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.
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