Brene Brown was a meandering youth in her 20s, doing more traveling and bartending than she was building a business or focusing on school. As a result, she didn't graduate college until she was 30. Nonetheless, after finishing her bachelor’s in social work, she quickly gained her masters and PhD and started a career as an academic at the University of Houston.

But something was rustling beneath the surface for Brown—being a quiet academic and publishing papers wasn’t enough for her. That something was entrepreneurship. Brene Brown started publishing books and doing talks and coaching for executives and successful entrepreneurs.

But Brown is best known for her unique message, calling for entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs alike to open their hearts and minds to vulnerability. What many avoid and even look down upon, Brene Brown insists is a key to success, real intimacy, and happiness.

Brown is a thought leader of our time. In an entrepreneurship community dominated by masculine values and "tough guy" attitudes, she breaks the noise with her message to accept and even embrace discomfort. And she isn’t just preaching: throughout her works, and her now-famous TEDx talk, Brown exposes her own vulnerability. This refreshing, data-based take on life and success has resonated with millions of people who have watched her TED Talk, and the many successful entrepreneurs she currently works with. It also informs the way she runs her own business and was in full display during her interview with Foundr.

In this interview you will learn:

• Why vulnerability doesn't have to be a weakness and how you can turn it into your strongest weapon
• Where to find the strength to get back up when you've fallen further than ever before
• The right way to deal with all the pressures of being an entrepreneur
• How to take the data you have and turn it into a profitable business
• What it truly means to be vulnerable
• & much more!

As the son of hardworking immigrants, David Cancel saw his parents working seven days a week to support their family. As an adult, he realized that not all people worked the way his parents did, which sparked in him a desire to make a living without getting a “job.”

Cancel always knew that he wanted to be an entrepreneur, even if he wasn’t quite sure what that meant. As a kid, he found that flipping through the pages of Inc. Magazine and other early entrepreneurial publications didn’t offer much insight. He saw ads for get-rich-quick schemes and stories of businessmen who had reached amazing heights. Although he wasn’t quite sure what it meant to be an entrepreneur, he knew he wanted in.

The term “serial entrepreneur” gets thrown around a lot, but few have lived a life that defines it as well as David Cancel. Building and selling companies has become a way of life; his obsessions around ideas or problems quickly snowball into companies. He has started and exited five companies in the past 16 years and is currently an advisor, investor, and/or consultant to several more, including BigCommerce, HelpScout, Rapportive, and Yieldbot.

In this interview you will learn:

• What it takes to create a successful product
• How to listen to your customer and what you can learn from it
• What kind of feedback you should listen to and what you should ignore
• The secret to iterating effectively and how you can start improving your own products
• Where to find the right audience and what it means to serve them
• & much more!

Justin Kan doesn’t come off as the type who lives for the spotlight. Which is funny, because at one point he live-streamed his life, 24/7 for the whole world to see, for months.

That may seem like an unlikely path to a billion-dollar sale, but in fact, the early experiment in the world of live video got Kan and his partner Emmett Shear part of the way there. That unconventional level of dedication and curiosity is a testament to how these two have been willing to dive into the opportunities before them, leading them through a flurry of tech business successes.

Kan’s CV speaks for itself: He co-founded hit companies Twitch, Justin.tv, Socialcam, Exec, and is now a partner at startup incubator Y Combinator, which invests millions annually into tech companies.

A native of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, Kan was not an obvious candidate for someone who would succeed in tech. He has a certain natural charisma, but studied physics and philosophy at Yale, neither of which is necessarily a match for a career in startups. However, he received a crash course in entrepreneurship from an early age by watching his mother run her own real estate business, and it seems to have stuck.

From there, Kan experienced his share of losses and ridiculously spectacular wins, developing a series of products that define the chapters of his fascinating career in tech startups.

In this interview you will learn:

• The exact process of coming up with, developing and selling your startup idea
• When to pivot and the signs to look out for
• What startup accelerators like Y Combinator are looking out for
• How to hustle harder than everyone else around you and gain the competitive advantage
• Why you should bet on the founders and not the startup itself and the wins that come with it
• & much more!

From a very young age, it was clear that selling was encoded in Gary Tramer’s DNA.

His aptitude for sales emerged early when he was a scrappy little kid riding his bike around the neighborhood with his friends. He and his gang would steal their neighbors’ plants, re-pot them into yogurt containers, and sell them back to the same neighbors. With the money they made, Tramer and company would indulge in Fizz Wiz, Warheads, and other junk from the candy shop.

“We were crafting our humble entrepreneurial beginnings,” Tramer says.

From these humble beginnings, Tramer has evolved to start and run several successful sales-focused businesses, up to today’s LeadChat company, where revenues reach over $1 million. He’s become a true master, with roots in face-to-face selling that he adapted and scaled up using cutting-edge digital tools. And he dished all of his secrets for us in this interview.

In this interview you will learn:

• From start to finish, what goes into making and closing leads
• Dozens of helpful tools you can start using today for your own sales strategy
• The different ways you can test your ads without breaking the bank
• The process of utilizing traditional marketing techniques in a digital setting
• What it takes to train your salespeople with no experience into becoming absolute sales machines
• & much more!