Who Am I And What's This Blog All About?

I like to sum this up in one sentence. I'm a passionate, seasoned, successful and of course as many many others before me failed entrepreneur. 

I graduated the University At Buffalo with a Bachelors Degree in Business Management. At 26 years old I've been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to bootstrap some of my own companies, and both help launch and grow many others. 

Having 5 years of experience in the NYC startup community and working on extremely young tech startups (15 employees or less) I've been exposed to so many incredibly valuable experiences. The stories are mind-blowing when you hear them and that's an understatement.  Everything from my company source code getting stolen, to winning business plan competitions, to launching viral brands and literally everything in between. 

Unfortunately I can't say I've seen everything yet but I can promise you I'm moving at a fast enough pace to get to that point a lot sooner than many others. 

My most recent startup was helping co-launch the most popular "Hoverboard" company and literally spearheading the recently acclaimed "Hoverboard Movement" over the last 12 months (April 2015 - April 2016) with a company called PhunkeeDuck.

I also launched a video conferencing company straight out of college called Vonvo.com (August 2011 - January 2015) and was a super productive part-time SDR (sales development representative) for an ad-tech startup called ListenLoop. 

First and most importantly this blog's number one intention is absolutely education!  I want people who read this blog to not make the same miserable entrepreneurial mistakes I made. I've made plenty of mistakes and have all these learning experiences bottled up inside of me. It was only recently where I  finally said to myself I need to start sharing these experiences with other ambitious entrepreneurs who are reaching for the stars like I have. 

Most of the posts to begin will focus around PhunkeeDuck as this company went viral overnight, is most relevant to readers (current events wise) and is both a fun, educational, and surely entertaining ride for readers to embark on.  I got a first hand perspective witnessing the "Hoverboard Industry" blow up in popularity both literally and figuratively. I had a front row seat to witnessing our brand in particular go viral, and lastly I received a crash course on when going viral can absolutely suck!  I want other entrepreneurs to be educated on the cautions, concerns, and warnings, associated with your brand or product going viral. 

I feel like so many other writers are talking about the "positives of going viral" or "what it takes to go viral" and they're beating a dead horse on this subject. I want to help analyze this subject from a negative point of view primarily because I've witnessed it and it's really interesting. 

We will also cover plenty of other general entrepreneurial lessons and topics that people need to be aware of when it comes to starting a business that not only took place at PhunkeeDuck but at Vonvo, and ListenLoop.

I'm looking forward to this journey and I hope anyone who visits this blog enjoys the content. I strongly encourage any feedback you have to offer (both positive and negative) because I want this to be the best educational, entertaining, and entrepreneurial resource out there for people to enjoy!

Thank You,

Max Ringelheim