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    Founder Stories : Page 3
    August 17th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Kevin O’Connor: “The Search Is Over, Tomorrow We Start The Business”

    A serial entrepreneur, Kevin O’Connor’s latest venture is FindTheBest, a company that offers comparisons on everything from credit cards to golf courses. Prior to FindTheBest Kevin was a founder of DoubleClick, which Google ended up buying for $3 billion.

    In this episode of Founder Stories, O’Connor takes us back before his DoubleClick days to when he joined Atlanta’s Internet Security… → Read More

    August 14th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Ben Lerer On The Startup Gold Rush

    As Chris Dixon wraps his conversation with Thrillist co-founder and Lerer Ventures partner Ben Lerer, Lerer offers his assessment of the present day start-up environment. From his perspective it is a mixed bag. (Note: this was taped before the most recent financial meltdown)

    “Since we started investing, we’ve seen a lot more money enter the market . . . so it’s tougher to be a seed stage… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    August 4th, 2011

    Founder Office Hours With Chris Dixon And Josh Kopelman: Dispatch.io

    If you have a product that could potentially appeal to everyone, how do you pick which customers to go after first? In this episode of Founder Office Hours with investors Chris Dixon and Josh Kopelman, Dispatch.io founder Jesse Lamb asks whether his file-sharing service should focus first on early adopters, consumers, or small businesses.

    Kopelman suggests, “You are going to reach them all the… → Read More

    August 3rd, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Thrillist’s Ben Lerer On Buying Customers And Going Up Against Groupon

    Founder Stories host Chris Dixon continues his conversation with Thrillist Co-founder and CEO Ben Lerer by discussing customer acquisition.

    Recognizing the line of thought that it’s not optimal to pay for customers, Dixon inquires about Lerer’s customer acquisition strategy and says, “a lot more tech businesses including Groupon and including I believe Thrillist are actually built … a large… → Read More

    August 1st, 2011

    (Founder Stories) How Thrillist’s Ben Lerer Got Thicker Skin And Grew Up

    In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Thrillist co-founder Ben Lerer discusses the challenges of running a growing business (watch his first interview here).

    Lerer says of primary importance is keeping the team focused on turning readers into shoppers and shoppers into readers: “We are not just Thrillist … we have this other thing called JackThreads and this other thing… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    July 31st, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Ben Lerer: Thrillist Will Do “$40 Million In Revenue This Year”

    In this episode of Founder Stories;, Chris Dixon sits down with Thrillist Co-founder and CEO, Ben Lerer (who is also a partner with his father Ken Lerer in Lerer Ventures). Targeted towards young men, Thrillist is a “platform for guys” that offers “both local and national content and commerce smooshed into one place” says Lerer.

    Inspired by Bob Pitman’s Daily Candy (Pitman is an early investor… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    July 27th, 2011

    Founder Office Hours With Chris Dixon And Josh Kopelman: Schedit

    “What do investors look for in a beta? What are the key metrics?” That is the question Omar Tellez poses to Chris Dixon of Founder Collective and Hunch and Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital in this episode of Founder Office Hours (a special format of Founder Stories we are trying out). Tellez is the CEO of Sched.it, a social online calendar app getting ready to launch.

    Kopelman notes… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    July 22nd, 2011

    Founder Office Hours With Chris Dixon And Josh Kopelman: Profitably

    Today, we are trying a special edition of Founder Stories that we are calling Founder Office Hours. Inspired by Paul Graham’s Office Hours onstage at our last Techcrunch Disrupt, we brought together a group of startup founders in our NYC studio to get feedback and advice. Joining regular host Chris Dixon is Josh Kopelman, managing partner of First Round Capital.

    In this first video above, … → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    July 6th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) MakerBot's Pettis: "We Are Going To See A Huge Amount Of Hardware Startups"

    Chris Dixon heads down the homestretch of his Founder Stories interview with Bre Pettis and the two touch on the fact that the barriers to entry for founders foaming at the mouth to launch hardware startups are being washed away.

    Pettis says, “we’re seeing this startup culture come into hardware, where normally this was just the realm of the really big companies who could afford to do this kind… → Read More

    July 5th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) MakerBot’s Pettis: "We Are Going To See A Huge Amount Of Hardware Startups"

    Chris Dixon heads down the homestretch of his Founder Stories interview with Bre Pettis and the two touch on the fact that the barriers to entry for founders foaming at the mouth to launch hardware startups are being washed away.

    Pettis says, “we’re seeing this startup culture come into hardware, where normally this was just the realm of the really big companies who could afford to do this kind… → Read More

    July 3rd, 2011

    (Founder Stories) MakerBot's Bre Pettis: "We Started With 3 Guys, A Laser Cutter, And A Dream"

    As Bre Pettis continues his conversation with Founder Stories host, Chris Dixon, the two discuss the challenges of running a business that literally requires nuts and bolts assembly. In this situation, scaling brings a whole new set of challenges unfamiliar to many software start-ups.

    Hardware is just a different game.  For example, as Pettis tells it, “we ran out of motors, we bought all of… → Read More

    June 30th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Bre Pettis' Ambition: "One MakerBot Per Child" (TCTV)

    In this episode of Founder Stories, host Chris Dixon takes a look at a 3D printer while talking to the maker behind the MakerBot, Bre Pettis.

    If printing 3D objects sounds impressive, think about this. Pettis thinks “it’s early days”—drawing comparisons to early PC’s like the Altair. About the size of a mini-fridge, the Makerbot ships for $1,299 and allows users to create their own objects via… → Read More

    June 20th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Busting Criminals And Managing Marriage At Eventbrite (TCTV)

    With more than $400 million in projected gross sales for 2011, Eventbrite is getting big enough that it has to worry about fending off the criminals. In the above clip of Founder Stories with Chris Dixon, Julia Hartz discusses Eventbrites’ digital shield, while her partner in crime Kevin Hartz describes a new box-office iPad app the ticketing site recently rolled out.

    The husband and wife team… → Read More

    June 17th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Eventbrite's Julia Hartz: "Facebook Is The No. 1 Driver Of Traffic To Our Site" (TCTV)

    Chris Dixon resumes his Founder Stories conversation with Eventbrite’s Kevin and Julia Hartz by asking questions about their strategy for attracting customers. Not surprisingly Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all factor in to the mix.

    Julia Hartz says initially Eventbrite positioned itself to be “highly optimized for search engines and discovery.”  However, search eventually gave way to… → Read More

    June 16th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Eventbrite's K. Hartz: "I Like Businesses That Go After Large Incumbents"

    Eventbrite, the company that lets anyone organize online events and sell tickets to those events, was founded by the husband and wife team of Kevin and Julia Hartz. Chris Dixon sat down with the power couple to discuss the early days of Eventbrite and some of the disruption that Kevin created along the way. Check it all out in this episode of Founder Stories. → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    June 12th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) How Mike McCue Came Up With Flipboard: "What If We Accidentally Deleted The Web"

    How did Mike McCue come up with the idea for Flipboard, the iPad reader that’s seeing more than 10 million flips a day? In these final two video clips from his Founder Stories interview with Chris Dixon, McCue says that he had no intention of starting another company after selling TellMe to Microsoft (which he talks about in Part I and Part II of this interview). He was tired after ten years at… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    June 10th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Mike McCue On Surviving A Downturn: The TellMe Years

    Mike McCue knows a thing or two about raising a lot of money to keep as a war chest for his startups. Recently he just raised $50 million for Flipboard, but at the end of the first dotcom boom he raised $250 million for his last startup, TellMe. Resuming his conversation from Part I of Founder Stories with Chris Dixon, in the video above McCue dives into additional detail about preforming triage… → Read More

    June 9th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) FlipBoard's Mike McCue: The Builder

    Before Mike McCue discovered how to flip an iPad into a device that made reading digital magazines a cinch, he himself was discovered by some of the biggest names in the tech world while working away in Silicon Valley Woodstock, New York.

    In this episode of Founder Stories with Chris Dixon, you’ll hear them geek out about programming video games for the TI99 in Extended Basic, how McCue went to… → Read More

    June 4th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Reddit's Alexis Ohanian Bows To "Lord Jobs" And Jabs Investors

    Color gets bashed as being a contributing player to the so called startup bubble and the frat-boy attitude of investors from the Web 1.0 era don’t do much better in this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon and Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

    In a conversation spanning a variety of topics, you’ll hear Ohanian describe how “Lord Jobs” has indirectly contributed to the success… → Read More

    June 2nd, 2011

    (Founder Stories) From Paul Newman to Paul Graham with Alexis Ohanian (TCTV)

    Alexis Ohanain continues his coversation with Founder Stories host Chris Dixon by discussing some of his activities and interests outside of Reddit.

    Highlights of their chat include Ohanian telling Dixon he considers Paul Newman, “the OG of social enterprise” and that Newman was the inspiration for Breadpig, Ohanian’s organization that creates “geeky things” and donates profits to worthy causes. → Read More

    May 30th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Reddit's Ohanian: What Competition? (TCTV)

    In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Reddit Founder, Alexis Ohanian takes Dixon back to his college days at the University of Virginia where he and co-founder Steve Huffman bonded over video games and began plotting ways to avoid taking a real job after graduation.

    Not wanting to be holed-up in a cubicle for 50 years, they submitted an idea to Y Combinator, the idea got… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    May 29th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Quora's Charlie Cheever On Building A Disruptive Knowledge Platform

    Last week at Disrupt, Chris Dixon did a version of Founder Stories onstage with Quora founder Charlie Cheever. We learned that Quora is not looking to sell, but we also learned a lot more.

    For instance, what convinced Cheever to quit Facebook with co-founder Adam D’Angelo was that tried to “imagine a world where I knew everything that I wanted to know, as long as someone else in the world knew… → Read More

    May 28th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Gilt's Kevin Ryan—It Is All In The Presentation (TCTV)

    Chris Dixon wraps his Founder Stories interview with Gilt Groupe’s CEO and Founder, Kevin Ryan by discussing the early sales strategy of Gilt – a strategy that was designed to build customer and brand loyalty, but not the bottom line, at least initially.

    Revisiting the launch period around four years ago, Ryan says, “we were going to make $4,000 for us on a sale and I spent $7,000 on the… → Read More

    May 22nd, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Fmr. DoubleClick CEO, Kevin Ryan "We Lost 70% Of Our Clients" (TCTV)

    Former DoubleClick CEO, Kevin Ryan led the company through a period of explosive growth in the late ’90′s. He took the ad-targeting company from a handful of employees to more than 2,000 in just 4 years before selling to Google for $3 billion. However, as Ryan discusses in this episode of Founder Stories with Chris Dixon, the dot.com bust threatened to wash it all away.

    Ryan says during the… → Read More

    May 21st, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Gilt Groupe’s Kevin Ryan Says There Is No Bubble (TCTV)

    Heading into TechCrunch Disrupt, New York, we pulled a couple excerpts from Chris Dixon’s freshly shot Founder Stories interview with Gilt Groupe’s CEO & Founder, Kevin Ryan. Ryan, who will be speaking at the conference dismisses talk of the so-called “tech bubble” and dives into the “renaissance” of the New York Tech scene.

    Responding to a recent “Economist” article which cautions of a… → Read More

    May 19th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Hashable's Yavonditte: Being Lean Does Not Mean Staying Small

    As Chris Dixon rounds out his interview with Hashable founder, Michael Yavonditte, SXSW serves as a springboard to discuss the power of thinking small, when thinking about launching. Yavonditte relates Hashable’s experience at SXSW and puts it in perspective.

    Speaking to the topic, Dixon says, “I have come to kind of believe in the lean startup thing, where you just kind of iterate and you… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    May 17th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) How Hashable Rose From The Ashes Of Tracked

    Before there was Hashable, there was Tracked, Michael Yavonditte’s attempt to build a better Yahoo Finance. It was little too complicated, and not social. “I felt like I was on the wrong side of history,” he tells Chris Dixon in this episode of Founder Stories.

    So Yavonditte (who had previously sold advertising startup Quigo to AOL for $360 million) started from scratch, recruited a new team… → Read More

    May 16th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Michael Yavonditte On Going Toe-To-Toe With Google (TCTV)

    In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Hashable founder and CEO Michael Yavonditte delves into the conventional (lack of) wisdom, power plays and power players that helped shape paid search as we know it today.

    Yavonditte, who sold advertising startup Quigo to AOL for $360 million, started his career running business development at AltaVista. Back then, Yavonditte notes “we… → Read More

    May 12th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Meebo’s Seth Sternberg On Hiring, Growth And Flying High.

    Like many start-ups, Meebo has been on a recent hiring spree. In this episode of Founder Stories, CEO Seth Sternberg tells Chris Dixon, “for 12 weeks we had to hire a salesperson a week and if we didn’t we would have missed our revenue numbers later this year.”

    But it’s not just new salespeople populating Meebo’s workstations. “We started this year at about 130 employees.  I think we… → Read More

    May 10th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Meebo CEO: "What If We Could Completely Change The Game?"

    Should founders innovate based upon customer feedback or is it better to develop from within and let consumer adapt. In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Meebo’s Seth Sternberg discusses his philosophy: “Users tend to be very good at giving you incremental product suggestions.”  But they are not product visionaries. “They may be asking for something that would be… → Read More

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