I recently read a post over on VentureHacks titled, “ Top Ten Reasons Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers ” written by Scott Walker (who blogs on legal issues for entrepreneurs ).  If you’re a startup and you don’t have a close relationship with a few law firms you’re really missing one of the most important relationships that any entrepreneur can have. I know that people have an allergy to lawyers out of fear of being screwed.  Much of this is unfounded – some is not. 

Within 2 months, the entrepreneurs were profitable. From the company's About page: "We started out as GotVMail Communications in 2003, after identifying the need for an easy-to-use virtual phone system for entrepreneurs that wouldn’t break the bank. ... As And that’s exactly what our service does for entrepreneurs like you: gives you the tools to propel your small business forward." If you like my interview, please vote for it on my favorite news site. --Andrew Andrew

How he came up with the idea for Goodreads But people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. So then they started going to these niche sites. How he designed the site to be viral Andrew: Before we Here's an easy way to vote for this interview on Hacker News. --Andrew Andrew

And how she launched her latest startup, SkinnySongs. We were all starting out together and building our companies and competing and cooperating much as is the case of the technology industry today so a lot of fun, we’re all sort of around the same age, so it is very similar I think of what goes on today in the Valley with you know with the web companies. So that ends up being funny. The Harvard Business School Case Study on Heidi Roizen talks about the dinner parties she hosts for tech leaders like her personal friend, Bill Gates, and how people skills helped her build one of the most admired careers in Silicon Valley.

When my friend Wil Schroter builds web sites, he's more concerned with attracting revenue than eyeballs. With Go Big, it's just not easy to replicate twenty thousand investors or two hundred and fifty thousand startups. But if I separate the two and all of a sudden I see a 100 people again sign up but only 10 people pay, I've isolated exactly what the problem is. When we get together in person, I like talking to him about how he builds revenue-generating sites like goBIGnetwork.com , because he's so methodical about it. For example, his order process is always split into two

In March 2007,  when Pownce launched, Twitter didn't have much of a head start. Plus it was backed by Kevin Rose a Web celebrity with geek cred. Leah promotes open source, APIs, and the Django web framework on her blog at leahculver.com . think, if I were to do a new start up or a different company, I would pick it in an area where there wasn’t such good We talked about more than Pownce and Twitter in this interview. Leah Culver is a developer who launched many projects.

This interview is full of stories of successful entrepreneurs because Jerry Colonna has invested in or worked with some of the best of them. On the other hand, Jerry told us about an entrepreneur who he didn't fund because when Jerry asked him why he wanted to start a company, the guy said that all his friends were starting companies. I know that that sounds like one of these clichéd statements, but there’s an hour As I listened to Jerry tell stories of the people he worked with, I kept noticing that the founders who made it big were building companies that were a part of who they were as people.

As you listen to this interview, ask yourself if you could have stood up to the challenges that faced Naomi Simson when she launched RedBalloon, a site that lets you give experiences as gifts. The designers that built the first version of her site wasted all her seed capital. And, as it would happened, he ended up being with us for four years, and it really was the turning point. Her first big challenge came before she even launched. Then her marketing ideas -- like walking down the street with balloons attached to her briefcase with the URL on them, hoping people would

We've heard past Mixergy entrepreneurs mention that they actively cultivate their niches' celebrities to grow their reputations and their sites' memberships. Play up their passions Haystack is where you’re going to find the right web designer for you next project. Every niche has its celebrities, people who aren't well-known to the rest of the world but are heros to a passionate few. We've Wil told us how he got top investors to be members of goBIGnetwork . 

One of the things I first discovered when I started tracking the high tech industry here in Southern California, is — due to how many people are here, and how spread out we are — it’s often much harder for entrepreneurs to find service providers, whether that is a web design firm, an attorney, a commercial real estate broker, software developer, etc. If you’re in Palo Alto, it’ s fairly easy to pick up the phone book and know that the business attorney you’re calling most likely has done at least a few venture deals–or maybe