My Interviews with "Miss Coupon Diva" and Money Saving Mom

I've been managing product at a deal site startup called AskForADeal. The company is built on the basic premise of giving customers the ability to create the deal they're interested in. As part of our quest to connect consumers with brands as well as educate our deal saving visitors I sat down with two couponing experts: "Miss Coupon Diva" of TLC Extreme Couponing fame and Crystal Paine of Money Saving Mom.

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This Week in Venture Capital #52 with Rand Fishkin, Founder of SEOmoz

Today I had the chance to jump in on a great episode where Mark Suster interviewed Rand Fishkin, the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz - an SEO product that I've used and love. Check out the interview below for the crazy journey behind how SEOmoz came to be as well as some great SEO tips and information.

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Tony Hsieh & Delivering Happiness Bus Visits Mahalo HQ

Yesterday Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, dropped by Mahalo HQ with the Delivering Happiness Bus. The purpose of the bus tour is to spread the word about Tony's business management philosophies outlined in his best selling book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. While Tony was in our offices, he sat down with our CEO, Jason Calacanis, on a special episode of This Week in Startups.

Below is the tour that Greg and I gave of Mahalo.com's HQ in Santa Monica, CA.

This Week in Social Media #10 with Kurt Daradics from City Sourced

This week we spoke with Kurt Daradics who is the cofounder of City Sourced. City Sourced provides crowd-sourced community driven reporting of community issues such as trash, vandalism, potholes as well as other items. We had a great discussion on crowd-sourcing as well as geo-location based mobile apps.

My Interview with Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com

* I conducted this interview for The Next Web. Please share this post from there :)

If you're like me you're constantly on a mission to learn new things everyday and find inspiration to help fuel your desire to achieve. A source for both that I was compelled to share with The Next Web audience was Mixergy.com.

Mixergy, founded by Andrew Warner (@AndrewWarner), is a site that conducts daily interviews with Internet entrepreneurs. Andrew, an extremely successful entrepreneur who built a $30+ mil/year Internet company in his 20s, conducts the interviews on a daily basis over Skype video chat and streams the interviews live using Ustream. In addition to Andrew's prepared questions, live viewers are invited to participate by asking questions for the interviewee in the live Ustream chat or via Twitter by amending #mixergy to their tweeted question. Interviews are then syndicated as a video podcast (iTunes, Blip.tv).

Andrew has interviewed some of the biggest names in the business including Leo Laporte (twit.tv), Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV), Tim Ferriss (Author of The 4-Hour Workweek), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Matt Mullenweg (WordPress), James Hong (Hot or Not) and Lynda Weinman (lynda.com) among many others. I had a chance to video Skype with Andrew last week to talk about his career and his mission at Mixergy:

What sets Mixergy interviews apart from interviews you might see on mainstream television or read in a business magazine is that they're raw, spontaneous and filled with interesting anecdotes. In essence, it's just two people having a casual talk over Skype. There is no off-screen PR person screening answers or pre-interview question approval process. It's also not a speech given at a conference where the entrepreneur has time to practice what they are going to say.

The lessons in the anecdotes are truly what I find most valuable. Sure, you can pickup a book about the 10 steps to this or the 25 secrets of that. However at the end of the day, entrepreneurship is about breaking the rules and going where others haven't. In many ways, the only rule or overarching theme you come to discover when hearing entrepreneurs tell their story is that there isn't any rules. Every entrepreneur's story is different and each offers unique takeaways.

If you haven't had the chance, I highly recommend checking out Mixergy's past interviews and following Mixergy on Twitter.