview with Suneet Bhatt, ideablob.com winner – 2008/12/20
  18. Interview with Ideablob winner, Tom Krieglstein – 2009/01/15
  19. Interview with Justin McGill from Novel Concept Studio2009/03/15
  20. Interview with Mark Husmann about a documentary on entrepreneurship2009/03/17
  21. Interview with Don Daszkowski, About.com guide to Franchises2009/05/01
  22. Interview with entrepreneur Andrew Markou from Dynamis2009/06/29
  23. Interview with Leslie Linevsky from Catalogs.com2009/08/29
  24. Interview with Argentinian microISV entrepreneur Germán S. Arduino – 2010/01/02
  25. Interview with UK entrepreneur Trevor Ginn – 2010/02/22
  26. Interview with Andy Otteman about being downsized and becoming an entrepreneur – 2010/03/10
  27. Interview with green packaging entrepreneur Dennis Salazar – 2010/03/23
  28. Interview with Weldon Long, autor of The Upside of Fear: How One Man Broke the Cycle of Prison, Poverty and Addiction – 2010/04/20
  29. Interview with Steve Welch, author of We Are All Born Entrepreneurs book – 2010/04/10
  30. Interview with Tom Kuczmarski, co-founder of the Chicago Innovation Awards – 2010/05/25
  31. Interview with th e author of the book Tipping the Odds for the Entrepreneur: Big Ideas on Success for the Small Business Owner – 2010/08/05
  32. Interview with SunBug Solar – practical solar energy solutions in Massachusetts – 2010/08/11
  33. Interview with Phil Murphy, CEO of Storage by the Box – 2010/10/16
  34. Interview with the developer of premium branded voices for GPS 2010/11/23
  35. Interview with Aaron Leischke, the entrepreneur who saved money working in the restaurant industry to start his own business – 2010/12/04
  36. Interview with Taylor Mingos, founder and CEO of Shoeboxed.com – 2010/12/10
  37. Interview with Matt Barrie, frelancer.com CEO – 2011/02/18
  38. Interview with Leslee Wilson from Nana & Co – 2011/02/19

Young Entrepreneurs Interviews

  1. Interview with Derek Johnson, Tatango’s Founder and CEO2008/07/18
  2. Interview with Andres Sehr from Edicy – a new technological venture from Estonia – 2008/09/11
  3. Interview with First Global Xpress – an innovative shipping company2008/11/11
  4. Interview with young entrepreneur Lior Levin from veedda.com2009/02/07
  5. Interview with young entrepreneur Patricio Quezada about the Hispanics Learn campaign – 2009/02/10
  6. Interview with young entrepreneur Matthew Turcotte (16) – 2009/02/14
  7. Interview with young entrepreneur Amit Avner2009/03/19
  8. Interview with young entrepreneur Ohad Rosen (24) 2009/04/01
  9. Interview with young entrepreneur Benjamin Lang (15)2009/04/21
  10. Interview with young entrepreneur Artia Moghbel (22) – 2009/08/13
  11. Interview with young entrepreneur Justin Beck2009/10/17
  12. Interview with young entrepreneur Andrea D’Intino from Tabbles2009/11/05
  13. Interview with young entrepreneur Anthony G Adams2009/11/25
  14. 24 year old entrepreneur Peter Zaborszky turns to profit when the credit crunch was in full swing – 2010/02/22
  15. Interview with young entrepreneur Charlie Walker from Vivid Resourcing – 2010/04/25
  16. Interview with young entrepreneur Seth Hill from Lose your List – 2010/04/29
  17. Interview with Ryan Meinzer, Founder & CEO PlaySay.com – 2010/05/04
  18. Interview with young entrepreneur Raymond Lei, UC Berkeley student – 2010/07/22
  19. Interview with young entrepreneur Jeremy Parker from Voteforart.com – 201/07/26
  20. Interview with www.bloginity.com founder – 2010/08/08
  21. Interview with the entrepreneur who created the CrystalDock for iPhone – 2010/11/08
  22. Interview with WordPress plug-ins entrepreneur – 2010/11/10
  23. Interview with young entrepreneur Tim Fouracre from Clear Books – 2011/01/13

Interview with young entrepreneur Anthony G Adams

Hi Anthony and welcome!  You are one of these guys that started a business in the middle of the economic crisis. What is your business about?

Anthony: Thank you for having me, I really appreciate the opportunity.  I created and oversee a dietary supplement powder drink mix that prevents hangovers called THC-The Hangover Cure.  My product is for sale online at www.drinkthc.com and through various distribution channels worldwide.


You told me that you’ve been laid off from a big company this year due to the economic crisis, so being laid off can be good sometimes?

AnthonyAnthony: Being laid off was the best thing to happen to me in my post-college life for the simple fact that I don’t think I would have taken the plunge so soon otherwise.  It’s hard to walk away from guaranteed income and a daily routine.  And I think a lot of people are in the same situation, where you have a good job with a great company, or even a decent job with a decent company and you don’t necessarily hate your career, but you don’t love it, either.  And that’s why I am so thankful I was laid off when I was, before I got married, had kids, all that good stuff, because it allowed me to take a chance at a young age.

Do you think you would have gone with the entrepreneurship path otherwise?

Anthony: I would have eventually, absolutely.  I am just wired like that.  I need that feeling of knowing that my actions directly affect revenue.

So what’s up with THC?

Anthony: Well it’s pretty much the most awesome invention ever 🙂  You simply mix it with water and drink before bed.  People all over the world love it.

What makes THC different?

Anthony: Other hangover products have missed the mark entirely when it comes to marketing.  They target health-conscious consumers and sell in places like Whole Foods and GNC.  And that’s fine.  But we target college kids and young professionals and sell primarily in liquor stores.  I will give you one guess as to who probably needs hangover relief more on a Saturday morning:  The wheat grass-shooting vegan or the fraternity pledge.  It just makes sense to me.

How did you come up with the idea? I mean it’s a big step from IT to dietary supplements.

Anthony: Haha it really is.  I grew up in a pretty healthy household thanks to my mom, and I guess a lot of that knowledge rubbed off on me despite my best efforts.  When I was in college, it occurred to me that a hangover drink that was marketed right and actually worked didn’t exist.  This was in 2004, before the ‘functional’ beverage craze was even on the horizon.  I just knew that if marketed correctly, to the right audience, it would be successful.


And who exactly is your target demographic? I can’t help myself not thinking at a recent movie I saw: “The Hangover”

Anthony: Yeah, the guys from ‘The Hangover’ fit our target demographic pretty well.  They like to party.  It’s interesting that although our product is primarily marketed to Gen Y with the way our site is written, we have customers from all walks of life.  So I have a hard time putting a label on our target market.

I had a look on your site and saw you are distributing THC on 5 continents. How did you do that?

Anthony: Every distributor I work with contacted us directly on our website looking for a new revenue stream.  So that just comes with driving people to our site one way or another.  We don’t actively seek out distribution so it’s flattering when people all over the world contact you with interest.  Running an online business really opened my eyes to the global market place.  And what I mean by that is, in places like the UK and Brazil and Kenya, that entrepreneurial spirit, that hustle, seems to be more alive than it is in the States.  For example, I have a partnership in Scotland buying large quantities and setting up accounts with convenience stores all over Glasgow.  Literally, going door to door, getting shop owners interested and setting up displays and collecting a cut of the profit.  There isn’t enough of that in the States, which is a shame.  Because that is business to me.  ‘I have a product, do you want to buy it?’  Everything else is secondary.

Wow, had a look now and  you are selling The Hangover Cure at the largest shopping mall in east Africa www.villagemarket-kenya.com . And you told me your fixed expenses for the distribution are $50?

Anthony: My company, by design, has very low operating expenses in general, yes.

Your business is mostly marketed online! What was the strategy behind this?

Anthony: Initially, I wanted to control all channels of distribution, which meant going direct to the end user and cutting out all middlemen to maximize profit.  And that’s what I love about the internet, no more middlemen.  If you put in more work than your competitors, you can dominate your niche for next to nothing online.  It’s that simple.  Because there is no competing product out there that spends an hour every day talking with potential customers on Twitter.  No competitors are putting out the content we are.  It was really just a conscious decision to have complete control over every aspect of a business, which the internet makes possible.

You are quite active on Twitter. How can a small business market itself on Twitter?

Anthony: I could literally spend hours ranting about how great Twitter is for business.  You could put me on a desert island with nothing more than Twitter and I could stir up interest in any product, I have no doubt about it.  It’s a fantastic platform that people are just beginning to grasp.  A small business markets itself on Twitter by asking questions and starting conversations with potential customers via Twitter’s search function, which is like Google AdWords but better and free and puts you in direct contact with people actively talking about whatever you have to sell.  If someone is Tweeting about being hungover, we will contact them in a non-spammy way and ask some questions, like what they drank last night.  Is this time-consuming?  Of course, but no one in our space is putting in that kind of work.  I also love the fact that we use real Twitter testimonials from customers on our sales site.  It’s the most legit form of customer testimonial I can think of and best of all, it’s completely free.

You seem to be a very energetic guy. Where does this come from and is it important for an entrepreneur?

Anthony: It’s funny to hear that because I think a lot of people that know me would say I am pretty laid back for the most part.  In a way, I didn’t really have any constructive hobbies prior to starting my business.  So I guess starting my own business stirred up some sort of fire in me, because I am miserably competitive with what I do.  It’s not even that I fear failing, because I fail all the time and learn from those mistakes, it’s that I fear having to go back to doing something I don’t absolutely love to pay the bills.  That’s what motivates me.  That’s what gives me energy.  And I didn’t have that when I was working for a large corporation.  Just to give you an example, I routinely work until 1 or 2 am on weekdays.  And I love it.  If my previous employer had requested I come into work at 2 am on a Saturday, I probably would have quit on the spot.  And that’s the difference; I care so deeply about what I am doing, it doesn’t even feel like work.  It’s actually 2:00 am my time right now.

Humor. There is plenty of humor on the THC site. Is this a part of the marketing strategy?

Anthony: It is.  You have to have a voice, especially starting out.  People have gotten so good with ignoring and blocking out advertising that you have to stand out somehow.  You have to get people talking.  That’s exactly how we ended up on Thrillist.com.  Because someone on their staff saw the THC homepage and thought it was funny.  It was valuable content for their readers.  I wanted to market The Hangover Cure in a way that would make me want to buy it, if that tells you anything about how my brain works.  If no one else liked our marketing approach and we failed because of it, I would honestly be okay with that.  Because at least I was honest with myself and did what made sense to me.

And what are the plans for the future?

Anthony: Continued retail growth and improving SEO through quality link building are what I am focusing on right now, which takes a lot of time.  Hopefully creating some new jobs in 2010 for my friends.  And making my parents proud.

Thanks for the interview! That was … refreshing! You can follow Anthony on Twitter and see how he is doing.

partnership with www.villagemarket-kenya.com (selling The Hangover Cure at the largest shopping mall in east Africa)

Interview with young entrepreneur Andrea D’Intino from Tabbles

AndreaDIntinoHi Andrea, welcome to Entrepreneurship-interviews. Tell us a few words about yourself.

Andrea: Hello  Christian, and first, let me thank you for this chance and for the good work on your entrepreneurship-interviews.com. Well, about me, I’m a guy with an idea. Before having the idea, I worked as a videogame developer first and as an S&M for a developer of industrial solutions. I also earned a BSc in Economics, which is nicely lodged in my bottom drawer.

Ok, we should let the readers know that last year you founded a company called Yellow Blue Soft that creates Tabbles. What exactly is Tabbles?

Andrea: and that would be the idea… the short version would be “it is a virtual folder manager, for desktop, where virtual folders are also tags.” Elaborating it a bit, I’d say that Tabbles is a tool that allows you to put the same file into several “magic folders” without copying the file… you can then find your files into each of the magic folders or ask the system to find for you all the files that are into those two magic folders. Technically: Tabbles is a file organizer that runs on a relational database; it has a pretty neat interface and several technical features which generate interest by themselves (it’s written in F#, and the GUI is in WPF). One thing is sure: in a way or another, it’s something you’ve not seen before.

Who is the typical user of tables?

Andrea: Both we (the developers) and our early users believe that something like Tabbles is where the future OS will h to in relation to file organization. Therefore, Tabbles can have a pretty broad audience. Right now, we’re concentrating our efforts on small businesses and professionals.

And what exactly does it do?

Andrea: Ok, the word “table” stands for “tag-bubble”:  it’s a tag, and it’s a container at the same time. Imagine you can drag-drop a file into 3 folders, then look at the file and see those 3 folders floating around it, as if they were tags… then you can double click on each of those folders/tags and find your files. For example, you can drag-drop the same .doc in the tables “customer Smith,” “project Alpha,” “the year 2009,” and “Berlin”: you’ll be able to find your .doc inside each of the tables above (and the file was never copied). Moreover, with 3 clicks, you can tell Tabbles “show me all the files linked to the customer Smith and the year 2009” or “the customer Smith and Berlin,” as you would do when querying a relational DB. That’s it’s the core functionality, but it’s not all it does…

You told me you are 3 founders that work remotely: Denmark, Belgium, and Italy. Is it really possible to start and run a company while you are so far away?

Andrea: well, it seems so. Two out of the three of us have quite some experience with cross-border projects. Me personally, I’ve been managing a small team of colleagues located 2500km from our headquarters. This solid experience was indeed necessary to make such a step: I can imagine that you only believe remote-collaboration can work only after you’ve done it yourself.

What if you have to hire additional staff? How is this going to be handled?

Andrea: as in any startup, we’re the co-founders and the only employees of the company. The thing that allows us to work well independently is that we all cover different areas inside the company: I’m the S&M guy (as well as webmaster, community manager, PR…), Maurizio is the developer (he’s the man behind 100% of our technology), and Irma is the legal/administration/finance person (and sometimes she lends me a hand with S&M). If we were in the same office, probably we’d sitting in different rooms anyway, and meet once a week/month to discuss what’s going : and this is exactly what we’re doing  – sometimes we meet in person, sometimes just over skype. That’s our remote collaboration recipe. So, to your question, we’re planning to hire people in different places: after all the office price is per sqm. and having two 100sqm offices  shouldn’t be so prohibitively more expensive than having  a 200sqm one, isn’t it?

I see. So what are the advantages and disadvantages of working remotely?

Andrea: the main disadvantage is that I can’t sit next to my beloved partners every day. The main advantage is that we all work from home,  so the time we spend to get to our desks every day is limited, and we can work wearing pajamas (maybe we should considering extending this tradition to when we’ll have offices). Plus, as in any passionate self-funded startup, you really work 24/7; working from home does help a bit logistically.

You and one of your colleagues left your jobs a while ago to fully concentrate on Tabbles. Was this an important step, and how do you know when the time to do it is?

Andrea: In my case, I believe you can call it chemistry. I had several entrepreneur-ish ideas in the past 10 years and nearly started something a couple of times. This time, the idea startup as a subtle itch in the back of my head and then grew to keep me awake at night for 3 months a row… at that point, I knew it was “the idea” and that there was no going back. With Maurizio, it went this way: we’ve been friends for the past 15 years, and while I was looking for developers, I him a call just for a random chit-chat. He told me was actively looking to quit his job and starting something on his own, so I mentioned I had an idea, and within 30 seconds, he said “yes.” In the recent past, he spent some time working on something similar on his own (http://onefinger.sourceforge.net/), and the idea of Tabbles sounded very interesting to him. And here we are, one year later, selling our first licenses!

You’re in charge of Marketing and Sales. How does a small company like yours promote the products and find the buyer’s target?

Andrea: I come from a quite traditional kind of business where you wear a tie, you sit at a table, you speak some German (or Italian/French/English…) and get a contract signed. Doing S&M in our micro-ISV, I had to forget about this and learn about e-marketing, e-sales, PAD files, web traffic, and so on. So far, we preferred to hold-back a bit: our strategy has been to do a pretty early launch (read: launch a product which is very immature), get some feedback, and tune-up both the product and the marketing based on the early feedback, which is exactly what we’re doing (at the moment I can say we already got pretty far in this stage). In our next chapter, we’ll be dealing with redoing a big chunk of our marketing staff, dealing with press and blogs, and maybe even start investing a few cents in AdWords and similar things. The Balsamiq blog (http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/) has been a huge help:  it’s a mine of resources, and it really helped us to understand a bunch of things about who we are and what we want to look like.

Coming back to Tabbles, what are its main benefits?

Andrea: “find and sort files based on what they’re related to, not based on where they are.”  The main challenge for us is not explaining what the benefits of Tabbles are but making clear the differences between Tabbles and desktop search systems (like Google Desktop or Copernicus). With Tabbles, you can categorize (ultra-quickly and with a high degree of automation) your files and folders and then find and sort your files based on how you described them. The main difference with a search system is that the search system tries to understand what a file is about and tries and give you what it thinks you’re looking for. With Tabbles, it’s you at the wheel; it’s you setting the rules, defining what matters and what doesn’t, but most importantly, tell the system about things he could never find out…and very soon be able to share this categorization with your colleagues (yeah! :-D)

How did you come up with the idea?

Andrea: at my old job, I was doing quite some marketing stuff (both copyright and graphics), and after 3 years, I desperately needed to re-organize my files.  Since a lot of files were used in different projects across the years, I had a hard time finding a folder (hierarchical) structure that would allow me to logically categorize and find what I was looking for: very often, I felt the need to place the same file into several folders. At that point, I thought, “it’s a common problem, there must be an easy solution to this…” so I started digging into Tucows and cnet looking for a “little app that would allow me to place the same file. Into several folders, without  making copies.” After 2 months of digging and a culture made about tagging and DMS, I still couldn’t find a suitable solution. Then I thought, “why not doing it myself?”. Following are 3 months with my eyes open at night staring at the ceiling…and then Tabbles.

Any plans for the future? What could Tabbles become?

Andrea: Tabbles has already become a file-tagger and virtual folder manager and a virtual file system manager (did I mention that if you tag a file and then move it or rename it, Tabbles understands it?). In the next future, we want to allow the user to share their categorization (initially targeted at intranets).

By the way, you told me the company is self-funded. Any plans to attract some funding from the European community?

Andrea: Yep: we registered the company in Lithuania (Irma is from Lithuania), and among the favorable points of Lithuania is the fact the most of the funds from the EU have to go back from Bruxelles since they’re unassigned. We didn’t actively start looking yet, but we based our choice of the company’s legal seat also on this topic.

So if you are in Europe, do you think that Eu state funds are the way to go? The US way is based more on private money: Angel Investors and such.

Andrea: In Europe, taxes are typically higher than in the US, and some of this money is re-invested in enterprises of different. I’ve been professionally involved in EU-backed projects, and we all individually know quite a bit about it. We don’t say that we wouldn’t look into private capital (actually, we’ve some contacts already); it’s just we didn’t really dig into it yet.  True, we’re European, and maybe things are a bit different here…but if it works out, I think there is nothing wrong with it.

You told me that the other 2 co-founders are actually friends of yours from school and University. Some say it’s a bad thing to go to business with your friends because if things get messy, you will not only have business problems but also run the risk of losing your friends. What do you think?

Andrea: I deeply disagree: founding a company is a lot like getting married, and you can’t get married to someone you don’t know well enough. Whether it’s an old colleague or an old friend, trust and knowledge of each other is a necessary ingredient to the success of any company. Then, of course, with talk, we discuss, and we get mad at each other sometimes, but whenever this happens, we always know that all we’re trying to do is achieving the best for the company (as an opposite of me digging my spoon a bit deeper than yours). Without this solidity, for sure, we wouldn’t have got where we are now.

What about the crisis. Does it really affect small businesses like yours?

Andrea: 3 guys living off their savings with no customers yet? It’s the perfect time to start a company!  A crisis is an issue if you’re running a company with 1000+ employees and you see your revenues dropping and have to figure out how to pay salaries and bills at the end of the month…we have no salaries to pay, and we work from home. Plus,  since we sell online, if our product rocks and maybe we sell 20-30% less because of the crisis, well, there is still a lot of money to be made…isn’t it?

Any advice for young entrepreneurs willing to start a business in the EU now?

Andrea: watch the Steve Jobs’ speech at Stanford ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vja4GJv40xE ) and see if you’re connecting the dot as well. Don’t listen to your friends and family unless they’re entrepreneurs themselves. Get yourself together and find a good team if you can.  From that point on, listen to anyone who may fall in the target group of your product/service: it doesn’t matter old/young/rich/poor,  get to hear as many as them as possible, correct your trajectory on a daily basis but don’t lose your focus.  Still, doubting? Remember that in these globalized days, the sole fact of having to start a company and got some know-how together can result valuable when looking for a job or starting a consulting career…the bottom line is: even if everything goes wrong, you will have collected valuable knowledge which can later be sold to someone else in a way or another. That’s it, I guess

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