Entrepreneur Ash Maurya has been building companies for over a decade, and during that time he’s always tried to find a better, faster way to build successful products. Maurya said he’s always had the entrepreneurial bug, and he attributes that to the way his parents raised him. He said his reason for staying an entrepreneur has evolved in stages – from building something awesome, to building a sustainable business, to finding purpose.

His company WiredReach was sold in 2010 after launching eight years earlier, and he now runs Spark59, a company that offers web-based apps for measuring, learning and communicating progress. Those apps include the Lean Canvas startup blueprint, USERcycle customer lifecycle tool, and also his Running Lean book, which has sold over 10,000 e-book copies and was released by O’Reilly in March 2012. For his Running Lean book and his projects like Lean Canvas, Maurya often takes an existing idea, like Eric Ries’ Lean Startup or Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, and creates his own interpretation. He keeps that inspiration close, as Ries also acts as an advisor to Spark59, and Running Lean is the first in Ries’ curated lean startup book series.

Maurya said his Lean Canvas project started off as an experiment. “I recognized the value in explicitly writing out the most critical business model assumptions versus just keeping them in my head,” he explained. He had been using worksheets outlined in Steve Blank’s book The Four Steps to the Epiphany, and used the concept of the worksheets combined with the idea behind Alex Osterwalder’s work on the Business Model Canvas to create his own solution. “The result was Lean Canvas which I described in a blog post back in August 2009. This post quickly rose to become one of my most popular posts of all time,” he said, so he started using it in his workshops and testing it on other entrepreneurs, and eventually made it available online.

Based on his experiences with WiredReach and Spark59, Maurya said entrepreneurs have to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. “A common trap for entrepreneurs is falling in love with their solution. I did this with my first company which was built around a technology vision. After our first attempt at solving a customer problem failed, we kept building more. Over time, we became a solution looking for problems and the legacy of our solution became a limiting constraint,” he said. “With Spark59, I took a completely different path. I fell in love with the problem instead. That simple mindshift allowed me to more freely experiment with all kinds of solutions and only keep what works.”

Maurya is a mentor to several startup accelerators around the world, including Year One Labs and Capital Factory, and has lots of advice for entrepreneurs interested in applying. “The true job of an entrepreneur is to systematically de-risk their startup over time. You don’t need to have a working business model when pitching to an accelerator but you do need to be able to effectively communicate your vision and progress thus far,” he said. “Another thing I tell a lot of entrepreneurs is something best described by [VentureHacks founders] Nivi and Naval as the Advisor Paradox: Don’t follow what advisors tell you, apply it. At the end of the day, it is still your job to build a successful business.”

While some may say we’re in a technology bubble, Maurya’s advice for entrepreneurs is that there is no better time than the present to start a company. “It’s cheaper than ever to get started and as a result we are building more products than ever before. But most products still fail,” he said. “What I believe can significantly change these odds is viewing the business model, NOT the product, as the true product of a startup. Then apply the same rigor to building the business model as we do to building a product – decompose it into manageable parts, tackle the riskiest parts first, and systematically test everything.”

As for the next evolution of his entrepreneurial journey, Maurya said he’s not looking to make a change anytime soon. “I believe I have found a problem worth solving,” he said. “Something I can commit to doing for a long time to come that also has meaning.” He said his goal with Spark59 is to help entrepreneurs succeed. “I don’t define success in terms of funding or exits but by whether we create positive outcomes for entrepreneurs. Sometimes that can mean killing a project.” He said his big audacious goal is to make a dent in the failure rates of startups. “A key part of the equation is that we are practicing entrepreneurs first,” he said. “We rigorously test everything we put out which is best summed by the tagline of my blog: Practice Trumps Theory.”

BlueCat Networks founder Michael Hyatt went to university with the intention of becoming a doctor, and graduated in a recession with “no money and little hope of finding a job.” He started enterprise risk management company Dyadem with his brother Richard Hyatt, which ended up selling to IHS many years later in April 2011. It was after encountering a problem during their first business that the brothers got the inspiration for their second. His brother developed a new server after they bought an expensive one to do DNS and had to send it back because they couldn’t get it working. “It had a simple, easy-to-use interface and solved the complexities of setting up DNS in just five minutes. That was the start of BlueCat Networks,” he said. “I picked up the phone and started calling companies in the U.S., and the rest is history.”

BlueCat Networks provides IP Address Management (IPAM), DHCP and DNS software, appliances, and solutions that help companies manage their entire IP Space and Name Space from a web interface that is simple and secure. The company has partnered with IBM and HP, which Hyatt said gave them a lot of credibility as a leader in their market. BlueCat Networks was named in the highest ‘Strong Positive’ category in a Gartner MarketScope analyst report, and Hyatt is a recipient of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 Award. The company has over 200 employees, and over 1,500 clients around the world. “Every device – from laptops to smart phones and tablets – needs an IP address to connect to the network and ‘get on the Web,’” Hyatt said about the company’s complex technologies. “BlueCat Networks provides the control point in the corporate network for managing the growth of IP addresses so that every mobile and smart device can be rapidly and securely on-boarded onto the network.”

Hyatt said the challenges they face in the business today are the same as they were when he started it in 2001, and that it all comes down to people. “Constantly finding the best people is the key to building a great company. Many people think it is raising capital and I have always disagreed,” he said. “Good companies with great people always find ways to raise capital. Money just has a way of finding the good stuff. In fact, there is more money than ever sitting on the sidelines waiting for great companies to emerge.” Hyatt and his brother grew the company based on their own seed investment, but raised $16.8 million in funding from Trident Capital in July 2011.

BlueCat is expanding internationally, and Hyatt said the key to maintaining a startup culture as they grow is to hire really smart people and let them act with authority. “Too many times CEO’s – especially founders – hold onto control of too much for too long,” he said. “I like building companies and that means letting many other great people do the great things you hired them to do. Sometimes you just have to let go and see what happens.”

Hyatt’s advice for young entrepreneurs is to focus. “Many smart young entrepreneurs have a great idea and then dilute it by trying to do five other things. I’m sure you can make money doing many things, but which of your bright ideas can make you the most?” He also advises entrepreneurs not to follow the herd. “Don’t line up for anything – including gold, condos or whatever the business fad du jour is,” he said.

Now that his first business has been acquired and his second is thriving with a recent injection of capital, Hyatt said he’s completely focused on growth and market share. “We continue to release better, more innovative solutions in the enterprise to help our customers meet the new demands of mobile, cloud and smart devices,” he said. “We live in an IP-dependent world. Intelligent management of devices and IP addresses is becoming an essential technology.”

Before becoming entrepreneurs, Zemanta co-founders Andraz Tori and Bostjan Spetic hosted a Slovenian television show about technology and gadgets. It was while hosting that show that they recognized a need for better organization of content and prepared a prototype for Zemanta and presented it to a number of outlets with the intent to pursue it as a new project.  The idea was rejected by many outlets except for the Slovenian national TV.

“We first created a product for big TV houses – using natural language processing to automatically create pages content-rich for their TV shows. However we soon discovered there was no market for it in Slovenia,” Tori said. “As we were thinking about how to pivot the company (however we didn’t use term pivot in 2007 yet), we thought about bloggers and tools to help them write. We applied with the idea to the Seedcamp bootcamp program and that’s how it all started.”

The duo applied for and were accepted to the Seedcamp startup accelerator program. Since launching in 2007, the company has grown to 24 employees with offices in Ljubljana and New York. There are over 80,000 active bloggers using the technology, and the company has formed partnerships with leading blogging services such as WordPress, Federated Media and others.

The company has raised over $3 million in funding to date. They said in the early days of the company, they had very few ideas about how to monetize the consumer-facing product for bloggers, so they raised funding to give them runway to figure it out. “We always thought there must be something valuable in being there when the content is created, interacting with the writer and really understanding what the content is about,” Tori said. “For bootstrapping we would need to think about the product very differently.” Spetic adds that funding offered them an opportunity to try a quick growth route, and they took it. “We were lucky enough to meet investors who shared our vision and passion for the product,” he said. “This made it easier to ‘experiment’ with more complex value propositions than just ‘freemium’. If we were forced to bootstrap, we probably wouldn’t survive.”

The company is a graduate of the Seedcamp startup accelerator program; Tori said his advice for entrepreneurs going through similar programs is to build an initial prototype quickly. “You need to build something functional in three months and start gathering feedback from users, angles and pretty much everyone you meet,” he said. Spetic said founders in accelerator programs can’t worry that people will steal their ideas. “Bounce ideas off everyone, have a list of accelerator programs and try all that seem interesting to you, each has another set of mentors eager to help you.”

Zemanta has several global offices, and the founders say there are challenges to having a team that’s so spread out. “You need to be much more vigilant about open and frequent communication, even between founders, since there is less of ‘accidental communication’ going on,” Tori said. Spetic says the problems vary from taking days to respond to customer service queries due to various time zones, to managing expectations between teams of different cultures. “What a U.S.-based sales person considers ‘done’ is much different from what a hacker considers ‘done,’” he said.

Tori and Spetic both say they didn’t grow up wanting to be entrepreneurs, and these accidental entrepreneurs say the lessons they’ve taken away from building a company have been plentiful. “There were so many it’s hard to come up with just one,” Tori said in an interview. “Love your users. Measure things. Don’t be afraid to change. Kill things that don’t work.” Spetic, on the other hand, said the biggest lesson has been about trust. “I think the most important thing so far was always know who you trust, and trust them completely until proven wrong,” he said.

In terms of their number one piece of advice for entrepreneurs, Tori says his is to “ship it,” then talk to users and customers as much as possible. Spetic advises entrepreneurs to have set goals. “I usually need more explicit instructions,” he said. “’Talk to customers a lot” really means ‘have 5-10 structured interviews with actual or potential users/customers every week.’ No excuses, it’s the one thing by which your success stands or falls.”

Entrepreneur David Rusenko says his desire to start a company started at an early age – some of his earliest memories were planning businesses. “When I was a bit too old for the jungle gym, I remember sitting on top and brainstorming how I could make a profit assembling computers from scratch,” he said. He started a business in high school that he said gave him valuable experience in entrepreneurship, and it wouldn’t be the last business he started while in school. It was while attending Penn State that Rusenko created a simple way to create an online portfolio as part of a class project. “Within weeks, we started thinking bigger, and had expanded the idea to helping people create all kinds of websites,” he said in an interview.

That project became Weebly, a website-building tool for individuals and professionals. Since it launch in 2006, the company has come to power over two percent of all websites on the internet, and is used by over ten million people around the world. Features include a drag-and-drop website builder, hosting, blogging tools, and themes. They also offer special tools for educators, and offer an affiliate program for users. The San Francisco-based company, which they say is “very profitable,” has funding from Y Combinator in addition to Sequoia Capital and individual investors including Aydin Senkut from Felicis Ventures and SV Angel’s Ron Conway.

The team joined the Y Combinator startup accelerator program in early 2007, and was named one of TIME’s 50 Best Websites that year. Rusenko said Y Combinator really helped to shape the company’s direction. “Y Combinator taught us quite a few things about how to make a product simple and intuitive, and immersed us in the [Silicon Valley] scene and culture,” Rusenko said. He advises any startups considering joining an incubator to join one if they have the opportunity. “It’s definitely worth it — apply, and if you get in, don’t look back.”

From the several years he’s been building Weebly, Rusenko said he’s learned that starting a company takes a log time, and entrepreneurs need to give it time if it’s not working out right away. “Focus on your users and always make things simpler and easier,” he said. “Aggressively manage your priorities and only focus on the specific thing that gets your business to the next inflection point.” He also advises entrepreneurs to take 24 full hours a week off, saying you “can’t sprint forever.”

Rusenko’s top piece of advice for entrepreneurs is to focus. “Focus, focus, focus. Don’t get distracted by things that don’t matter,” which he believes is easier said than done. “Spend as much of your time as possible on building your product early on.”

Entrepreneur and investor Gabriel Weinberg believes that startup founders should view starting companies as a career path. Instead of building one company and being done, Weinberg says it often takes more than one try to build a successful company. “Startup skills and intuition take a while to develop, and the odds are the first try will not be successful,” he said in an interview. ‘It wasn’t for me.”

Weinberg didn’t always know he wanted to be an entrepreneur. He took chemistry in college, then switched to physics and thought he’d be an academic. He realized after a couple years of school that the academic life wasn’t for him. ”Then I got a hint that startups might be fun and so just kind of jumped in,” he said.

Weinberg is the founder of Duck Duck Go, a search engine that provides an alternative to Google, and additional features like increased privacy. He started Duck Duck Go because he thought there was a need for search alternatives, and wanted to explore what that might look like. “I was working on variety of projects that involved search technologies, and then after a few failures I saw a combination of them that might produce something interesting,” he said. Prior to Duck Duck Go he started NamesDatabase, which was acquired by United Online, Inc. for $10 million in 2006.

The company launched in 2008, and just passed the four-year milestone. Weinberg said in the early days he had some initial ideas around how the business would work, but didn’t have much of a plan. “Those original ideas (that search could use less spam and more community-driven answers) still remain a focus, but they’ve gradually been put in the context of a whole strategy to make Duck Duck Go a compelling alternative in search.”

The company raised Series A investment from Union Square Ventures and several individual investors in October 2011. “We invested in Duck Duck Go because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it,” USV partner Brad Burnham wrote in the funding announcement. He also called Weinberg “exactly the kind of entrepreneur we like to back.” Duck Duck Go also recently crossed a major milestone – in mid-February the company had its first million-search day, with one million direct searches on the site.

When it comes to the biggest startup lessons he’s learned through building Duck Duck Go, Weinberg said he’s found that thinking big is the same as thinking small. “I’ve come to think that the probability of success when pursuing a big vision is on the same order as thinking smaller/niche,” he said. He also stresses the importance of a critical path. “I’ve also cemented the importance of staying on critical path and embracing feedback to help determine that path.”

Weinberg is also an active angel investor, and past investments include Notehall (acquired by Chegg), Locately, and RJ Metrics. He outlines his investment criteria on his website – he says he’s looking for hacker founders with a bootstrapping mentality who have a minimum viable product (MVP) backed by some customer development. He says when it comes to raising investment, founders need to remember that traction trumps everything. “Figure out the critical path to a little bit of traction and ignore everything else,” he said.

He also outlined his experience raising capital for Duck Duck Go in a lengthy blog post, and outlined the time commitment involved with the fundraising process. “Even though our round went relatively smoothly, it was still a massive time sink. It was the top idea in my mind, and it pretty much consumed my life for the past four months,” he wrote in the post. “In other words, it seems like you should commit to being all-in, all-consumed for a while, or you might as well not do it.”

For now, Weinberg is focused on continuing to build his company, while supporting his local startup community and investing in up-and-coming companies on the side. He often holds office hours and hackathons to help entrepreneurs who are working on their first idea. Since startups are his career path, he wants to build Duck Duck Go into a viable competitor to Google. “I’m focused on growing Duck Duck Go and making it into a search engine that you want to switch to.”

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Like many other successful entrepreneurs, Brian Wong worked at a startup before branching out on his own. He worked in business development at Digg, and though he was laid off he says he learned a lot from working there. The company was around 100 people when he joined, and he said it taught him how to hustle and hustle smart. “In Business Development, your job description is usually very vague and you’re able to find your strengths and fit them into a success metric,” Wong said in an interview. “I was able to learn a lot about how the entire company operated because building external relationships and incorporating that into a product required conversations across the board. It was a license to be creative – and I loved that.”

Wong studied political science in college, and learned how to design on the side. “Everything started as a hobby on the web side, and then I learned that I could make money off of what I loved doing every day,” he said. After he was laid off from Digg, and wondered what would happen if he went out on his own. “Being laid off was the trigger that got me thinking: what if I could control my own destiny? What if I didn’t have to pay for someone else’s mistakes? What if what I did directly impacted my outcome?”

Wong said the idea for Kiip was born out of a simple observation that mobile gaming was exploding across every demographic that he observed. “Tens of millions of people spending millions of minutes engaged in a medium meant something at the very least,” he said. “Yet everyone hated mobile ads. Something had to be done.” His idea was for a mobile rewards network that would give app developers a way to provide in-app rewards to players using Android and iOS devices. When he came up the idea for Kiip he knew he had to pursue it rather than go work for someone else. “I knew that we were also on to something with Kiip,” he said. “Many of the early folks that I had interviewed with to get back into a full-time job after I had gotten laid off found me much more passionate about the idea of Kiip vs. the other option of working for them. That’s when I knew I had to do something.”

Since Kiip launched, Wong has been listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and has been called the “youngest person to ever receive venture capital funding” by TechCrunch (he was 19 when he received funding). The company just launched a $100,000 developer fund, and hired a new COO away from gaming giant Zynga. Advertisers using the Kiip platform include Sephora and vitaminwater, and the network reaches 50 million players. Wong has always viewed his age as an enabler. “There’s a certain expectation attached to being younger and being innovative, and having crazy ideas that could maybe feasible,” he said. “You have a license to think big and to get excited quickly. People against working with you for just your age are definitely not people you want to spend time with.”

Kiip has raised $4.4 million in funding to date from investors including True Ventures. He said he didn’t choose to raise money over bootstrap, he just went with the flow. “Being in the valley meant that certain opportunities were a little closer than others,” he said. “Raising funding was one. We were just lucky to be approached by venture capitalists that we really like and made sense as partners vs. simple funding sources.” He said money is very commoditized, so it’s the people you get to work with that really “add to the magic.”

The rewards space is a busy one to be in right now. SessionM just launched the provide in-app rewards that can be collected from multiple games; Square just launched its Register point-of-sale app for merchants that integrates loyalty rewards; and companies like PunchTab and Punchd are trying to bring the loyalty card online. Wong said he’s happy companies are validating rewards. He says Kiip is all about “finding that happiness moment,” an in-app achievement, and augmenting it for the user with a reward. “Kiip is very much so a consumer brand – a badge of approval, of a genuine, authentic rewards play,” he said. “Our rewards are a unique breed that we chose as a word because it was really the only word in the dictionary that could serve the objective (to the extent it can) that we want to create through the reciprocity element of finding a moment and rewarding someone. We’re trying to find organic audiences that are already doing what they’re already doing… not making them do something else. Disjointed objectives and goals that aren’t a part of a flow that are incentivized don’t serve a natural affinity, it’s a coerced affinity.”

He said brands are eager to reward users at a time of “intense emotion and happiness” because the user gets instant gratification for their achievement, which then translates into a shared experience with the brand they’re presented with. “The user is engaged at that exact moment of interaction with the brand, creating an unparalleled affinity by the consumer. Reciprocation is a huge factor in this advertising model. Users get rewards, and brands get engagement and loyalty from consumers. Brands also find that a rewarded user is an active and engaged user… in order to get to that achievement in the first place, you had to be paying attention. You also feel like you earned something. That’s very powerful.”

Wong said his number one piece of advice for entrepreneurs is that “you are the most powerful force in your own life.” “Don’t let others set the rules for you,” he said. “Make the rules yourself.” Wong said he’s excited about Zynga’s Anekal joining the Kiip team, and says they have several announcements coming up soon. ”I’m only here to continue to build this thing to being an amazing force in the world.”

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Kirk Simpson learned early on in his career that he thrives in a startup environment. The entrepreneur is the founder of Wave Accounting, an online accounting tool for small business that has raised over $5 million since its launch in November 2010. He said through running his own company, he’s learned that the best way to ensure the kind of workplace he thrives in is to create it himself. “I learned very early in my career that I thrive in innovative, fast-paced environments with smart people. And I’ve found that the best way to find that culture is to have a hand in trying to create it,” he said in an interview.

The original idea for Wave Accounting came from co-founder James Lochrie, who saw the pains involved in small business accounting first-hand when dealing with clients. Simpson said he also knew the pain first-hand from owning his own business, and he knew he had the connections necessary to get the idea off the ground. “We put this pain in perspective to the market size, and we got excited,” he said. “I still can’t believe I’m the CEO of a company with the word accounting in the title given the fact that I hate accounting.”

Wave Accounting launched in 2010 with a free online accounting solution for small businesses. Simpson said the challenges they faced in the early days of the business were likely the same two challenges that all startups face. “The first challenge was how to reach thousands, tens of thousands then hundreds of thousands of small business owners at a Cost Per Acquisition that made sense,” he said. “The second was how to find the capital required to make all of this happen in the early stage.” He says both get easier as a company scales, but at the beginning that’s the most difficult part.

Simpson and Lochrie raised $5 million in Series A funding in October 2011, and has raised over $6.5 million in total funding. Simpson said he was surprised by how much he loved the fundraising process. “I had the opportunity to meet interesting and smart people, and those people asked lots of great questions,” he said. “In order to answer effectively, we had to dig deep into the data and look at things from a different angle. Fine tuning our business model and our pitch through the fund-raising process has made us better at recruiting great people, generating PR and doing a lot of other things that are critical to running a business.” He did find that everyone came out of the woodwork after they needed the money, which reflects the common advice “raise before you need the money.” He also tells any entrepreneur looking for funding to embrace funding, rather than see it as a time-consuming distraction. “Most entrepreneurs I speak with hate it,” he said. “But I think we are way smarter about our business because of it.”

Wave now has tens of thousands of users in 200 countries around the world. They acquired Small Payroll in November 2011 and relaunched it as Wave Payroll earlier this month. The team is now 35 people strong, and Simpson said he loves being surrounded by great people who are focused on achieving the same vision. “The energy that comes from this team is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced and it makes me constantly strive to do even better,” he said. His view isn’t all internal though – he said he pays attention to the competition, but looks at macro trends and doesn’t study their day-to-day. “Our success will be dictated by our ability to execute,” he said. “The market is large enough that invariably, there will be multiple winners so I don’t worry too much about things that are outside of our control.”

He says all successful entrepreneurs share two traits: restlessness and the desire to take risks. “I vividly remember a moment back when I was working for someone else, where I looked in the mirror as I was shaving in the morning and thought to myself ‘I can’t do this every day for the rest of my life,’” he said. “I think entrepreneurs act on that feeling. Every time I tell that story to other entrepreneurs, it resonates.”

As for what’s next for Simpson and Wave Accounting, he said it’s all about not settling for the small win. “We’ve got a massive opportunity in front of us and we don’t want to get caught thinking too small.”

Entrepreneur Matt Mullenweg recently said that his motivation isn’t to make money, it’s to change the world. Mullenweg is the founder of Automattic and Audrey Capital, as well as a founding developer behind popular blogging platform WordPress. He says he believes that everyone who has changed the world is a type of entrepreneur. “It’s about drive and ambition, not owning a business or being a boss,” he said in an interview.

Mullenweg didn’t start a company as a kid, but he did have an obsession with business cards. “I thought all you needed to start a business was a business card, and I loved printing things and those perforated card sheets you could buy,” he said. “I’d make business cards for everything.” He may not be obsessed with business cards anymore, but he has an impressive startup resume. His first claim to fame was being a founding developer behind WordPress, the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world. The inspiration for starting to blog came from reading blogs by Jeffrey Zeldman and Anil Dash. “I ended up using open source software called b2 on my own site, and when that project stopped development it became the base of WordPress,” he said. “In the beginning there were never any grand ambitions, I just wanted better software for my own blog and liked the idea of sharing the improvements I was making.” WordPress now powers over 60 million blogs, 16 percent of all websites.

WordPress is an open-source project, not a for-profit business. Mullenweg decided to start his own company, Automattic, as a for-profit entity whose commercial interests would benefit the larger non-profit community. “I wanted to create a company that I wanted to work at,” he said. “I knew that the more people we could get working on WordPress full-time the faster the software would grow, but in creating a company I didn’t want to make the mistakes that I perceived many open source project founders made when they started a commercial entity.”

Automattic offers over 12 tools for WordPress including spam filter Akismet and survey tool Polldaddy. He says the company’s product releases have been driven by products the team wanted to use themselves. “Almost everyone in Automattic is a blogger, so we experience the software every day just like our users,” he said.

Mullenweg launched Audrey Capital in 2005, and has invested in over 28 early-stage companies, including now-acquired startups Typekit, About.me and Sphere. “I’ve been fortunate in my career so far and wanted a way to give back and support, both financially and from experience, new entrepreneurs in that crazy stage of starting something new,” he said about his motivation for starting the angel investment and research company.

Now that he’s at the helm of Automattic and Audrey Capital, Mullenweg speaks about difference between being a visionary and being a leader. He says that the elements of management aren’t intuitive and must be learned by everybody. “Like anything, the best way to start is to read and consume all the resources available, practice, seek feedback, and iterate,” he said. When it comes to the companies he invests in, Mullenweg says the qualities of the entrepreneurs behind them vary a lot. “There are few surface similarities, but each has made me believe that they’re the most passionate person about their category in the world and will do their very best to make their vision a reality.”

Mullenweg’s top piece of entrepreneurs is reminiscent of other successful founders. “The hardest part is starting, so get that out of the way as soon as possible.” Now that he’s gotten through the hard part and actually started several companies, Mullenweg says he’s devoting more time than ever to Automattic and WordPress. “Both have grown tremendously over the past few years, with Automattic now employing over a hundred people across 23 countries and WordPress now powering 16 percent of all websites,” he said. “Working with that fine group of folks to create services that change the way the web is used is what I plan on doing the rest of my life.”

photo credit: Eva Blue via photopin cc

Gregory Galant is the accidental head of a fast-growing social web empire. Galant is the founder of Sawhorse Media, the company behind Muck Rack, Listorious and the Shorty Awards, but he didn’t start out with the intent to build a media company with several brands. It all started with the Shorty Awards, which honor the best in social media. Now in their fourth year, and with recipients including Conan O’Brien and Neil Patrick Harris, Galant says the idea was never meant to become a business. “We built the site ShortyAwards.com in two weekends without any plans to turn it into a business,” he says. “We were surprised when it became a top trending topic on Twitter within 24 hours and we quickly got mainstream media coverage.” The first ceremony was a big success, which gave him the idea for Sawhorse’s other products.

The Shorty Awards spawned several other projects under what is now the Sawhorse Media umbrella. They include Twitter list tool Listorious, and Muck Rack, a database of journalists on Twitter. The projects are all focused on social media but take different formats, from awards to search engines to industry-specific tools. “They’re all about finding what matters on social media,” Galant says. “With 500 million people on social media, how do you find the right 50 to pay attention to? We do that with Shorty Awards by shining a spotlight on the top ones by category.” He says that after running the first Shorty Awards they ran out of food and drink in their press lounge after a crowd of journalists showed up, which led them to launch Muck Rack. Last year they built an internal tool to see what journalists were saying about the Shorty Awards, which led to the release of Muck Rack Pro last December. The service targets communications and social media professionals and helps them find journalists who are focused on their company or industry, create media lists and get press alerts.

Galant says any chance of taking a traditional nine-to-five job was eliminated after he started a website development company at age 14. “I had so much fun it ruined me for conventional employment.” He says one of the first startup lessons he learned was how quickly the world can change. “When I started I had to convince businesses why they should be on the Internet. Very quickly people stopped asking that question and only wanted to know what they should do on the Internet,” he says. “We’re seeing the exact same thing now with social media.”

In addition to his role at Sawhorse, Galant profiles entrepreneurs on his Venture Voice blog. Based on five years of interviews, he says there are very few things entrepreneurs have in common. “Some are introverts, other extroverts. Some love to plan and are highly analytical, others thrive by the seat of their pants,” he says. “But I did notice they’re all extremely persistent and willing to continue despite setbacks and failures.” Galant views his own web projects like TV pilots. “No matter how good you are at building products, there’s still a lot of unknowns from timing and hitting the cultural zeitgeist,” he says. “We maximize serendipity by launching products fast, nurturing the ones that work and killing the ones that don’t.”

Galant says that even though he recognized the power of the social web early in the hype curve, he finds it challenging to keep up with how quickly it’s changing. “We’ve needed to quickly rethink the Shorty Awards and Muck Rack as social media has come to mean more than just Twitter,” he says. As he navigates the ever-changing social web and his multiple online projects, Galant abides by one golden rule, which he says is also his biggest piece of advice for entrepreneurs. “Always make decisions from first principle, don’t over-rely on the advice of others.”

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Today we’re announcing the launch of BetaKit, a new publication dedicated to providing original, real-time reporting and analysis of emerging technology news and global innovation.

We’re also excited to announce two additions to the Sprouter team. Darrell Etherington is joining us as Senior Writer, and Cheronne Thurab is joining us as our journalism intern.

Darrell Etherington
darrell [at] betakit.com
Darrell Etherington is a Senior Writer at BetaKit.com, covering emerging technology around the world. Prior to BetaKit Darrell was a technology writer at GigaOM and editor at The Apple Blog, where he wrote more than 2,400 articles about early-stage startups and technology. He holds a Master’s degree in English literature and creative writing, and has been a journalist since 2005.
Follow Darrell on Twitter at @drizzled, connect with him on LinkedIn and Google+.

Cheronne Thurab
cheronne [at] betakit.com
Follow Cheronne on Twitter at @toRONNEto, or connect with her on LinkedIn or Google+.

Welcome to Darrell and Cheronne! We will also be expanding our journalism internships this summer – if you’re interested in applying for one of the positions please email erin@sprouter.com for more details.

And as always, if you have a news tip email tips[at]betakit.com.