82 episodes

Muck Rack & Shorty Awards cofounder/CEO Greg Galant interviews the world's best entrepreneurs and creators, including the founders of LinkedIn, The Vanguard Group, Yelp, Brooklyn Brewery, Trello, Twitter and Stack Overflow.

Venture Voice – interviews with entrepreneurs Gregory Galant

    • Business
    • 4.8 • 39 Ratings

Muck Rack & Shorty Awards cofounder/CEO Greg Galant interviews the world's best entrepreneurs and creators, including the founders of LinkedIn, The Vanguard Group, Yelp, Brooklyn Brewery, Trello, Twitter and Stack Overflow.

    Matt Mullenweg built Automattic into a $7.5B company

    Matt Mullenweg built Automattic into a $7.5B company

    Matt Mullengweg was a high school student looking for a better way to customize his blog when he discovered the open source software community and created the WordPress platform. A few years later, after dropping out of the University of Houston for a brief stint at CNET Networks, he founded Automattic, which he describes as a holding company for products such as WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Simplenote, Longreads and The Atavist. And just like over 40% of the web today, they all run on WordPress. Unlike many of its contemporaries, Automattic, which became a unicorn in 2014, hasn’t gone the IPO route or been acquired. In February of 2021, the company closed a new primary funding round of $288M, and it continues to grow at a rapid pace. The company recently did a $250M share buyback, primarily targeted at current and former employees, at a $7.5B valuation.

    Matt continues to be energized by the open source community, which keeps him connected to users all over the globe. In fact, even before the pandemic made remote work the norm, Automattic was at the forefront of changing the way we work. A distributed company since day one, Automattic now employs 2000 people across 90 countries. Matt has influenced many leaders with his experiences of running an entirely remote business and keeping people connected, both technically and culturally. He shares more in this episode about what they’ve learned about remote work, and what they’re still figuring out.


    ***

    If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than a minute and helps us continue to attract the entrepreneurs you want to hear and learn from.

    For show notes, past guests and transcripts, visit venturevoice.com

    Sign up for the Venture Voice email newsletter at venturevoice.substack.com/welcome

    Follow and connect on social:
    On Twitter: twitter.com/gregory
    On Instagram: instagram.com/gregory
    On YouTube: youtube.com/c/GregoryGalant
    On LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/galant/

    Learn more about Muck Rack at muckrack.com and The Shorty Awards at shortyawards.com

    • 1 hr 9 min
    David Cohen’s Techstars

    David Cohen’s Techstars

    As Co-Founder and Chairman of Techstars, David Cohen has spent nearly his entire career focused on helping entrepreneurs succeed. Aspiring founders and early-stage entrepreneurs from around the world apply to Techstars’ startup accelerators to get three months of hands-on mentorship, access to a worldwide network and a check for $20,000 in exchange for 6% of the startup. When I spoke with David for this episode back in 2008, the program was just two years old, part of a trend of structured angel investing and mentoring that was started by Paul Graham’s Y Combinator. At that time, two companies founded at Techstars had been acquired: socialthing!, which was sold to AOL, and Intense Debate, which was sold to Automattic (the makers of WordPress).

    Fast forward more than a decade later, and David is a first-round investor in approximately 2,100 internet startups, including Uber, Twilio, SendGrid and Pillpack. Now running 40-55 accelerators during any given year, Techstars has funded over 2,600 companies that have gone on to raise more than $14.5B and create a market cap of more than $44B. In this episode, David shares his own stories of success and failure as an entrepreneur, how he decided to start Techstars and his advice for anyone thinking about starting up — or investing in — a new venture.

    ***

    If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than a minute and helps us continue to attract the entrepreneurs you want to hear and learn from.

    For show notes, past guests and transcripts, visit venturevoice.com

    Sign up for the Venture Voice email newsletter at venturevoice.substack.com/welcome

    Follow and connect on social:
    On Twitter: twitter.com/gregory
    On Instagram: instagram.com/gregory
    On YouTube: youtube.com/c/GregoryGalant
    On LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/galant/

    Learn more about Muck Rack at muckrack.com and The Shorty Awards at shortyawards.com

    • 45 min
    Henrik Werdelin’s Bark fetches $1.6 billion valuation

    Henrik Werdelin’s Bark fetches $1.6 billion valuation

    Originally from Denmark and now living in the US, Henrik Werdelin has been recognized as one of the “Top 100 Most Creative People In Business” by Fast Company and named to the “Silicon Alley 100” by Business Insider. His path to entrepreneurship took him through the BBC, MTV and Joost before he ended up creating Prehype, a “halfway house” for entrepreneurs like him, who didn’t know what to do next. Not only has Prehype incubated new ventures from scratch and in collaboration with Fortune 500 companies, it’s also where he hatched his own startup, Bark.

    With a mission to make dogs as happy as they make us, Bark quickly took off, expanding its BarkBox subscription service over the years to include toys, pet food, home and health product lines. In June of 2021, Bark went public via SPAC by merging with Northern Star Acquisition. The newly combined company is valued at approximately $1.6 billion, and Bark is expected to generate around $365 million in revenues and reach a gross profit of $221 million this year. But the coolest part of the job, Henrik says, is getting to make dogs happy.



    ***

    If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than a minute and helps us continue to attract the entrepreneurs you want to hear and learn from.

    For show notes, past guests and transcripts, visit venturevoice.com

    Sign up for the Venture Voice email newsletter at venturevoice.substack.com/welcome

    Follow and connect on social:
    On Twitter: twitter.com/gregory
    On Instagram: instagram.com/gregory
    On YouTube: youtube.com/c/GregoryGalant
    On LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/galant/

    Learn more about Muck Rack at muckrack.com and The Shorty Awards at shortyawards.com
    Produced by Podcasttech.com

    • 1 hr 8 min
    Fabrice Grinda on growing Zingy into a $200 million business

    Fabrice Grinda on growing Zingy into a $200 million business

    Fabrice Grinda is one of the world’s leading Internet entrepreneurs and investors, with over 150 exits on 500 angel investments. When I first interviewed him for this podcast, way back in 2005, the then-31-year-old French native was in the process of packing up his office at Zingy, the mobile media start-up he’d founded in 2000. After growing Zingy to $200 million in revenue, Fabrice had sold the company for $80 million in 2004. Eighteen months later, he was stepping down as CEO and looking ahead to his next adventure.

    At the time we spoke, Broadband, iTunes and podcasting were all new, and Fabrice saw it as “the beginning of a hundred year revolution.” He recognized that there were going to be huge opportunities ahead for the entrepreneurs who were willing to take the risks and go all in on a big idea. And as Fabrice’s story shows, you don’t have to be the one who comes up with the groundbreaking product to become a wildly successful entrepreneur.


    ***

    If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than a minute and helps us continue to attract the entrepreneurs you want to hear and learn from.

    For show notes, past guests and transcripts, visit venturevoice.com

    Sign up for the Venture Voice email newsletter at venturevoice.substack.com/welcome

    Follow and connect on social:
    On Twitter: twitter.com/gregory
    On Instagram: instagram.com/gregory
    On YouTube: youtube.com/c/GregoryGalant
    On LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/galant/

    Learn more about Muck Rack at muckrack.com and The Shorty Awards at shortyawards.com

    • 1 hr 3 min
    Guy Kawasaki’s evangelizing Canva

    Guy Kawasaki’s evangelizing Canva

    Guy Kawasaki’s name has become almost synonymous with tech entrepreneurship and evangelism. Over the past 25 years, he’s had a hand in advising a generation of tech start-ups and innovators, either directly, through stints at Apple and Google, or through his writings, speaking engagements, podcast and numerous books. Guy has started up a few of his own companies as well, and the venture capital fund he launched, Garage Technology Ventures, has invested in a variety of early-stage technology companies.

    I first interviewed Guy for this podcast in 2006. Catching up with him nearly 15 years later was a real treat — although we were a little delayed getting started. As Guy explained, the waves were pretty good that day, so he had to get a little extra surfing in. When he’s not riding the waves, Guy is the Chief Evangelist for Canva, bringing the good news of the democratization of design to the world for this Australian startup, which is now valued at A$6 billion. In this episode, he shares what it means to be an evangelist, the role of luck in entrepreneurship, how his work life has evolved and the career achievement he’s most proud of — which also happens to be the one he feels is most underappreciated.

    ***

    If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than a minute and helps us continue to attract the entrepreneurs you want to hear and learn from.

    For show notes, past guests and transcripts, visit venturevoice.com

    Sign up for the Venture Voice email newsletter at venturevoice.substack.com/welcome

    Follow and connect on social:
    On Twitter: twitter.com/gregory
    On Instagram: instagram.com/gregory
    On YouTube: youtube.com/c/GregoryGalant
    On LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/galant/

    Learn more about Muck Rack at muckrack.com and The Shorty Awards at shortyawards.com

    • 44 min
    How Derek Sivers decided to sell CD Baby

    How Derek Sivers decided to sell CD Baby

    CD Baby founder Derek Sivers made two appearances on Venture Voice in the early days of this podcast. In our first conversation, he described the process of growing the company into one of the largest sellers and distributors of independent music online, with $25 million in revenue and 50 employees at the time. This week we’re revisiting our second conversation, which happened three years later. What a difference three years makes.

    In August 2008, Derek, who owned 100% of the equity, sold the company for $22 million. When we spoke in October of that year, Derek described what drove his decision to sell the company, how he sold it (including a Willy Wonka style plan that never came to fruition) and what he learned along the way. As you’ll hear, Derek wasn’t driven by the money. If anything, it was a deterrent to selling. So his lifestyle didn’t change when he sold CD Baby — and he made sure of that by putting all of the money into a charitable trust that will go toward music education when he dies. If you’ve ever felt disconnected from your own venture or wrestled with the idea of whether you should sell your “baby,” this episode offers some good insight and excellent advice.

    ***

    If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than a minute and helps us continue to attract the entrepreneurs you want to hear and learn from.

    For show notes, past guests and transcripts, visit venturevoice.com

    Sign up for the Venture Voice email newsletter at venturevoice.substack.com/welcome

    Follow and connect on social:
    On Twitter: twitter.com/gregory
    On Instagram: instagram.com/gregory
    On YouTube: youtube.com/c/GregoryGalant
    On LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/galant/

    Learn more about Muck Rack at muckrack.com and The Shorty Awards at shortyawards.com

    • 43 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
39 Ratings

39 Ratings

J.C.Town ,

Just what I was looking for

I am really enjoying the clever questions and interesting interviews on this podcast. Greg does a good job of asking questions that bring out the passion in the stories of the people he interviews.

Dave - Reviews Nickname ,

The original!

Venture Voice was the original podcast interviewing amazing entrepreneurs. I loved it when it started many years ago and am so glad that Greg is picking it back up. Strongly recommend!

pkuhar ,

The best startup podcast returned

Venture Voice was the first podcast about startups I listened too back in 2006. It inspired me to go the entrepreneurial route. I still remember the interviews with founders of Yelp, Grasshopper... even
@Jason

now after 10 years the podcast returned.
Thank you
@gregory

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