Scott Kucirek is the co-founder of ZipRealty (ZIPR), the online real estate brokerage company founded in 1999. Scott and his partner Juan met on their first day of business school at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. The pair ended up starting four businesses together and although the first three failed, they all evolved into what became ZipRealty. Over the next five years the company weathered the dot com bomb, raised six rounds of financing and finally went public in 2004 in a deal that was 10 times oversubscribed. Download the mp3 to hear the story.

 

 ZipRealty co-founder Scott Kucirek [33:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2654)

Meebo is a web based platform that enables instant messaging from any computer. My guest today is Seth Sternberg, one of the three co-founders. Launched in 2005 with 10,000 users on day one, the company is off to an astonishing start. It’s popularity has surged in part because it is a convenient way to overcome the technical limitations on university and corporate networks that block downloading software typically required to IM. Funded by Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the company has grown to support 90 million daily messages and 5.5 million monthly users. Earlier this month Business2.0 dubbed Meebo one of 25 startups to watch. Tune in to hear their story.

 

 Things that influenced Seth Sternberg to become an entrepreneur. [2:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1277)

 

 Seth Sternberg's recommendations on raising VC funding. [2:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1226)

 

 Seth Sternberg co-founder of Meebo. [20:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3044)

Serial entrepreneur Chris Law founded Indigo Technologies, Tribe.net and Aggregate Knowledge. Tribe was recently acquired by Cisco and Aggregate Knowledge just announced a $20 million series B round. Investors include Kleiner Perkins and Josh Kopelman. Aggregate Knowledge is a web service used by online media and retailers that combines the collective behavior of other users to anticipate and surface relevant suggestions for related products and content. Overstock.com uses the service and during the 2006 holiday season, over 20% of all products purchased at the site were discovered by consumers using the new “discovery window” powered by Aggregate Knowledge. My takeaways from the interview include the importance of listening to what the market is telling you, experimenting quickly and being willing to throw away ideas that don’t work. Listen in to learn from Chris’ experience.

 

 Aggregate Knowledge founder Chris Law [23:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2629)

Matt Mullenweg created WordPress, the popular open source platform on which almost one million blogs are written. The growth of blogs is astonishing. Today there are over 57 million blogs total, up from zero in 2003 with 100,000 new blogs added daily. Matt is an accidental entrepreneur, tune in to hear how it happened.

 

 Matt Mullenweg founder of WordPress [20:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2748)