Best of Panic with ME (Howard)....A Look Back at My Wallstrip Journey

Panic with Friends – Investing for Profit and Joy

No, you haven’t entered the Twilight Zone. Yes, I’m the host of Panic with Friends, but on today’s re-run, I’m the guest. My producer Knut Jensen has turned the tables and put me in the hot seat. I get a lot of questions from people that follow me on the blog, Stocktwits and Twitter about how and why I started Wallstrip back in 2006. Hopefully this answers a lot of those questions.

We cover the good, the bad, and the funny times building my first internet company – and how those lessons carried over when I started Stocktwits – lessons like finding the right mentor, the benefit of domain experience, and some key ingredients: product, team, recruiting and timing. It’s a different spin on Panic with Friends ...going back and telling founder stories, which I will be doing more of in the future.

You can listen to the podcast here on Spotify or Apple podcast and now all the episodes are on my YouTube channel as well. You can click subscribe on any of these channels and get the podcast alert each week.

You can also listen right here on the blog:

For more details on today’s conversation read on below…

Guest: Howard Lindzon

Profile: Entrepreneur & Investor, GP at Social Leverage

Where to Find Him: LinkedIn, Twitter

What's Howard About? I'm panicked about 2023.

Show Notes:

• Introduction (00:27)

• Coming up with Wallstrip (01:42)

• Starting with GolfNow (07:55)

• YouTube becomes a thing (10:27)

• Cold pitching Fred Wilson (11:59)

• Raising funds (15:08)

• Finding the team (18:34)

• The formula (22:36)

• Gaining traction (25:13)

• Would I do it again? (27:09)

• My ‘growth hack’ (30:24)

• The ‘moment’ it’s successful (31:10)

• The right kind of attention (31:54)

• Now the pressure is on (32:36)

• Dealing with haters (33:56)

• Sell or grow (38:14)

• The Jim Cramer spoof (39:21)

• My Costanza moment (41:04)

• CBS acquires Wallstrip (41:30)

• The right people and domain experience (44:29)