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The biggest fumble in the history of the media business happened in Dallas, Texas in September of 2000. Two desperate Silicon-valley entrepreneurs named Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph flew into Dallas for a meeting with John Antioco, the legendary CEO of Blockbuster. Hastings was an engineer who had botched several software startups. Randolph was a serial small business entrepreneur who made his name as a co-founder of MacWorld magazine in 1984. Less than three years earlier the two men had joined forces on a DVD rent-by-mail idea they called Netflix. By September of 2000, their new venture was looking like a bust. On track to lose $50 million that year, Hastings and Randolph’s company wasn’t an entrepreneurial David hoping to defeat a corporate Goliath. Netflix was more like an entrepreneurial Faust willing to sell its soul to the devil if it could turn a profit amidst the ongoing dot com …

Some people win the game of business by sticking to the rules. Other people win by changing the game. Most entrepreneurs are game changers not rule keepers. That’s why you go into business for yourself, right? You don’t fit into the gray cubicle world of corporate America so you build your own craft and launch out into the world of business. A few founders go way beyond ordinary, though, when it comes to breaking the rules and changing the game, people such as Daymond John. You might know Daymond from ABC’s hit reality business show Shark Tank. He’s the shark who started with $40 and created a $6 billion game-changing fashion empire called FUBU. Today, Daymond, a boy with dyslexia from a middle class neighborhood in Queens, boasts a personal net worth of $250 million. He didn’t earn it with an Ivy League education and a network of family friends, …

Building a great business often starts with a big dream, but it never ends there. Success also requires securing the right team and honing a clear vision. Many entrepreneurs who’ve built empires realize the value of focusing their energy on what only they can do and finding the best people to do what they can’t. But no one exemplifies that vision more than the subject of today’s Storytime Tuesday, Alli Webb, the founder of Drybar, the nation’s premier blow dry bar specializing in just blowouts, no cuts, no color! Alli Webb’s blowout success story began where most people’s business stories start–at home with her family. Key players on the right team already surrounded Alli since they were related by blood or by marriage. Her brother, Michael Landau, was a successful business executive, and her husband, Cameron Webb, was an experienced advertiser. Although Michael and Cameron both lacked something essential to …

There are a lot of industries that take a lot of energy and hard work to be successful in. Entertainment, real estate, and publishing are all pretty high on that list, but today’s Storytime Tuesdays subject has been successful in all three. Ryan Serhant is best known as the host of Bravo TV’s Million Dollar Listing New York and Sell It Like Serhant, but is also a published author, prolific blogger, and, of course, self-made real estate mogul. He is an excellent example of a business owner who pulled himself up by the bootstraps and built his business around his passions and strengths. A Foundation of Hard Work Ryan Serhant grew up with an interest in theater and acting. Raised in Massachusetts, Ryan and his younger brother were taught to value education and hard work from a very young age. One summer, their father, Vice President of State Street Advisors …

If you want an example of a fiercely ambitious, highly gifted entrepreneur, you can’t do much better than Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s been on the “hustle” since he was a young kid in New Jersey, and a talent for creating profitable businesses is in his blood. You’ve probably seen him somewhere online, especially YouTube, because he documents nearly every minute of his days to promote himself and his businesses as much as is humanly possible. In fact, he’s probably the first person to document his life to the degree that he does, which has prompted many other entrepreneurs to follow his lead to promote their own companies. The CEO of his massively successful media company, VaynerMedia, venture capitalist, investor in a wide range of social media companies and other investments, frequent public speaker, and creator of multiple original segments on YouTube, “Gary Vee”, as he is known to his fans, never …

  If you live in America, then you’ve probably read and heard at least something about Arianna Huffington in the past couple of years, which is ironic because she is actually from Greece. Nevertheless, you could debate the reasons why she has actually been thrust into the public forum these past few years, most likely because one of the latest books that she’s published about the importance of healthy sleep habits struck a chord with a lot of people. Arianna has been writing books for decades, and she is exceptionally intelligent. An intellect like hers that is matched with relentless self-motivation to work in different fields, influencing many people as she goes, is a pretty rare combination to occur in the same person. All the books which she has published over the years seem to be her way of expressing and releasing all of the ideas she has inside of …

  We all know Jeff Bezos as the billionaire mogul who built the company that made it possible for us to buy pretty much anything we want online and see it show up on our doorstep, post-haste. What we don’t really think about as much is that Amazon had to come from somewhere. It didn’t just materialize out of nowhere, and the founder and CEO of the company, Bezos, participated in a journey, from childhood until today, that shaped him into the entrepreneur who would transform ecommerce forever. When you look at the progression Bezos went through and the steps he took to end up where he is now, it almost seems like he knew exactly what he was going to do, from the very beginning. Of course, he couldn’t have known the empire he would later build, but every phase of his life brought him closer to that destination …

  There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that Elon Musk is an extremely important figure in our culture today. In truth, that goes for people around the world because the projects he is into have implications for improving industry and the way we interact with technology for everyone, everywhere. That unfortunately means that we are even concerned with his sleep habits. It borders on ridiculous for massive portions of the public to be worried about how a single entrepreneur is sleeping, but that is the world we live in. And that is how important this man is to the world. Musk is working on developing solutions for an incredible number of different problems that people are facing in the United States, as well as the world, as a whole. So, when that kind of a person is not getting enough sleep, it’s mainstream news and a concern for people everywhere. …