Entrepreneurs’ Prior Lives

Marcelo Calbucci is the founder and publisher of Seattle 2.0, and the founder of startups Sampa and TweepML. He's the best known, most influential startup instigator in the Seattle tech community.

But in this, the third episode of Entrepreneurs' Prior Lives, we get to know about Marcelo's past. We hear him speak about his youth in Brazil, how he started at age 12 as a game and small business app programmer, his collegiate experience with desktop publishing, and his move to the US to work within a Microsoft that was at that time yet entrepreneurial and growing.

What we learn is that Marcelo's "prior life" in many ways foreshadows his current one: at the center of the web and of publishing.

Entrepreneurs’ Prior Lives is produced and edited by John Solit. Burgess Carleton wrote and recorded the music ((c) 2010 Burgess Carleton). This episode was recorded in Seattle on June 8, 2010.

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Michael Cann is the CEO of TapDynamics, Inc., a San Francisco based company and the leading provider of draft beer monitoring solutions for multi-unit bar and restaurant operators. But before Mike brought data capture and analytics to draft beer flow meters, he was an investment banker, working for Banc of America Securities and for the investment banking boutique, Cascadia Capital.

In this, the second episode of Entrepreneurs’ Prior Lives, Mike tells us how he ambled through college, how he turned a temp job into a Vice Presidency at Bank of America Securities, why an investment banker will never have the passion of any CEO he or she works for, what he thinks of the current controversy over Wall Street pay, and how a divorce and subsequent single-fatherhood shook him up and focused his entrepreneurial energy.

Entrepreneurs’ Prior Lives is produced and edited by John Solit. Burgess Carleton wrote and recorded the theme for the series. This episode was recorded in Seattle on February 25, 2010.

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Joe Harb is a Seattle-based entrepreneur whose current project is Quu, Inc., a company Joe founded to bring consumer interactivity to the traditional, ad-based revenue model of the AM and FM radio industry. But before he wrote code and built social media platforms, Joe was a geotechnical engineer, working on brick and mortar construction projects in Lebanon, France, Canada and the United States.

In this, the first episode of Entrepreneurs’ Prior Lives, Joe tells us what led him to leave his family in Lebanon, how his education trained him to be a civil engineer (while sowing the seeds for coding days to come), what construction sites in Lebanon were like, and how cultural differences made working as an engineer in the US intolerable.

Entrepreneurs’ Prior Lives is conceived as a series of conversations with startup founders and tech company CEOs — but not about what they are doing now. Instead, discussions are to be about something memorable from the past. The idea is to insist that the entrepreneur take a break from “pitching” his or her current deal. When we’re lucky, we’ll get an unguarded conversation that may reveal something about how the entrepreneur’s mind works.

This first episode was produced and edited by John Solit. It was recorded in Seattle on February 18, 2010. Burgess Carleton wrote the theme for the series, which is copyright 2010 Burgess Carleton, all rights reserved. The podcast itself may be freely distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

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