I do watch many of the videos yes. They are well done. He asks good questions and he's not like a typical journalist, because he asks questions he shouldn't. Sometimes he puts the interviewee on the spot and I like how he helps them feel comfortable sharing things they otherwise wouldn't. That part of it is great, because it helps entrepreneurs understand that the reality of business isn't pretty PR releases.

Packaging is important. It can be just as important to focus on the failures, but we don't see that a lot. People don't want to talk about their failures. It's hard to find the failures though, they aren't as famous. We can really learn a lot from failures though.

I believe it may be precisely because we don't see many failures that we keep failing. It's very difficult to understand why a company succeeded. We aren't told about the neighbor who had $1 M to invest or the happenstance that led to a great sale.

It's easier to identify reasons we fail and help us avoid them. Oddly, most failures we read about are due to the environment created by vc. Expectations, short runways, business/techie conflict, yet we continue to be led to believe that vc is a good thing for entrepreneurs. If you run the numbers, the first decision you should make as first time entrepreneur is to avoid VC.

Bootstrap the first one and get VC for the second one. Or, as some suggested to me in the past, get VC for an easy idea you don't really care about. Sell the investors that idea, keep the good one for yourself, then use the money to fuel what you're really passionate about.

For Anu, as a serial entrepreneur, there must have been some failures. Ask lots of questions about those and how they might have been avoided. What lessons were learned? How is trial and error used to make better startups in the future? What things are important to remember and forget? What are some of the less intuitive things to think about? What are some motivations.

Ask Fred about Zynga and why he was quiet about it so long. Why does he think what they were doing is acceptable? Ask him why he doesn't push Zynga to give the ill gotten gains back.

Ask the VCs how to techies can manage expectations and package their startups in a way that can help them better understand them. What motivates them to invest in a particular startup. Do they actually read emails? What's the best way to contact them? What is an introverted techie to do? Can a techie focus on the tech stuff and still succeed in a VC backed startup? How?

For Ed of course, what kinds of prejudices did he face in a world dominated by twenty somethings? How did he balance risk inherent in older life with risk in a startup? What is different at that age than a 20 something entrepreneur? Do people respect his opinions more or was he considered washed up? Why did he wait so long? How has the environment changed over the past couple of decades?

For what it's worth, I think Mixergy is useful just as it is. Why does everyone want people to "cough up their secrets"? There is value in discovering some of this stuff for yourself. The founders Andrew talks to certainly didn't have Mixergy there when their companies were founded, simply spitting out "secrets". Yet, in an hour of listening to Andrew talking to these guys, I learn quite a bit, not just about tactics (which many founders are hesitant to reveal), but about the way that successful people think and formulate ideas.

Hearing other people's stories and ideas is great, but at the end of the day, it's just fluff. Only by trying to start a successful company will you actually figure out what works for you and what doesn't. Obviously, no one wants to hear that. They'd rather hear convenient doctrine, packaged up nicely in a book or podcast, that makes founding a successful company as easy as baking cookies. Here's the newsflash for those people: That recipe doesn't actually exist.

This is why you are the second best at what you do Andrew. You swallow criticism and ask "for ways to improve my work". Keep it up at Mixergy.

Edit: And I do not know who the best is. But being second best is always better, you have room to grow.

Andrew: you're not a hopester. But what you need to do: really push harder to get your guests to cough up their secrets. You do try. But too many of them end up getting away with answering key questions with vague answers. "Oh, well, we just kept trying and somehow managed to build an customer base." Stuff like that. HOW did that happen? Accident? Happenstance? The guy from Aptimize got away with skimming right past the most important question he could answer: how the hell did he manage to build a business with little or no marketing? His answer was "oh, some SEO and stuff" -- not good enough, not if I'm trying to learn from his experience. The wu-themes guy -- same thing. He "built a community" and then starts charging $100 per theme. Little or no detail about how exactly he built a community -- what specific steps he took -- and what exactly he said and did to get people to cough up $100 for a wordpress theme.

That's been my frustration. It's good to hear these people explain their success, but if you managed to squeeze a bit more detail out of them, I would even consider becoming a Mixergy subscriber.