I felt his energy and excitement from the start - David Meltzer joined me with me on Operate and we had a great conversation.He lives by 4 key principles: gratitude, empathy, accountability, and effective communication—and these principles have allowed him to communicate and mentor everyone from college students to c-suite executives. These four principles in everyday practice allow David to live by his mission to “make a lot of money, help a lot of people, and have a lot of fun.”He’s the co-founder of Sports 1 Marketing with Hall of Fame quarterback, Warren Moon.  He’s a podcast host, frequent speaker, business coach, investor and author, to name a few.  Every time I’ve been with him or seen him speak, he’s present and generous. It’s impressive and inspiring and I felt it once again during this episode. His life’s mission is to empower OVER 1 BILLION people to be happy! This simple yet powerful mission has led him on an incredible journey to provide one thing…VALUE. In all his content and communication that’s exactly what you’ll receive.  He's hosted a free coaching session every Friday for over 10 years - you can find more out about it and register to attend for free on his website.

Luke Cooper is the founder and CEO of Fixt, an innovative mobile device support and repair business that he sold earlier this year (for 11 times revenue!).  Over the last 7 years, he’s been through a great entrepreneurial journey that we discussed on the show.  Luke is the kind of entrepreneur and leader that makes you lean forward and pay more attention - his honesty, authenticity and clarity were inspiring.  He shared a lot of wisdom that new and current entrepreneurs can immediately use, and anyone building and leading a team should appreciate.His personal stories that have shaped him were powerful, and once again illustrated the importance of storytelling in how we build relationships and connect with each other.Luke also had a great background prior to Fixt – having been a lawyer at one of the largest firms in the world, in-house counsel at a large financial services firm and strategy lead for a tech startup that grew and successfully exited.  I'm super excited to now count him as a friend, and one that really knows how to operate!

Nick Bradley is Co-founder and Director at Fielding Group, a growth accelerator and investing company. He's been a business owner & investor who has built, bought, & sold multiple businesses over the last decade. He also spent 15+ years with corporate organizations - as a CEO, Board Director, & senior commercial leader - working in both large & small companies all over the world.Nick loves to work with ambitious entrepreneurs, with the sole purpose of creating value from growth and scale-up. He also works with a select number of Private Equity firms, advising on strategic investments & acquisitions.He's also the host of Scale Up Your Business podcast and has developed a great show.We had a wonderful crossover podcast discussion about the future of entrepreneurship, venture capital, the roles of different groups such as venture studios and growth advisors, etc.  Enjoy!

John Dearie joined me to discuss the critical need for more entrepreneurs in our country, to drive forward more economic growth, innovation and jobs in our country.  He is currently the President at the Center for American Entrepreneurship in Washington, DC.  John founded this organization in 2017 as a nonpartisan research, policy, and advocacy organization. CAE’s mission is to engage policymakers in Washington, and at state and local levels, regarding the critical importance of entrepreneurs and start-ups to innovation, economic growth, and job creation – and significantly improve new business formation, survival, and growth.John has studied the history of how economic development, job and innovation growth, and entrepreneurship has evolved in our country, and has pulled together an amazing group from across the country to advise CAE in its efforts.  We now have the first ever caucuses in both houses of Congress on the topic of Entrepreneurship, which has led to much more energy around new key pieces of legislation to spur more entrepreneurship and innovation.Prior to CAE,  John was the CEO of Financial Services Forum, a policy organization formed by the CEOs of the largest US financial institutions.  He also was at the Federal Reserve Bank in NY for almost 10 years, including several years as an officer of the bank.John and I hadn't discussed it previously, but he attended a rival school in Indiana, Notre Dame.  In fact they often don’t claim Indiana as their location.  Thankfully we don’t play them in football – but we usually have our way with them in hoops. This conversation is important to everyone in this country as we look ahead to the profound changes in our economy in coming years, and how we create more prosperity and opportunity for as many people as possible.

Ian Hathaway has been a founder, an investor, an author, a professor and an advisor, just to name a few roles he’s played.  He’s currently an executive at Techstars, a fellow at Brookings Institution, a board member at the Center for American Entrepreneurship and recently co-authored a book, The Startup Community Way, with his friend, Brad Feld.  Ian is the type of thinker, connector and advisor that we need in our country to help us better understand entrepreneurship, investment and how we transform our economy to one more focused on innovation.I am so excited to share our chat with you as Ian can cover a lot of ground. We both love data and have had some fun geeking out a bit lately on some economic and jobs data.  This is part 1 of 2 - enjoy!

Anthony Saba is currently Executive Director at Samueli Academy, an amazing charter high school in Santa Ana that uses an innovative, student-centered approach to education.  As a public charter school, it’s available for all students and no tuition fees. The students can even take high school and college classes at the same time.  Their new facility includes on-site housing for foster youth who need a stable living environment to excel academically. They’ve recently added junior high as well. We talked about the school’s journey, as well as his, on the show.Anthony came to Orange County almost 10 years ago and I had the pleasure of meeting him shortly after arriving here. He has nearly 2 decades of high school experience (both in the classroom and in administration) plus a passion for involving students in the learning process. He says: “My teaching philosophy is to allow students to take an active, hands-on role in their learning,” and we talked about how the school focuses on that learning approach, and is getting amazing results.The Samueli Academy’s mission is - "To ignite the passion within all students to reach their greatest potential through a nurturing and innovative learning environment."Anthony also says “I think it is especially important in the 21st century that we don’t just teach students WHAT they need to know but show them WHY they need to know it.”  We talked about how important it is to provide the why and the context for learning.  We have an innovative high school and leader in our community in Anthony. He's another example of the world class people here who are shaping lives and accelerating our collective futures.

Andy Wilson is currently the Executive Director of the Alliance for Southern California Innovation, a group formed to pull together the talent and ideas in all of SoCal to help more innovators to emerge and succeed in bringing their breakthroughs to the world.  We talked a lot about the mission and activities of the Alliance on the show. Andy has also been an executive in a number of venture-backed, high-growth companies, such as Yahoo!, as well as an investor, advisor and startup community builder.  He was co-founder of Innovate Pasadena years ago, and he’s currently a city council member in Pasadena.He cares deeply about this region of the country, and helping, connecting, inspiring and encouraging others to participate and support each other.  His leadership and friendship are things I greatly appreciate, and you'll see from the conversation that we can talk for hours about our excitement for all that's happening here.

Katrina Ghazarian is founder & CEO of Gameday HR, an HR solutions provider to small and mid-sized companies. She recently renamed the company to reflect the perspective they have - "IT'S GAMEDAY... EVERY DAY. We're changing the way the world thinks about HR."  They offer both hands on consulting and an online subscription service.  Katrina unveiled the new name and her views on HR, people leadership, culture and other topics in our conversation.She is also an advisor to the Professional Collegiate League, which works with college athletes to enable them to directly benefit from their talent and marketability.  This is a very interesting topic, which we discussed on the show.Katrina is also a working mother and formed a consulting firm around that several years ago.  That eventually became part of EVA8, the prior name of the company until now.  She is also a partner in an LA community initiative called 5D United, to help with health and wellness in children in under-served communities.However, I mainly invited Katrina on the show to share how she beat out her other 5th grade classmates to be named the funniest (as it says in her LinkedIn profile). Did you have superlatives in your 5th grade class?!?  She’s also a great podcaster with her own, called "HR Sucks", so I was hopeful that she’d have some pointers for me. We had a lively conversation across these many topics - enjoy it!

Neal Hansch is CEO and Managing Partner at Silicon Foundry, a membership-based innovation platform for corporations, enabling them to connect, learn and invest in the innovation ecosystem, such as in startups and with each other.  He and his team have helped advise and drive forward many corporate venture capital, venture studio and other innovation activities.  He’s been very active in connecting corporations to startups and innovative thinking, which we discussed on the show.Additionally, we spent a lot of time talking about how corporations and startups translate their different languages, and how companies need multiple strategies to be innovative.  Neal and I could talk for hours!Before Silicon Foundry, Neal ran an incubator for Meltwater Group, which included building bridges between high tech entrepreneurs in emerging markets like Africa with Silicon Valley.  He trained over 200 entrepreneurs, and invested in a couple dozen startups, including helping them access accelerator programs like Y Combinator and 500 Startups.He was also a venture capitalist at Rustic Canyon Partners, which was a longstanding LA-based VC with several funds.  Neal has been a great friend for a long time – it was so fun to have him on the show!

Andrew Bermudez is founder and CEO of Digsy, a commercial real estate search and marketing engine.  He often calls it "Zillow for commercial real estate."  He started it a few years ago after a successful career as a commercial real estate professional.Andrew and I met and became friends when he was first conceiving the idea of what became Digsy.  He has been through the process of raising capital, making hard choices and pivots in his startup, and many other challenges of being an entrepreneur.  We explored many of those topics and his personal development as an entrepreneur on the show.He also has been active in the community in trying to connect and help other entrepreneurs.  Earlier this year he joined the Cal State Fullerton center for real estate as a board member as well.

Hazime is the Founder of Prodoscore, a SaaS startup that provides productivity intelligence. Leveraging ML, AI, and NLP to measure thousands of daily activities across cloud tools already in place (like your office suite, CRM, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Communications, etc.) Prodoscore creates visibility and drives performance and growth. They’ve seen a big surge during the last 6 months as sales teams have mainly been moved to remote, distributed home offices.  She's leading a growing distributed team and "eating her own dog food" at Prodoscore.  We talked about that a lot on the show when she recently joined me.  Prodoscore also closed a Series A round of funding in May. Troy Carter, famed investor, and entrepreneur, led the round.Denise was previously Chief Revenue Officer of VIWO, one of the first Google Apps for Business providers, so she’s been in the cloud business application world for awhile.She's clearly a good writer, too, as a multi-time author and member of the Forbes Business Development Council.And like me, Denise is a Midwest transplant to Southern California, as she grew up and spent a long time in Michigan.

Schedules aligned and I finally was able to have Neal Bloom on Accelerate Show to compare notes about startup community building in San Diego and what he's learned by participating in some other SoCal communities.Neal is CEO of Rising Tide Partners, a PR and communications firm in San Diego.  He’s also founder of Fresh Brewed Tech, which publishes both a newsletter and podcast about all things tech in San Diego.  He also launched Fresh Squeezed to cover all things tech in Orange County, and I appreciate him for trying to bring some coverage and order to everything.He is a successful entrepreneur as well, having co-founded an edtech talent and learning management company, Portfolium, which was acquired by Instructure a few years ago.  Prior to that he worked in the space industry for a leading manufacturer and coordinated their work with their main client who you may have heard of, NASA.Neal is an active investor in startups, through Tech Coast Angels and some of his own efforts, and he’s taught courses on entrepreneurship at UC San Diego as well.  He’s a key fixture in the San Diego startup scene.  We had a lot to talk about across his main 3 jobs - entrepreneur, investor and community builder.

It was super fun to have Jenny Dinnen with me on the Accelerate Show. She is currently President, Sales & Marketing at MacKenzie Corporation. For over 30 years, MacKenzie has been turning analytics into action and using data-driven insights to help companies to strengthen their customer experiences.  As businesses have turned to more of a customer focus in recent years, or ignore it at their peril, Jenny is on the front lines of that work.Jenny has been with the business for a dozen years, which is actually a family business.  Her father started it in 1985 and now Jenny and her sister, Katie, run the company.  I can certainly relate, given my family business background, and there are a lot of great family businesses around here, which we discussed.She is also active in the community with Team Kids, as well as both Chapman’s business school and Cal State Fullerton's.  Jenny is a dynamic, creative leader and we had a conversation that spanned topics from the importance of data, customer insights and being customer-focused, family business, and the business ecosystem of Southern California.

Per is General Partner at Welinder Shi Capital, an investor in lifestyle, culture and technologies around it.  Why, might you ask, would Per be good at finding and seeing opportunities there?  We’ll talk more about it in a bit, but if you’ve been around awhile and followed action sports, his name might be familiar.  In a prior era, he was a really good skateboarder, a key part of the Powell Peralta skate team.Per has been a prolific entrepreneur and executive as well, as an action sports entrepreneur – he was CEO of Blitz Distribution, in the heart of lifestyle brands, for over 25 years, and he’s an active mentor, advisor and investor in startups.Per is also a fellow UCLA MBA, Go Bruins!

It's been a true pleasure to get to know Tom Ferry over the last year.  We both have a passion for entrepreneurs and startups and interviewed each other for perspective and stories.  If you don't know Tom, he's a force of nature and #1 coach for real estate professionals.  He's also CEO of Ferry International, and a markeing and social media maven.We did a podcast crossover and talked about what entrepreneurial traits and skills entrepreneurs need to succeed, the difference between a side hustle and a business, having an open mind to create new plays that work for your business and the necessary steps you have to take to promote and encourage entrepreneurship in the community.6:47 – What makes a good founder? Listen to find out!10:06 – These are the mistakes to avoid when giving your business pitch 21:22 – Maybe you should start a side hustle that can ultimately create a breakthrough in the long run!24:55 – It’s going to be really hard if you just start with $0 when starting a full-time business29:20 – Are you clear in your customer needs and does your business have legal help? 32:30 – Always be on the lookout for new plays to implement in your business35:53 – How the financial crisis of 2008 impacted startups still to this day37:55 – “I see a renaissance on the horizon.”40:44 – Why the next big wave will be created by the collective intelligence of people42:26 – “The education system of today is built on a manufacturing economy… we’ve been pushing manufacturing out of this country for decades.”45:28 – Why imagining “the complete opposite” might help you resolve a challenge53:45 – Steps being taken to promote and encourage entrepreneurship56:44 – The importance of seeking mentors who are further down the path you want to travel58:30 – A valuable reality Mike Vance taught Tom: It’s hard to get the lesson from an experience you’re not having1:03:07 – “Give a huge amount of value to the world, and you’ll live a great life.”

Jessica Oslo joined me on Accelerate to share her journey to becoming an entrepreneur with Vantis Institute.  It was a fun story to hear, and highlights how creative, driven entrepreneurs emerge.She is a founding partner and clinical director for Vantis Institute in Newport Beach.  She explained more about Vantis and the innovative aesthetic work they do in our conversation.  For the last 10 years she’s worked alongside some of the most elite plastic surgeons in the US, and what I found fascinating is that she’s found a way to combine her passion for art and medicine at Vantis. Jessica is also a living kidney donor, which is an incredibly generous act.

Tony and I spoke last year about the amazing company he was leading and building here.  He is the co-founder and CEO of Restaurant365, which he started in Orange County in 2011 and over the last 8 years has built the company into a leading back-office solution provider to restaurants.  Earlier in 2019 the company raised $88 million in a series C funding round.  His world class investors include ICONIQ Capital, Tiger Global Management and Bessemer Venture Partners.The company won the best ERP SaaS Award in 2018 and has been recognized in a number of other industry awards as well.  Tony has been a finalist for Ernst & Young’s entrepreneur of the year, as well as received other industry and entrepreneur accolades.  He’s very humble about the company’s explosive growth and success, though.Prior to Restaurant365 he was a key member of the team and board member at Dynamic Methods, a Microsoft-focused reseller and solutions partner. Tony has been in Orange County for over 15 years and is building a company of significance here.  He also has good perspective on OC vs. other tech centers as he opened an office in Austin a few years ago.  He is a great example of an innovative Orange County leader.  One of his many words of wisdom in this conversation was "fist bump the messenger."  Listen and learn what that means!

Re-releasing one of the top-rated Accelerate Show episodes: Ray Grainger from Mavenlink.He is the founder and CEO of Mavenlink, a fast-growing software company in the services business management and collaboration space.  He’s also a graduate of highly distinguished school, Harvey Mudd College, where he’s been a trustee now for many years.He was a Managing Partner at Accenture for nearly 20 years before starting Mavenlink, and that experience provided much of the idea kernels for starting the company.Ray started Mavenlink in 2009, and over the last 10 years has had an amazing run in building Mavenlink, headquartered here in Orange County.  I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Ray nearly the entire time he’s been on this journey and have been so impressed with his leadership and energy, and his support of the OC tech community along the way.Ray has built an amazing team and company, and is doing his part to Accelerate OC!Great quote he shared from Ernest Shackleton: "By endurance we conquer."  Such a powerful message!

Kate Buckley joined me on the Accelerate Show to discuss premium domains, a topic not discussed nearly enough around startup and brand conversations. She is the CEO of Buckley Media where she specializes in Premium Domain Sales & Acquisitions, Domain Strategy Consulting, Naming and Branding.We had a super engaging and exploratory conversation about why premium domains are so valuable, how a founder might want to think about their name from the earliest stages, and the many different ways to engage premium domain owners (there are several).  Her expertise is unquestionable, and she had some great stories to share.  It definitely got me to think more strategically about name, brand and domains.We also had some fun discussion about our backgrounds as we grew up in Indiana (me) and Kentucky (her).For additional background, Kate has personally brokered millions of dollars in both private and publicly-recorded top domains sales. She brokered three of the world's Top 25 domain sales in 2018, as well as three of the world's top domain sales in 2017. Most recently, she brokered the 7-figure sale of Chocolate.com.

Jeff Gardner joined me on the Accelerate Show to discuss what he's been doing as the new President and CEO of CalAmp, a local company that has always been a pioneer in IoT and connecting the mobile economy. He’s been on their Board for over 5 years, so he knows the company well and has a strong vision for its future.   Through their hardware and software they have enabled others to track, trace and manage their assets more effectively, such as vehicles in a fleet.  One of the brands that you may recognize that they own is LoJack, which has helped many people recover stolen cars over the years.  They have over a million customers and track over 20 million products where they are installed. We talked about their roots, innovation and solutions today and into the future. Prior to CalAmp, Jeff was the President and CEO of Brinks Home Security, a well-known national company home security solutions.  He was also President and CEO at Windstream for 10 years, a multi-billion dollar telecommunications company, which had been a part of Alltel, where he was the CFO. He’s also been heavily involved in M&A and technology throughout his career. I did my best not to hold it against him as Jeff graduated from my college rival, Purdue.  It's great to now have him in the area, accelerating a leading technology company!