Greg Koch doesn’t care if you don’t like Stone Brewing’s Co.’s beer. Case in point, the label on a bottle of Arrogant Ale:

This is an aggressive beer. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory…

Koch, Stone’s CEO and cofounder, insists that when he wrote that caption back in 1997 when they first released the beer, it wasn’t a marketing gimmick. He really didn’t want people who prefer “fizzy yellow beer” to buy this hoppy, high-alcohol monster without fair warning. Of course, he did have some fun with it, reveling in the mocking tone of the Arrogant Bastard.

“That’s a tone of voice that I attribute to the beer and not to myself. Although maybe there is a little bit of me in there,” says Koch, who with partner Steve Wagner started in 1996 what would become one of the largest and most beloved craft breweries in the United States.

That little bit of arrogance — although you might swap that descriptor out with optimism, passion, or persistence — is in large part what has made Stone the giant success it is today.

Stone Brewing started early in the craft beer revolution, when the market had little interest in bitter, heavy brews, but Koch and Wagner had strong and unwavering opinions about good beer. When they decided to start their own brewery they knew they had to stick stubbornly to their ideals, and accept that some set of people would like it … or they wouldn’t. 

But they did, and as Americans came around to more aggressive flavor profiles in their beers (with Stone and other small breweries leading the charge), the Southern California-based operation grew rapidly, averaging 50 percent annual growth and ranking consistently as one of the country’s fastest-growing companies and best-reviewed breweries.

In this interview you will learn:

- Why Greg has never had to ever pay for advertisement for Stone Brewing Co

- How to develop a cult following 

- Creating something that people truly want

- What it means to follow your heart and create true art

- The Stone Brewing story, and how it all started

- Marketing copy 101

- & Much more!

37,000 feet high in the air. Hurtling forward at hundreds of miles per hour.

This was it. This was the scene. This was where Chris Ducker sat when he wrote his resignation letter – a step that helped his career take off and reach new heights.

“I got my job because I ultimately become unemployable,” he says. His current job: CEO. But as he sat aboard that plane to Hong Kong in 2006, Chris wasn't the boss – he was being bossed around. He says that the head of the company he worked for was “such a painful boss, just a micromanaging boss.”

Living in the Philippines, Chris worked for a Florida-based infomercial company. But his work earned the company half a million dollars per month in sales, which was far more than his salary. Throw that fact on top of the fraught feelings he bore towards his boss's management methods, and Chris was itching for something different.

So he crafted his resignation letter on an airplane flight to Hong Kong. When the plane landed, he sent the email, officially resigning. He didn't intend to return to the world of work as someone else's employee, so he entered entrepreneurship.

Having been involved in the Philippine call center market for several years, Chris decided that the niche could support a new company. He launched with seven staff and a lot of courage.

Eight years on, Chris still works as CEO for his Live2Sell group of companies. Composing the group is a call center, a business to help people find virtual staff, and a co-working space. Starting with seven staff, the group now boasts 270 employees.

To get there, Chris worked hard. He poured time and effort into his companies, striving to build them up to where they are today. And he pulled it off.

In this interview you will learn

- How to attain virtual freedom

- Chris's strategies and tactics on buying your time back as a business owner

- Productivity hacks

- How to outsource & train overseas staff

- Chris's best advice for entrepreneurs right now trying to grow their business

- The 3 lists you need to create to attain freedom

- & Much more!

This episode is proudly sponsored by DesignHill - The World's #1 Marketplace for Custom Designs. If you go to designhill.com/promo/foundrmag, foundr listeners will get $40 off the contest posting fee and $50 worth power upgrade of services for free. 

There aren’t too many startups on the planet that regularly make millionaires of their community members. Or who have doubled user, traffic, and revenue numbers consistently for the better part of a decade.

The story of Envato going from a modest Flash design resource to a multi-site, multi-million dollar, online heavy-hitteris the essence of startup success. In fact, as a case study, it should probably be taught in business school. Except for the small fact that the journey of CEO and Cofounder Collis Ta’eed has been anything but textbook.

Since its inception in 2006, Envato has boomed. Actually, you would have to say it has BOOMED. One and a half million active buyers, eight thriving marketplaces, 250 employees and over $215 million paid out to authors to date — all born from an idea to start a business that could support the travel aspirations of Ta’eed and his wife Cyan.

“We had just got married and we had a lot of freelance clients. It was beginning to feel like a drag! Cyan said, ‘Let’s go traveling!’ I had always wanted to start a business and we had some ideas about how it would work, so we just thought, let’s go for it. Even though we had to keep freelancing for a long time to keep living as we built the company,” Ta’eed recalls.

Since Envato launched FlashDen, its first digital marketplace that sells content created with Adobe Flash, the company has grown to include eight online marketplaces. There’s a good chance you’ve heard of at least one of them. The Largest of the Marketplaces is ThemeForest, which sells website themes and plug-ins. ThemeForest, is to digital creatives what Home Depot is to DIYers, The Envato Market also includes GraphicRiver, CodeCanyon, VideoGive, PhotoDune, 3DOcean, AudioJungle and ActiveDen (formerly FlashDen), while the broader Envato group is also home to freelance hub Studio and learning platform, Tuts+. Phew.

In this interview you will learn:

- How Collis validates his business ideas for marketplaces and how he chooses the right ones to pursue amongst the hundreds

- How he has rapidly grown Envato

- Raising capital vs Boostrapping

- How he got his first 1000 customers

- Marketing tactics and strategies for growth

- What it takes to manage a large team and becoming a leader