Hooked On Startups

This week I speak to Ryan Crownholm - a serial entrepreneur with a long and successful track record of moving into established, highly competitive industries and transforming them by introducing technology, branding and marketing.

This week I speak to William Henshall - a five times entrepreneur and founder of Focus At Will Labs - a neuroscience based web tool that uses specially composed instrumental music tracks to significantly increase your attention span when working and studying.

As you can see from the sea of platinum discs behind him on the video, Will is a musician, scientist, song writer and technology inventor working with audio to find the right music at the right place at the right time. He was the founder of the British pop soul band Londonbeat and had two Billboard #1 hit records. He went on to found Rocket Network, a Paul Allen/Cisco-funded San Francisco company in 1995. Will has achieved notable global success both as a musical/visual artist and as a technical inventor.

'We choose to go to the roof not because it is glamorous, but because it is right there!' 'Go out there and have huge dreams, then show up to work the next morning and relentlessly incrementally achieve them' Luiz Barroso wrote about this in an internal Google+ posting in 2014. Taking small, incremental, achievable steps is so important if we are to achieve our dreams. The math works - if you do something 1.3x every quarter, you'll hit 10x within 3 years. Fascinating book if you want to read more about this - 'How Google Works' by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg.

Yoni is the founder and president of MWR Life. He immigrated with his family to Canada at a young age and ever since he can remember he's been an entrepreneur. He started his first company at the age of 17 and has spent nearly 20 years building profitable organizations with a global reach. His experience lies in a wide range of industries, including international real estate sales and development, energy efficiency technology, financial services, extended warranties and the global direct selling industry. Yoni is an expert in designing and building scalable business infrastructures to market a diverse line of products and services, resulting in extensive long-term growth and profitability for his companies and stakeholders. He is passionate about helping others succeed.

I chat with real estate investor Joe Fairless who controls more than $138,000,000 in real estate assets. He is the author of best-selling book 'Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever, Volume I' and is host to the world's longest running daily real estate podcast, the Best Ever Real Estate Investing Advice Podcast.

Hugh advises and invests in startups and is an active practitioner and teacher of Lean Startup Methodologies. He recently concluded a 22-year career at Intuit where his last position was Engineering Fellow and Vice President. During his Intuit tenure, he worked on QuickBooks and several other small business offerings. He has been a serial innovator and helped launch several new businesses at Intuit including Intuit Payments. Hugh is passionate about grassroots innovation and "giving voice to good ideas" wherever those ideas may come from.

I chat with former hit record producer turned real estate mogul Peter Lorimer. Peter is the owner of uber trendy PLG Estates, which fuses together the art of handling incredibly delicate and private VIPs while giving all clients the feeling of being "inside the velvet rope," just like the rock stars and celebs the PLG Estates brand is known to cater to.

Reed Goossens moved to the U.S. in 2012 to pursue a career in structural engineering, however he discovered a passion for real estate investing. With limited funds and no credit, Reed went from purchasing a small duplex to growing his own real estate investing firm, RSN Property Group. Reed now syndicates large multi-million dollar deals across the U.S. Reed Goossens certainly lives up to the 'never say die' Aussie attitude when it comes to being a successful entrepreneur. Reed is also the host of the up & coming podcast, Investing in the U.S. An Aussie's Guide to U.S. Real Estate, where he invites other distinguished real estate investors and entrepreneurs to speak with him about their success and help guide other international investors who want to successfully invest in the U.S.

Murray Newlands is a published author and recognised online marketing and PR guru. He's a regular contributor to Entrepreneur.com, Inc.com, and VentureBeat where he writes on entrepreneurship, tech and social marketing trends and startup advice. In this episode we talk about the challenges of starting a new business, the first steps for an entrepreneur to get their business off the ground, and how to become the Key Person of Influence in your market.

In this episode I chat with Gerry Kelly, the founder and CEO of Sonas Denim - an inspiring entrepreneur who has built an LA based fashion brand that combines unique products with a keen social mission. I talk to Gerry about how he got the original idea for the fashion range, how against massive odds he has managed to build a truly unique fashion brand in a hugely competitive marketplace, and what his vision is for the future.