What's up, everybody? This is Cortland Allen from NDHackers.com, and you're listening to the NDHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders behind profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of how they got to where they are today.

How do they make decisions, both in their personal lives and at their businesses,

and what exactly makes their businesses tick?

The goal here is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples, their successes, and their failures,

and go on to build our own successful businesses.

This show is just one part of an online community full of aspiring entrepreneurs and founders

that you can find at NDHackers.com.

There are also full transcripts of every podcast episode, including this one, at

NDHackers.com slash podcast.

Today, my guest is none other than Josh Kaufman.

Josh is the author of The Personal MBA.

It's one of my two favorite business books of all time.

It's kind of a bedrock of all of the business knowledge that you need to get started,

and I find myself referring back to it regularly and also recommending it to other people,

especially people from an engineering background who are excited to start a company,

but may not have had any real business experience in the past. Rather than just going piecemeal through his book in this

interview, we instead talk about Josh's past history, how he learned the things that he learned,

what went into writing the book, and how you can apply the principles from his book to starting

a modern day tech startup. Josh is a smart guy. He's very kind, and I think you'll enjoy a lot of what he has to say. So without further ado, Josh Kaufman. Josh, welcome to the show. How you doing? I'm great, Cortland. Thanks for having me. Thanks a ton for coming on the show. You have worked in the past as a marketing lead at Procter & Gamble. You've worked as a consultant, and I'm sure as a mentor to many people to help them grow their businesses. You're an extremely popular blogger and essayist, and you're the best-selling author of several great books, including one of my all-time favorite business books, the personal MBA, which I tell just about everybody who's getting started with entrepreneurship that they should read.

So I guess what I want to start with is who do you think you are and where do you get off doing all this great stuff?

You know, what's sort of the origin story of Josh Kaufman.

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